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.
I agree with the values you mention they are "supposed" to provide. But in reality Filtering, I dont think they do it correctly. At least in Technology.
See technology nowadays it's a lot about buzzwords, and usually recruiters just look for keywords inside resumes. If you dont have one of those keywords, you're off the hook.
Technology hiring, could have another layer of analysis. For example every developer knows that if you've been doing mysql, and php, and web development. You probably can manage a CMS like Drupal or Wordpress.
A recruiter would dismiss you for not having one of those in your resume.
Maybe this is good. Maybe not, my point is, job hiring is not only plain resume reading, and they usually dont go beyond that.
I think the automated resume filtering systems are interesting. Previous stories, about how to hire people, have told how the nice people involved in hiring did the exact thing these systems do, only manually. They take a big stack of resumes and filter 95% straight into the trash, based on some arbitrary rules.
I don't like the idea of these automated systems, but I also don't see how this is any different.
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.
The interesting thing to me about this, and many other responses here, is that it's so blind to the reality beyond the tech space about how hiring actually operates for a job seeker. If you're in a position like, say, "software engineer," your skills are clear and unambiguous. You can list the same skills for every job application and eventually find what you want. But many – if not most – job seekers don't actually have that kind of experience. There's a ton of experience that needs to be tailored to the employer. I'm in the nonprofit operations space and there's about 10 different ways I can spin my experience based on what's being asked in the job listing. I don't WANT to copy & paste my LinkedIn because that's not going to get me the job – it reflects what my previous employer wanted, not what my new one might want.
It's not cultural. I think the agencies are trying to put in every single keyword and "skill" to get past algorithmic filters and also make sure non-technical managers see the words they are looking for.
At a past role we were looking for a contract Tableau person and one of the agencies that was approved by HR sent me 20+ resumes. All of them were 5+ pages, with things like "Made a Bar Chart in Tableau," "Made a Pie Chart Tableau", etc.
After looking at 10 of these, I told our HR exec these resumes all looked the same and I thought they were fake. I had a meeting with the agency rep and they said they smiled when I said these resumes were BS. Their response was "Usually we send resumes to a manager and they have a 30 minute phone conversation with some of them. After that they sign a contract with one of them."
The point is, a lot of hiring managers want a person to do X on a contract basis, but they don't understand X or have anybody in their group that does X. For all they know, connecting to a SQL database and making a bar chart is rocket science. These agencies target these managers.
I did end up interviewing 2 people from that agency, both of which were actually quite good with Tableau. Of course, those people were curated by the agency after I made my comment.
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.
At least when I was a hiring manager at an AI start-up, I looked at just about every resume submitted, and I thought the advice was pretty spot-on for what I was looking for. That said, I've never worked at a very large tech company, so I could believe that humans aren't reviewing them at those institutions.
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.
The thing is, it's not a resume-sorting problem at all. Most people aren't even qualified to be who they are.
In general, people aren't qualified to do their jobs. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be doing them, or be hired to do them. It means the qualification system is broken.
That's why they need to be included. Companies are using automated systems and/or non-technical HR people to filter resumes. The bigger the company, the worse it is because they get more applicants.
> After all, there would be no reason for HR to apply said filters if the posting was prescriptive.
HR also doesn't want to spend all day sorting through garbage resumes. Some use resume parsing software (or form fields) to do this sorting for them, in which case, it is effectively prescriptive.
> these days everyone has transitioned to "Bachelors degree or equivalent experience"
Most tech companies hiring rank-and-file software developers, maybe. Definitely not every job. Pick your favorite job posting site and look at mid or upper management positions -- few accept "equivalent experience".
Well, yes, but the point is that tech recruiters are very willing to look at people who have done 3 low-status things, and 1 high-status thing. The article complains about recruiters who insist that resumes reject any sign of low status.
If your resume has nothing interesting on it at all, then it's going to be hard to get an initial phone screen at a tech company, because there are so many resumes just like it.
The automatic matching BS is why my resume is chock full of bullshit with a skills matrix. I would rather they look at my overall experience and try to match me to a relevant job.
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.
"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 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.
This is a how things are handled at companies that get 500+ applications for each open position and/or are just incompetent. At smaller companies it is very likely that actual humans read a résumé without the keyword matching bullshit.
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.
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