The long list of skills is a symptom of a much larger problem. Too many companies are just clueless about hiring technical staff.
These things don't work: using HR, resume databases, keyword searches, creating an overlong and too detailed list of requirements and then treating them as a checklist.
Yet, this is the approach taken by far too many companies. The result, of course, is a stack of resumes a mile high that each contain a list of as many buzzwords and skills as possible. How do companies expect to find a good match in all that?
The way out is simple. Create a simple resume, with a small focused set of "skills". Leave out anything that's irrelevant to what you actually want to do. Then send it to a small handful of companies that run reasonable adverts. There may be fewer such opportunities, but I think a focused approach works better in the long run.
Here's the thing: for the typical job listing, there are dozens, or hundreds, of applicants. Maybe more.
You do not have the time to do a full-fledged investigation of every one of them, or bring them all in for a lengthy interview. You just don't. You need some filter to reduce the number to something more manageable, and degree/school is a straightforward way to do it.
Also recognize that 99% of jobs, even technical jobs, do not require (1) a one-in-a-million technical skill which is (2) easy to identify and measure.
Is filtering by degree flawed? Absolutely. But that's an academic argument. The question managers face is: what's a better way, subject to real limitations of time and resources?
Last but not least: in my experience, most jobs require navigating some amount of bureaucracy and difficult people. Someone completely unwilling or unable to make these "compromises" probably would be better working for himself, and not within an organization.
The worst is when it isn't engineers or any kind of technical leader performing any screening, but strictly an HR rep with no technical knowledge or experience outside of names of things (and the tools they personally employ) or an applicant tracking system that will immediately filter you out if your resume doesn't contain ~XX% of the required skills— or enough/too many years of experience according to the parameters in the posting.
And to so many people operating that way it just seems practical.
I feel lucky with how I got my current job— even though it's a very large company and they definitely do operate in those fashions, my resume somehow made it directly into the hands of the Senior Manager and Lead Engineer for the specific team at the time. They brought me in to talk— no whiteboards, no brain teasers— just some technical questions and personal/professional questions and I was hired inside of two weeks— onboarded a month later.
Applying and [if I even get to] interviewing at most other places previous has left me feeling much the same as yourself...
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.
This is not really my experience, having worked at a number of companies. Everyone's desperate to hire as many good engineers as they can find, there's rarely a week when two qualified candidates walk in the door. Maybe other job markets are worse, but IMO the real curse is that most resumes get only a cursory glance for buzzwords before a call is made.
People list 100 technologies to get through the automated HR filters. If companies would just list the core skills required, instead of a unicorn wish list, people would put less keyword spam in their resumes.
I had always assumed that it was buzzword soup to get past HR/Recruiting (it's sad to see recruiters basically admitting this on this thread). As someone who has hired people I care far more about your experience and what you did at your last job(s) than a list of enumerated skills.
I would say make the skill section brief. Don't list every flavor of SQL you've ever worked with, just put SQL, etc. Or go crazy, but put it at the end. Honestly, I never begrudged someone doing a word dump at the end of their resume, as long as the rest of the resume was good. We all know that recruiters have no clue and might scrap an application if a buzzword is missing.
From what I've seen, the problem is that HR only knows what to look for from the job description given by the hiring manager. Typical HR personnel don't have the technical background to properly identify candidates, so you get to play buzzword bingo.
The sad truth is that I know many people in HR as well as hiring managers who weed out resumes for completely arbitrary reasons.
"As soon as you get someone who’s never been an engineer making hiring decisions, you need to set up proxies for aptitude. Because these proxies need to be easily detectable, things like a CS degree from a top school become paramount."
No doubt this is true to a some extent, and perhaps even to a large one. But let's not give the HR drones too much credit here.
How many of us have ever had to sift through a stack of 100 resumes or more in, say, a week or less? It's not an easy task. It's especially difficult for hiring managers, because they have day jobs to perform. They may not mean for things like "Google," or "Harvard," or "L33t CS Degree" to become proxies for our honest, thorough, intellectually rigorous analysis of every resume in the pile. But these things become a sort of shorthand.
HR types seem more prone to overemphasizing the letter of the law, to putting pedigree on a pedestal, and to thinking as un-differently as possible. But given a thick stack and a few measly hours, I doubt most of us fare significantly better.
If we're serious about moving toward a better hiring process, we need to start by recognizing the limitations of the resume itself as a normative tool.
I run into this problem all the time with recruiters, especially non-technical recruiters, who are the kind of people who just want to match up YEARS_EXPERIENCE_NEEDED with ${ACRONYM} down a list, and if you don't match up, you're filtered out. It's very frustrating because it's hard to get interviews, which is where I have a chance to shine, and show that client why taking on someone with a broad skillset -- especially one who understands business issues -- is better than hiring a hyper-specialized candidate.
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.
A technical résumé, to a non-technical recruiter, is just technobabble; they have no way of knowing whether the information contained in the résumé is generally good, or just someone BS'ing, or someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. Discerning whether a writer actually understands what they're talking about (particularly in the terse format of a résumé) generally requires a deeper understanding of the lexicon at hand.
They can be told to look for certain keywords, sure, but that doesn't, IME, seem to be sufficient to screen; obviously bad résumé use the right words (but in the wrong ways / in ways that to an expert clearly indicate a lack of understanding) so they pass the filter.
Brief technical screens can be done, but again, without technical knowledge, the recruiter can't know if the answer given by the candidate matches the answer they have in an answer key, if they are provided with one. Even relatively simple technical questions might have more than one right answer, or the answer might just be phrased in a way that a recruiter doing a human version of lexical edit distance isn't going to think passes, but any engineer would say would.
The problem in all of these is the lack of technical knowledge. Tech recruiters, on the whole IME, are trying to recruiter for a role that might as well be "town wizard". Any theoretical recruiter with technical knowledge would never work in recruiting — they'd fetch more in pretty much any real technical role, like an engineering role.¹
The other problem, again IME, is that there is a wide pool of candidates with very little actual experience, though they may have worked any number of years. Finding someone with actual knowledge and understanding of software engineering requires sifting through a lot of chaff.
¹One might see this as people aren't willing to sufficiently pay enough for recruiters / if you want a recruiter with technical knowledge, you need to compensate them adequately enough that other opportunities are not worth their time. I would agree here.
Have you ever had to sift through 250 resumes to narrow them down to a shortlist of five??
If you haven't, it is very very hard. You simply don't have time to dive deep, figure out a person's unique value, and determine whether they could be a good fit.
Therefore, usability becomes very important. The candidates who give a recruiter the information he/she needs in the shortest amount of time possible will rise to the top.
Reviewing resumes is mind numbing work predicated on an already broken model. That's by there is so much opportunity in recruiting and why we are starting to see startups that are changing the recruiting industry. Since the skill involved in crafting the perfect resume is a poor predictor of the skill involved in writing software, we are seeing initial screenings based more on job tasks.
I understand why it exists - text is easier to query than reading a resume, but it's a terrible and outdated design pattern that needs to go. But good news: there are better ways!
Some possible solutions and suggestions:
-Use a list of checkbox options for candidates to click skills/requirements that you want for the role. If you need SQL, JS, Python, and you believe a CS degree is necessary, then let candidates click which ones they have. No more messing with text! Bonus: You could add some kind of percentage of skills match metric when reviewing applicants (you should still review resumes, however).
Bonus #2: You can autofill the job posting with a list of desired skills instead of needing to type them out - just select which ones you need when creating the posting.
-You don't need user-entered text fields for keyword matching. Extracting text from PDFs and Word Docs is trivial. If your text extract fails or misses a min word count threshold, just trigger a secondary step for HR to review and manually copy the text and enter it. Point is, stop making users manually enter the text when applying, just pull it out yourself.
-If you insist on candidates typing out their resume, stop trying to extract text from resumes to autofill the application form. Personally, I'd prefer to just type it out rather than review it and fix all of the inevitable mistakes (or more likely, clear the fields and just enter it myself).
I have considerable experience hiring engineers, and I can tell you concretely that:
1. Strong candidates are hard to find.
2. A single bad hire can sink a team.
3. Technical interviewing is hard and far from solved.
Given these three things, why make it harder than it has to be by using a badly designed system when a few changes to the logistical process can fix so much?
And if the bosses balk, maybe sell it like this: the existence of your company depends on good hiring, so maybe assign an engineer or two to spend a few months building this out. Not to be all "Dropbox is easy build" - but the basic functionality for something like this is not terribly more complex than a CRUD app with file uploading. I know that's oversimplifying, but I bet you get my point.
So here's the thing... hiring at larger, growing companies often means weeding through a stack of a hundred resumes, for one or two or five roles. Most of those resumes need to go away. The interview process, for competent candidates, is going to cost you at bare minimum a half hour of one person's time for initial screening. A quality interview is going to take a couple of hours each for a few important people - managers and senior/lead tech staff, for engineering jobs. Considering pg's maximum about maker schedules, the hiring process is very disruptive for the productivity of some of your most valuable tech staff.
So you want to get rid of 19 resumes out of 20, without ever interviewing them. And for that, you need heuristics. And those heuristics are, in all likelihood, going to be biased and stupid in some ways.
For example, I will automatically reject any resume that has more than two typos. I consider it evidence of carelessness - I don't care if you can't spell, but I do care if you don't bother to run it past someone else who can for editing.
The danger is that a heuristic - any heuristic - for filtering out resumes will inevitably lead to missing some candidates who would excel in the role. Oh well. I'm not going to waste time interviewing every possible candidate, just hoping to catch that magic person. It's irresponsible.
First, to get to the phone screen many companies now use some form of automation to weed out applications. Less words simply means less chance of an automated match against the job description criteria.
Second, never underestimate how lazy the HR screener is. They aren't technical, they aren't ambitious, they're generally borderline incompetent people whose sole marketable skill is that they are pleasant to talk with. If you don't spell out, in detail, that you're a Front-end Developer who uses X, Y, Z tools for N years the screener won't be able to read between the lines.
Quick example... I was in a time crunch so I asked a recruiter to find me a Front-end Dev. She came back and asked for a job description, project brief, culture brief, competitors / no hire list, and salary range. I felt like she was asking the right questions, she seemed smart. A week goes by, "Sorry, no candidates." Oh... Ok, well it's a hot market... we can up the price $5k.
Next week, "Sorry, no candidates." Hmm, that's really odd. She apologized, said she had gotten over 100 resumes, and said, "Nobody has 5 years of HTML / CSS experience listed on their resume." After a brief talk, she fundamentally didn't understand anything past a direct keyword match.
Anyway good and bad recruiters, but you never know when your resume is going to end up in the hands of someone really junior. Better to have everything spelled out. Better to be explicit around what you did with each past job. Generally the posted job description is all the recruiter is going off of to match you, so it's easy to tune your resume to fit.
A developer who lacks the communication skills necessary to write a resume by hand isn't worth having. They may be great at what they do, but everyone needs to be able to communicate effectively.
Any HR department that relies on automated tools, that only reads resumes that match a profile dictated by the needs of an automated reading machine, isn't doing its job. If they are getting too many useless resumes that they need robot to read them, they need to better describe the offerings and/or broadcast to a more focused audience.
Announcing jobs to everyone in the world and sifting through the millions of applicants with a machine might make you feel good, it might make you think you are finding the diamond in the rough, but in reality you are selecting candidates almost by lottery.
Replying here because the above comment is too many levels deep: this shows exactly what is wrong with hiring. Especially the HR manager who is so used to getting 100 resumes and trying desperately to find a reason to throw out 80 of them. Some of the best people I ever worked with didn't have CS degrees, and it's sad that HR still works this way at so many places.
(We are working to change it in our niche of Sales, but even there we have these same battle stories).
The problem is when resumes get filtered into trash because the computer determined that you don't fulfill the stated requirements (no matter how silly). Which is a common practice these days, especially in hiring agencies who are hired to do pre-screening of candidates for a company.
Add the outright dishonest recruiters ("Oh don't worry about that ultra short start date, I have only put that in there so that people apply faster!" - one 20something HR dude trying to rope me into a BS job ...) to the mix and then companies are wondering why they "can't find talent" and why skilled people have difficulties to find jobs.
These things don't work: using HR, resume databases, keyword searches, creating an overlong and too detailed list of requirements and then treating them as a checklist.
Yet, this is the approach taken by far too many companies. The result, of course, is a stack of resumes a mile high that each contain a list of as many buzzwords and skills as possible. How do companies expect to find a good match in all that?
The way out is simple. Create a simple resume, with a small focused set of "skills". Leave out anything that's irrelevant to what you actually want to do. Then send it to a small handful of companies that run reasonable adverts. There may be fewer such opportunities, but I think a focused approach works better in the long run.
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