Resume screening is very effective when done by someone who is intelligent. The tech industry refuses to take hiring seriously and apply such people to the problem.
Resumes are mostly useless in tech. Juniors have too little of note to put on them and Seniors only need to demonstrate enough experience to get a tech screen given the severe shortage in talent. Filtering out someone because they didn’t put enough time into their resume is silly. It’s even more silly when that resume may be a scrape from LinkedIn and may not even be provided by a first party.
I think the fundamental problem exposed in the article is actually not the hiring criteria, but rather that resumes are usually screened by HR departments who have no clue about what a job entails. So the hiring managers have to provide hiring criteria that the HR resume screener can understand. The HR resume screener is not a programmer and has no way to judge the capabilities of programmers. The hiring manager may not be either.
As seen in a Slashdot sig some time ago, "Light travels faster than sound, which is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak." Unfortunately appearances win to those who cannot understand what is being said.
I could absolutely see myself using this as a screening mechanism. When I was hiring developers, I would get literally hundreds of resumes sent to me. Filtering through resumes is a waste of time. You cannot tell from that piece of paper (PDF, Word Doc, etc) how technically capable a person is, or if they would be a good fit for the team.
I do not have time to interview hundreds of people, so we have to apply some filtering. Are we going to potentially filter out a good candidate because they didn't take the time to make themselves stand out? Maybe, but I'm okay with that.
I have no idea how to respond to this, which I promise I did read, other than to say that across my whole career, some of the very best and most qualified people I've hired didn't have their "Education" on their resume. Some of them had degrees from very solid engineering schools, others didn't, but I didn't find that out until after we had hired. You're suggesting you'd shred their resumes. If you're serious, you're a fool. I don't believe you're serious, though.
Your hiring process sounds broken. For instance: you seem to put a lot of thought into what is on people's resumes. We don't. Resumes exist to secure job interviews. Your interview process is what selects good candidates, not your resume analysis.
Finally, a reminder: it is 2011, and for at least the least 18 months, it has been a white hot competitive market for talent. In my recruiting role, my job is to sell candidates on the notion that we're a great place to do application security. It is not my job to look for reasons not to talk to people based on their resumes. In fact, that is the opposite of my job. The notion of finding new and clever ways to screen people out of the process based on their resumes ("look, Bob! this candidate listed 'coursework in computational linguistics'! if he couldn't hack it to a degree, he'd never hack it here!") is crazy.
Maybe the problem is, you've plugged the top of your funnel into horrorshow sources like Monster.com and Craigslist (actually, Craigslist is better than Monster.com). Stop doing that.
I might have a negative impression of a candidate whose resume was riddled with misspellings. But I'd still talk to them.
We are very, very, very, very good at screening, by the way. Not a little bit good. Very good.
Slightly tangential but I believe the resume situation is another part of the "broken hiring in tech":
1. There is a whole cottage industry of resume writers. My CV got me mostly where I wanted and then some, but of course the professional "resume reviewers" told me it's awful and I need to pay them $50 to make it noticeable at all.
2. The "importance of results" makes people willing to bend the truth and then resumes start looking very sleazy. I saw CVs of interns from Silicon Valley darling companies who claim in every line how they saved millions of dollars here and there. Hard to believe frankly.
3. And what do those results even give us? If resume A says "Implemented ETL tool that improved customer acquisition 420%" and resume B says "Implemented ETL tool to work with customer data in Java", there is no reason to believe candidate A is at all better than candidate B. Well, they are better at resume writing or hiring resume writers. Or maybe they are good at office politics and were able to put themselves on impactful projects. But will they pass the FizzBuzz?
Resume-based hiring is dehumanising and terrible under any aspect. There is nothing redeeming about it.
There is an incredible number of factors that determine how good a prospective employee is to a company, and none of them can be easily represented with a list of job titles and qualifications. You can find people with impressive resumes and they are terrible employees: lazy, stupid, unmotivated. There is a vast amount of people with unimpressed job history that would be perfect candidates even to work on a very specific piece of technology if they are smart, quick to learn, driven, ambitious, enthusiastic or any other soft-skill.
My best interview is my first, as a 19 year old high school dropout: I must've mentioned that I had played with Linux and knew C and PHP. They asked me something along the lines of "what does ifconfig do?", "can you configure Apache?" and "tell me a little about your projects in C", and got hired. They only needed to know I was able to learn undirected, was passionate about computers in general. Of course this was for a junior position, but still, none of that 3 interviews, whiteboard leetcode bullcrap that is so common nowadays.
tl;dr: Candidates are to their resumes what a chef's meal is to the list of ingredients.
As a hiring manager for a tech startup, I find resumes useful as a filter.
There is a class of applicants who produce 3-4 page resumes filled with tedious details, with every technology they ever used bolded, and turgid prose describing internal software projects as if they should be common knowledge. It takes me probably 15 seconds to move on to the next candidate if I see one of those.
The next thing I filter on is choice of employers. If I see health insurer, big insurance, blah fortune 500 firm, government contractor, ... over and over again, then unless there's something in the first half of the first page of the resume that otherwise catches my eye, that resume is also going in the discard pile after 30 seconds.
Finally I'll scan for interesting projects. I generally want to find people who have done more than just CRUD UIs, and show some passion about the technology they've built and worked with. For somebody who makes it past this point, I'll have spent max 60 seconds with their resume. I then customize and send the message in the ATS and invite the applicant to check out the company and job posting.
Serves them right. Employers have been using AI and algorithms to weed out resumes/applications for years. To the point that the only way to get seen by an actual human is the game the system.
I disagree. A recruiter that uses resumes effectively frees up time that lets him carefully inspect only those candidates that made it through this coarse filtering process.
I've helped my friend do recruiting at his startup (albeit, not in the US). There are hundreds and hundreds of applications, and the constraint I pointed out becomes evident. Is it really cost-effective to personally interview and understand the context of every single resume-submitter, including those with absolutely no experience? How about someone without even a compsci degree and no experience to make up for it?
The resume review process isn't intended to find the single best candidate. It's intended to whittle a big pile of resumes down to one that can be reasonably covered by the next stage of the process. Coming from public listings, the pile of resumes is enormous, and most of them are utter garbage. There may be thousands of resumes where the goal is to find a couple dozen candidates. At some point, the only way to do this is to apply really broad filters: "Went to Stanford, MIT, CMU...", "Worked at MS, Google, FB, Apple...", "Proficient in Scala, MongoDB".
I didn't really appreciate this until I was on the other side of the massive pile-o-resumes, but it's really the only option.
I hate saying this, because I generally believe that "problems solved" are far more indicative of success than any specific school, company, or technology. I have at times used a resume that doesn't do the whole buzzword-bingo game with very limited success - It basically never got pulled from a big pile-of-resumes unless I had a friend on the inside, or was applying to a job on my school's job board (where clearly everyone passed this "filter").
You've been using AI to rapidly filter through all the resumes, and now finally we have something to fight that, and now WE need to stop?
And yes, I don't know if the OP uses AI. This is a more general complaint about the state of hiring managers and the disproportionate advantage they had over the job market. Ability to ingest massive amounts of resumes, parse them, send out emails to take personality tests etc, requiring cover letters why the applicant believes they are the most suitable candidate for the job being offered, and how it will be a magical experience...
Now finally, when applicants get some help to do mass-applying, it's not ok?
The most desirable companies get so many resumes that they need to filter out most of them. I used to work for a popular search engine before Google came into the picture. As an engineer I had to interview people every week. HR handed me lots of resumes from people with CS degrees from top universities for phone screening. They didn't bother with the rest unless someone was heavily recommended by a trusted source.
The reason for this is that resume review is really ineffective as a screen.
No is saying they should rely solely on resume review as a screen.
What is under question here is the perceived wisdom (on Google's side) of screening for Director positions using badly programmed chatbots (or recruiters, whatever) instead of having them be asked the same questions by an actual human.
IMO, a better approach now are basic on line code screens designed to take 15m for a qualified candidate.
Perhaps, but companies like to screw that up as well -- having people code into a Word doc, for example (try it sometime), or assigning problems that are either brain teasers or essentially willingness-to-cram filters rather than what they should be -- a simple, straightforward test of minimal programming ability (to determine whether further time investment is merited).
The problem isn't the computers, it's the people. You put HR-bots on the task of listing the job, and they don't know Atom from Adam, so they list all sorts of silly requirements like 15 years of SAP experience, 15 years of Ruby on Rails, 15 years of COBOL, and all for a $20/hr entry position, or a list of certifications that no human could ever accumulate. Then what happens is applicants start keyword spamming their resumes just to get noticed, and now as a technical person I get a stack of resumes that are absolute trash.
Two years ago I was hiring for a sysadmin. My HR department put my requirements up on Indeed. I got 70 resumes that passed their screening. Of those 70 I found 5 that I wanted to interview, 3 that showed up, and none were hirable. I left a company several months ago, couldn't deal with the management anymore, and the past few months of job searching have been excruciating.
We need more technical people screening resumes and comparing to actual job requirements.
I've heard reports that recruiters might spend all of 15 to 30 seconds per resume during a screening exercise. Never mind not having technical expertise to ask technical probing questions, sifting through the top of the funnel is more of an exercise in coping w/ high volumes of resumes than it is about validating depth of expertise at the bottom of the interview funnel.
IMHO, complaining about the status quo is easy and giving armchair hot takes about circumstances one does not understand is also easy. If one wants to play the smart game, there are some facts that can leverage to one's advantages:
1) job postings being above the fold vs long tail is a thing. There are tons of companies/roles you will never hear about from by perusing linkedin search.
2) following from that, interview criteria often needs to be adjusted based on various factors and plenty of companies have to make more streamlined funnels in order to have a fighting change of capturing any talent at all.
3) even for high visibility/demand companies, recruiters have incentives to think outside the box to find truly valuable talent, because these people are not even in the market for a new job, let alone willing to put up w/ bullshit. The catch that many people miss is that just accruing a high number of years of experience doesn't necessarily translate to being valuable, especially on the fast changing world of tech.
I agree that resumes are a poor means to distinguish between good and bad candidates. Humans already struggle with the screening process. There's no way an AI can reveal some kind of hidden secret sauce written into all great candidate resumes. This project was doomed to fail from the beginning, in my opinion.
The author doesn't appear to understand the economics of the hiring company; it's about time & effort to filter and the cost of making a bad hire. I cannot give every application 1-2 hours of review if I get 100+ resumes.
This is an entirely self-created problem, not for you personally, I mean for the industry. We are against "credentialling" so signals like personal recommendations, alma mater, or work history at prestigious firms are overlooked.
My employer tried Hackerrank for a while, we abandoned it when we realised that the candidates we really wanted (e.g. based on personal recommendations from existing employees) were dropping out of the pipeline as soon as the Hackerrank link was sent to them. And the ones we were getting were good at Hackerrank and not much else.
You will get better results if you build a process that doesn't screen people out because of their resumes. That doesn't mean you don't screen candidates, and it doesn't mean that you don't have a funnel that knocks out a big chunk of them before you get on the phone.
It just means: don't select people for their getting-a-new-job skills. Those skills aren't relevant to software development work.
The problem is that if you don't have any screening, then you get a flood of candidates, and it takes someone's full time job to sift through them. HR needs to be well trained on what to look for, but they are often a necessary gatekeeper in my experience on the hiring side. The goal is to keep the number of qualified candidates who get filtered out at a reasonable level.
(I completely get that this is unfair. If you went to MIT and have a high GPA, you are gonna make it past the gate more often. Community college, but an excellent coder? Unfortunately you will be rejected more often by HR. It's completely unfair, but companies can't reasonably interview every candidate who submits a resume.)
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