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Comment by tomnipotent | Hacker News Reader

> Employers are looking at your education

People can be petty. I've seen no shortage of candidates get passed on because of spelling mistakes or something equally silly, and it happens a lot more than you'd like to think. Maybe the resume reviewer is having a bad day, or their dad told them "people that do X are dumb" and so anytime they see X they think someone is dumb. I've even worked at places that fast-tracked candidates from USC because the founders were from there.

People are biased, and those biases will come across.

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> I've seen no shortage of candidates get passed on because of spelling mistakes or something equally silly

I wouldn't use this as the only basis to pass on a candidate, but it'd certainly be a red flag[1]. If you can't take the time to even run spellcheck on your CV - a document you have specifically crafted for presumably serious people to read - what does that say about your attention to detail at work?

There's room for leniency, obviously, because even professional proofreaders miss stuff and not everyone is writing in their native language, but some baseline level of competence is expected.

1. I'm usually hiring people in design and product, not engineering, so ymmv.

> what does that say about your attention to detail at work

It says absolutely nothing. You've inferred something from it, and then run with it to create your own narrative.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point (or maybe this is your point), but doesn't this take effectively invalidate the entire human interviewing process? The whole thing is just a series of actions (portfolio review, phone screen, whatever) that give the reviwer(s) a set of mostly subjective data points from which they infer a candidate's fit for a particular role.

I've had plenty of recruiters that could ignore silly resume mistakes and find gem candidates. I've also hired candidates with horrible resumes, and it's never been a problem.

Evaluate a candidate based on their experience and qualifications, everything else is just to satisfy our own egos.

> Evaluate a candidate based on their experience and qualifications

Well, as I said I typically hire in design and product, so "proven ability to produce high-quality written content" is often an important qualification.

> I've also hired candidates with horrible resumes, and it's never been a problem.

That's as much survivorship bias as it is to hire someone based on their attention to details.

It says a lot. Just because it is a bias, doesn't make it wrong. I've meet enough people in my career that would prove the rule about attention to details.

I'm a stickler for typos, but I would note that sometimes resumes are sent by recruiters who have reached out to the candidate and are trying to get them hired (so they can get a commission). These recruiters will sometimes edit resumes — even PDFs, in my experience — and can sometimes accidentally inject typos or formatting oddities.

One reason that recruiters want to tinker with your resume is to remove contact information, so they can ensure that the company can't reach you without going through them.

I was livid when this happened to me, especially after I made clear that I did not want the recruiter to send any documents on my behalf.

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.

> because they're looking for easy

But they're not easy ways. There's absolutely no correlation between resume quality and candidate performance, and they're just idiosyncrasies we develop over time. We trick ourselves into believing these signals are important, when they're not.

> There's absolutely no correlation between resume quality and candidate performance

I don't think that's entirely true. The resume is a product of a potential hire, and it gives off the first impression of their organizational and writing skills. While it shouldn't be the _only_ deciding factor, that first impression is an important signal for a hiring manager who has to filter potentially hundreds of candidates.

> The resume is a product of a potential hire

That's like saying a first date is in indication of a couples future. It's a bit silly. Sure, if it's absolutely chock-full of errors that could be a sign, but one or two are the kind of things you're supposed to ignore.

> that first impression is an important signal for a hiring manager

Only because people have been trained to judge others based on petty things, so people have responded in kind. Not because it's actually a valuable effort, but to give people one less reason to throw it in the "No" pile.

I fear this would filter out a lot of perfectly competent engineers whose native language is not English.

Spelling issues are inexcusable given how easy they are to catch (I hear Microsoft Office has a spell check feature), but grammar issues beyond that should largely be overlooked.

I used to work with someone who had been a manager in 80s Britain (high unemployment) and he said they threw any applicable in a brown envelope in the bin.

It wasn't about skills or experience or culture fit, but about getting the hiring done in a sane amount of time.

It sometimes can be indicative. We recently had a resume with an error in the birthday (would have been only 1y old by that) and a couple of other errors. Candidate didn’t even know who he was applying for and should clearly have been filtered out by HR. If you list technologies with spelling errors, like “Sql” you clearly don’t know what you’re talking about.

> like “Sql” you clearly don’t know what you’re talking about

This is the kind of silly leap I'm talking about. People infer WAY too much from something like a word in a digital document and extrapolate that into something they use to impact a persons life.

I had an employee that insisted on asking candidates what they're 5 year plan, and was insistent that long-term goals were serious indicators if a candidate should be hired. She would give candidates thumbs down if she didn't like the answer, even if they could do the work.

You're taking it out of context. I'm not saying that taken along it's a strong enough negative signal to filter, but it makes me being alert and I'll drill more into these items. But there are a lot of resumes that are clearly low effort and have a bunch of these mistakes - those are in my experience always indicative of the candidates' quality.

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