The author is talking about a fairly “classic” approach. I was a hiring manager for a long time, and had a similar (but more flexible) worldview. It may not age well.

I personally think that being able to leverage AI tools will be an important skillset, in the future, and would not disqualify AI submissions, right off the bat (but maybe not consider them a “leg up,” either). They will just be part of the landscape, going forward. A lot of “classic” résumé advice isn’t really much better than what ChatGPT will provide, anyway. For example, he rails against “Buzzword Bingo.” I hate that, too, but it is also a “classic” CV technique, and many professional submissions will be absolutely packed with jargon.

I just think that there isn’t any way to avoid having to dedicate some real time and effort to screening applicants. In my case, it was something that I took very seriously. I had to fight like crazy to get headcount, and I was hiring pretty high-functioning people for a small, rather “elite” team. I really can’t relate to having to sort through hundreds of CVs of folks right out of school.

I for one welcome phone interaction and tests, though not all tests perfect and found many flawed tests and errors in tests in the past. Some companies appreciate when you tell them of mistakes and others will hold it against you, though again, found HR departments if you point out a mistake will not take it onboard and take it as criticism and in a negative way and hold that against you.

So for me, I do feel HR departments play too large a part in recruitment in IT than their skillsets entail.

Not saying a golden solution, but I do feel that many recruitment processes have gone down hill with HR wedging themselves into the process more and more and filtering out candidates that the manager doing the recruiting, never even knows about.

Though this is all based upon my experience and I'm sure others had different views. But for me, having been turned down for a job for being overqualified and case of you actually knowing the manager and he never even got to see your CV, well, sadly I know it is very true and happens.

1) I would throw an 8 page resume in the trash without bothering to read it. 1 page cover letter telling why we are a match for each other without repeating just what is on your CV and AT MOST a two page CV.

2) It is true that you need to get past the HR/Recruiter firewall. Our HR does not do some sort of NLP but recruiters certainly might.

3) I don't really care what your resume looks like as long as it is neat and easy to read.

4) Personalize domain is absolutely meaningless. In fact, I would likely (sub-consciously) think you were a self-important ass for using one.

5) If your job history is more than 5 years, I can't imagine why I would care about the months.

I might be atypical, but I don't really care much about ancient history. For a candidate that has 5 years of experience:

I don't care anything about your high school.

While I likely want to know about your college and degree, I don't care about your GPA.

If your hobbies are other forms of programming, don't show me. It is a negative. Show me there is something more than programming in your life.

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.

But from there, if the recruiter is looking for easiest resumes to parse... they'll immediately recoil and move on

For me that's a feature not a bug. I'm at the point in my career where it's generally assumed I'll be capable of giving technical interviews, and nothing sucks more than being on the receiving end a recruitment funnel that's more focused on cookie cutter applications than the actual applicant...

I also don't want to work on a team that passed up capable people who just happen to have missed the resume meta

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And fwiw, I work at fairly large company, not FAANG large, but ~5k employees, market cap ~50B, and TC is also about in line with FAANG I'd say, at least at my level. We have a ton of ex-FAANG coincidentally...

I was contacted by a recruiter of theirs who recognized a previous company I worked at and wanted to chat (very small company, tiny, so I was surprised that was what got them to bite)

Here's what I used to do. CVs went through initial triage and were (quickly) sorted into three piles:

1. People I want to interview.

2. Backup pile: I don't want to meet these people, but if there is no one left in (1), we take this pile and work with it.

3. Rejected.

That triage was quick. If you have several hundred CVs, you will judge them quickly. That's not just because you can't spend too much time on each, but also because you can actually afford false negatives: even if you reject some good candidates, chances are you'll still end up with a good hire. So things that people would consider superficial become factors. Badly formatted CV: rejected, it's likely the candidate doesn't care or isn't organized. Typo spotted: rejected, same reasons. Missing information (like dates): rejected. You get the picture.

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.

Also, if the job looks especially interesting I'll sometimes ask for more information. Likewise, if the job looks completely off-base I'll reply telling the recruiter that I changed industries or am not interested in anything similar. My logic is this; If I'm going to receive this crap, at least make it relevant.

You are the one seeking something here, lost in a pile of other seekers. Why wouldn't you do everything you could to make it easy for the person looking at your CV to pass it on to the next stage of vetting.

Why would someone bother googling some obscure reference on your resume when they have dozens or hundreds of others that fit the bill? The key is learning what it takes, in general, to get to the next stage. While there are always horror stories about oddball reasons for not getting selected, they aren't the norm.

Understand the job you are going for, understand the expertise and expectations at the different stages, and you'll do fine. It is basically a numbers game at that point.

ChatGPT can generate a custom resume and cover letter for each position you apply to that's hard to distinguish from the real thing. This makes all 100-1000+ applications look like rock stars.

How does a recruiter filter through all of that? How does a hiring manager?

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?

If candidates come out and say such when I ask them questions about it, I'll just move on. I won't hold it against them unless it happens excessively.

So they spend more time and cash on the traditional method...then complain about a lack of talent. Resume keyword filters and non-technical recruiters are a (not) surprising waste.

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.