It does seem that way, especially when you're on the outside of the decision. When you're trying to find one hire out of thousands, something as minor as a slightly unusually formatted resume can be enough reason to make a no-go decision. I'm not going to waste anyone's time by listing all of the minor data I used to decide whether the candidate was a fit or not; but what seems arbitrary on the outside feels very systematized on the inside.
I agree with you, particularly about interviewing - that the hirer will often have arbitrary beliefs and standards. But I'm not so sure about resumes. While inevitably there is some arbitrary nit-picking and subjective preferences, I would be willing to bet that there are a good few universals. For a business resume, I think no more than a page is one of them. I've edited many resumes and there's a number of guidelines for success that I make sure people follow.
Also, I bet if you were to take a large number of different recruiters for the same type of position and hand them a stack of resumes, they would mostly pick out the same few as stand-outs.
Interesting results that seem to challenge some received wisdom. However, N=1!
What this study tells you is the systematic relationship between resume detectable attributes and getting hired at this particular company. If this same analysis was carried out at 29 more companies we would have N=30 which is considered a small sample size. To effectively do that the author would need to put out a detailed description of methods for coding resumes and ideally a means of determining inter-rater reliability and so on.
Interesting conversation starter - but please no one make any important decisions based on this.
I don't believe that a nice looking resume tells you nothing.
It shows additionally effort, creativity, and style.
But if your hiring is based solely on what you can input into a computer, crunch the numbers and spit out the top candidates, then you might as well just have your candidates fill out an online form. Maybe even make it multiple choice to avoid any possible individualism.
It is. I do some recruiting work for my job. When you're looking over 100+ resumes for a position you don't have time to research every little acronym that you don't know. Sure ideally you'd know exactly what they're talking about, but in the real world that often doesn't work out.
That's fine, every hiring place has arbitrary rules to cut down on resumes. You can't just guess at what those will be and use those guesses to base major Career decisions.
You'll always miss some stupid filters - it's why your job search is a numbers game.
They are arbitrary in a way but remember that the people scanning over the resumes are not technical people, for them its important that a skill is there and thats about it. Finding a job is more about social skills than technical ones.
Jacob is smart and has been around the block a couple times, but I find this whole post kind of frustrating. Essentially what he's talking about is reading tea leaves out of peoples' resumes. I think that's a comprehensively flawed way of qualifying candidates.
It's reasonable to be concerned about behavioral patterns in candidates. Some otherwise-qualified people will be behaviorally incompatible with the roles you have. Maybe they're hard to work with, or need too much or too little structure. To the extent you're concerned about stuff like this, you should probably just check references.
Other than that, what are we talking about here? Hiring managers spend too much time looking at resumes already. It's possible to hire without looking at them at all; the last several companies I've worked for have done just that: just ask people to demonstrate that they can do the work the role requires, build a rubric to assess their performance, and hire the people that clear the bar.
It wouldn't even occur to those teams (or my current team, I guess) to look for patterns and indicators like this, because they're just not making any decisions off of resumes to begin with. I've been in this business since 1995, and studiously avoiding resumes since around 2010. I have made more bad hiring decisions by carefully assessing resumes than I ever have by just asking people to demonstrate the work, and then taking the time to build a serious evaluation checklist for the work.
If you're worried that people are habitually bad communicators, are disorganized, can't manage scope and are adrift without structure, can't stop talking and just deliver some practical unit of work, won't ask questions or collaborate: you can assess for all of these things!
If you're worried that people are ladder-climbers, or aren't here to do the work, you can set expectations.
And if you're worried that candidates aren't going to be loyal and are going to jump ship when presented with a funner job with higher comp at a more promising company, well, that's life in the Professional Golfer's Association, I guess.
I disagree with that assertion. When looking for my current position, I had a much higher response rate when each resume was tailored to the position.
Tailoring, in this case, meant relatively minor tweaks - if it was a more engineering role I'd highlight those skills and contributions whereas with the more data science-y roles I'd highlight more relevant aspects. I think it's very arrogant to think that a single resume is appropriate for every job application.
I don't know if this helps, but I've hired people in situations like this.
If somethings stands out in a resume, people will ask. But the fact it's there doesn't mean it's negative - the question is what's the story. If the resume as a whole makes sense but has a curveball I'm probably more likely to have them interviewed, not less.
It could also be because they're looking for easy ways to filter out candidates if the applicant pool is particularly large.
Think of it as dimensionality reduction—many people claim to be detail-oriented, but mistakes on a resume are an easy way for reviewers to verify that claim.
As an interviewer in a big tech company, I don't have time to analyze 2 pages of resume. There are hundreds of candidates. It probably won't matter that much to the company who is hired. Interviewers just want to get the interviews over with.
However, if I'm hiring for my own small startup, I would carefully comb over every detail of the resume because hiring the wrong person could mean the death of my company.
On the other hand, many times hiring managers are just looking for a reason to discard your resume to narrow down the talent pool. Anything negative gets you tossed. They see this. Maybe it's a good sign, maybe it's a bad sign. Either way it's something out of the ordinary that will take more time to evaluate. Better just toss the resume. There's still another stack of 100 candidates to go through...
Not really, no. I've found resumes to be terribly poor indicators of hiring suitability, and so I end up conducting brief first-round phone screens with most at-least-slightly-suitable candidates.
This correlates well with the article here, as it turns out that resumes were more useful as a writing sample assessment than a work experience assessment to this company.
That's true. I'm making a guess based on the limited time I can spend--that's part of why resumes are so valuable.
In my limited experience, there tends to be a fairly pronounced cutoff below which candidates obviously lack the basic skills or inclination for the position, or even didn't bother to read the job spec at all.
Unsatisfactory as the whole hiring process can be, I don't actually believe that throwing a pile of resumes in the air and picking up a handful at random would work as well.
I have to agree with your disagree but point something out also.
> HR sees a unfamiliar format, and simply bins that resume.
When they bin the good resumes, they bin the good candidates, which means the chances of the current employees not being particularly good is higher. This would make me think twice about working for a company that says no to the better candidate because HR found their job too difficult.
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