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Comment by maayank | Hacker News Reader

"These companies don't notice that in this way, the good people a driven away, and only the desperate will apply."

This. One of the reasons I chose my last employer (SAP, or more specifically, SAP Research) was their no bullshit, yet very thorough, recruitment process.

Compare that with my <A very, very, well known software corp> experience, where the phone call interview with HR went like that:

HR drone: "So, what's your degree?"

Me: "Mathematics." [didn't you read my resume?]

HR: "Oh... well... Most of the people working here have CS degrees."

Me: "Ah, well, my last job title was 'Computer Science researcher' and before that I had several years of experience as a programmer, so I think I'll fit" [apparently not!]

HR: "Yes, but do you know algorithms?"

Me: bangs head on wall

Sorry, no matter how reputable your company is, if that's the recruitment process then I can do better.

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Let me shed some prespective.

I can absolutely guarantee you that the actual hiring manager briefed the HR department on the job spec and had to dumb it down significantly. The summary would have been something along the lines of 'Ideally the perfect candidate will have a CS degree from a major University as strong algorithmic knowledge is a fundamental requirement for the role.'

HR would then interpret this as:

1: Must have CS Degree

2: Must know algorithms.

3: Only CS people study & understand algorithms.

4: Refer to step 1.

This.

Ironically, it helps to think of the HR screening process as a really dumb algorithm. The HR staffer likely has little to no understanding of how to ferret out "knowledge of algorithms," (or any other job skill, for that matter). So he defaults to a list of keywords or phrases -- interpreted very literally -- from a job description received from the hiring manager.

His internal logic is pretty much driven by two directives:

1: If a keyword or phrase is in the job description, a successful applicant MUST have it on his resume. (Word for word, preferably).

2: Anything on a candidate's resume that is not on the job description is irrelevant.

In fairness, there is some legitimate value to the HR screening process. It is a filter. A dumb filter, but a filter that the hiring manager doesn't have time to run on X hundred (or Y thousand) resumes. Some HR filters are designed to screen out resumes that don't contain the right keywords. Others are designed to select for resumes that match all the right keywords. Either way, the effect is similar. Of course, such a process can (and does) weed out a lot of very talented, very qualified people.

The trick is learning how to game the filter. The filter penalizes creative or unusual word choices. The filter flags candidates who reference someone they've met or spoken to at the company (doubly so if that person is the actual referrer). The filter rewards fidelity to the letter of the job description. Tailor your cover letter and resume accordingly.

I actually have a part in my resume that is intended for such filters (i.e. includes keywords like "OOP" and "Client-Server programming"). I call it "the HR blob". Admittedly, it's not in the beginning...

I've actually gone so far as to have a mostly modular resume. There is no static document, per se, but a giant list of resume "modules" that can be picked and compiled into a coherent resume when the time comes.

Some modules are used pretty much all the time (name, address, education, previous jobs and titles). Others are swapped in or out (bullet points under each job, interests if applicable, etc.). I've found that customizing the resume to fit the job is worth the extra 30 minutes of hassle to compile it.

[Note that I do not advocate making shit up. Rather, I've found that sometimes even the same bullet point, phrased two different ways, can have positive or negative outcomes at two different job openings. Or sometimes Job X considers Accomplishment A very important, but Job Y considers A irrelevant. Etc.]

This is a really good idea - like having a master license agreement (reads like a play book - think 50 pages of options and possible negotiation tracks for what starts as a 5 page agreement).

Of course, an army of lawyers put that together - is there an equivalent group to do that for technical resumes? A resume coach at the VFW wouldn't cut it...

I'm sure there is a cool, hacked-together way to automate the process. And that might actually be a great idea for an app or utility of some sort.

My system to date has been very paleolithic. I keep a spreadsheet with all my bullet points, categorized by job and mapped to different Skills and Experiences (i.e., the things to be demonstrated via the bullet points). When compiling a resume, I cross-reference by job description and its keywords, skills/experiences to be shown, etc.

Then I sort of treat the process like a compilation of overlapping sets, i.e., "The job requirements are A, B, and C. I want to show that I've done X, which demonstrates A and B. Then I want to show that I've done Y, which demonstrates B. But maybe Z demonstrates B and C in a more effective way, so I'll use X and Z as my bullets." There is definitely an easier and more automated way to do all this, perhaps with databases, but I still value the organic process of poring over everything myself and gut-checking if the overall narrative flow makes sense.

As you might imagine, I played too many RPGs as a kid.

Something like an automated resume / CV generator would be a great feature for a site like Linked In, or perhaps Monster.com.

see http://xmlresume.sourceforge.net/ - It has the capability to include or exclude sections based on what type of job you are applying for.

It's really a cool library; at one point I was going to build a job site to help people build xml-based resumes using this library.

'make' and a 'resume.d' directory tree with a vanilla and variant resumes works pretty well. Put the whole shebang under version control.

You can output various formats (HTML for web posting, PDF for distribution/printing, .DOC for recruiter's resume-uptake systems (many are based on MS Word / VBA macros). This is also handy for stripping your personal and/or contact information from resumes posted online (to keep annoying contacts down).

This sounds like the way to go. Thanks. Especially because, as modular as I like to think my resume is, there really kind of is a vanilla/standard version from which all subsequent versions are really just mods. Might be less legwork than recompiling from basic modules each time.

This sounds very clever and well engineered. And let me just say that I pray to all the gods I hold holy that I never be forced into a situation where I'd need to use such a thing.

Viewed from outside the box: this is a classic example of a clever hack to work around the wrong part of the problem.

it's a fun diversion from the tedium of jobhunting

It is that.

Fortunately that tedium is usually brief and infrequent. It's also not current.

Yea, you don't want to automate this. You need to keep your resume personal and truly tailored to the job. Unless you really work on natural language parsing the job description and the "about" pages of the company website, it's going to be a lot easier to do those little modifications yourself.

And as you said, you want to make sure the overall narrative flow as well as the overall design of the document makes sense for the job.

The CurVe package for latex does exactly this.

My university required my resume to be in HTML for applying through their system, so I used to have everything in one HTML file with irrelevant sections just hidden with CSS.

(I also exploited the ability to link external CSS to make a script that tracked everyone who viewed my resume, with a reverse DNS on their IP.)

A friend of mine puts every conceivable keyword on her CV... At the bottom, in 1-point white text. Slips right through all the filters!

Do you think the actual work conditions, atmosphere, and team will be better if already the entry gate is made of mud?

How many more tricks will you have to employ after you get past HR to get through the job itself? Let alone have some fun and learn something new.

Precisley.

It might not be an exact science, but it reflects somewhat on existing and future recruits, not to mention an indicator of corporate bureaucracy.

True. There's usually a correlation between annoying HR processes and annoying corporate cultures. But not always. Sometimes there's a really cool company that just happens to have a bad entry gate here and there. Usually this is the case at companies that have grown hot more quickly than they can scale up their initial HR systems.

To that point, oftentimes bad HR is really just a scale issue. A company starts getting more resumes than its people can deal with, and so it hires HR drones just to help with the workload. And this continues. Eventually, the managers are so far removed from the day-to-day HR filter that they don't really notice how bad it's become.

The point of departure is that HR attains life and influence of its own. What started as Payroll, having only a service role, morphs into an imperial organisation jamming its long beak into all corners. "It involves humans", goes the reasoning, "therefore we are in charge!"

In my experience, there are perfectly good candidates that pass the filter with flying colours. Then there's the ok candidates with fluffed up resumes that also pass the filter with flying colours. Followed by the wanna-bes who have their friends fake references but fill their resumes with fluff.

Then there's people who've take a slightly different career path, or chosen a job at some unknown place, yet have lots of good experience, and they're ignored because HR doesn't know what to do with them...

"Then there's people who've take a slightly different career path, or chosen a job at some unknown place, yet have lots of good experience, and they're ignored because HR doesn't know what to do with them..."

I've been that guy on more than one occasion. I'm a self-taught hacker, and I made the mistake of majoring in English in undergrad. While I usually look great on paper at the hiring manager stage, I have pretty spotty luck with the HR filter. To make matters worse, I've graduated twice into very unfortunate circumstances: 1) I graduated from college into a recession (post-tech-bubble-burst); 2) I graduated from grad school into an extremely deep recession.

The necessity of my circumstances has forced me to get creative with my job searches. Hence, the "modular resume" strategy I outlined in a subsequent comment. And hence the general strategy I now take on all job searches. Conventional wisdom holds that a job search is a numbers game: get your name out there as broadly as possible, and eventually, you'll catch a few things in the net. In my case, knowing that I look iffy on paper to HR drones, I know I need higher-touch tactics. Casting a wide net won't get me many fish. I need rod and reel, so to speak.

So I'll hyper-prioritize, say, 10 openings. And then I'll really drill down on them: researching the best fit, reaching out to friends of friends, doing informational interviews, networking over a fairly long term, etc. My goal is to get the hiring manager to know me before my resume hits the HR filter. I'm dead in the water if I hit the HR filter blind. (My affinity for horrible, acquatically themed metaphors knows no limits).

In fairness, a lot of these tactics could be seen as good habits in general. But for me, they were born of necessity. So in some ways, I enjoy being an unconventional candidate. It forces me to experiment, to learn, and to adapt, and to persist.

Have you considered contributing to a well known open source project? Some good ol' OSS name dropping might give that 'wow' factor.

I don't particularly think HR capable of evaluating or even understanding open source contributions. Unless, of course, the job description says, "must have contributed to open source."

If you gain a reputation, people will come to you.

Yeah, but probably not HR.

That's a good thing. You want to bypass HR.

Steve, how to recruiters themselves find their jobs? Do you guys find your respective jobs via the traditional resume-interview route?

I ask this because looking for word-for-word matches etc imply a lack of unfamiliarity with the process as viewed from the other side of the table. I understand that you have been a developer previously and probably understand the technical specifics better. But my guess is be that most of these recruiters might have gone the resume-interview route for at least _some_ job; I am surprised that they don't seem to understand how hopeless their techniques are.

Recruitment is one of the easiest jobs in the world to get into. Which probably explains the abundance of terrible recruiters. If you have any recruitment experience what so ever you will have employers literally lining up at your door with job offers. The last time I put my CV on the market I had 4 solid job offers within a week. I didn't apply for a single one, they all approached me.

I wonder the same about how SAP employees book time off... It can't be with their own software. E.g. I can't see the holiday calendar and how many days I have remaining on the same screen. I can't open them in different tabs because of the way it does session management, it will break horribly. You would think that they would get this bit right at least, just for their own sanity!

You're assuming an actual spec existed. When budgets are tight, the ability to hire someone occasionally comes out of nowhere with an insane deadline.

So instead of writing something up, the recruiter or manager googles around for "enterprise foobar developer", and copy/pastes a few pidgin english job descriptions from other places.

This arrives in HR, who then needs to translate slop into something that can be posted. Hence, the loop you described above.

Man, this makes me happy to hear. I'm CTO at a small startup, so hiring is crucial. We've worked really hard to optimize the recruiting process to make it easy on candidates, but it's been hard to know how much it matters.

To filter out the total idiots, I ask people to give me a one-paragraph answer to one of 5 technical-ish questions. That lets me spend plenty of time on the people that do make it through. I try to reply to all applications personally within 24 hours. Interviews take scheduling priority over pretty much anything else. We meet right after interviewing someone and try to get them an answer either way within a day.

If folks have other things they like (or hate) about hiring processes, I'd love to hear about it. We really want to get this right.

> I try to reply to all applications personally within 24 hours.

With that, you've addressed my biggest issue with the ordinary hiring process: Complete Lack of Feedback. When I was fresh (or nearly) out of college in 2003, the only responses I received were from the CMU Robotics Lab. And while they were "we're not interested" replies, they at least had a real signature on them. Nothing else I applied for produced even as much as an automated response - print, e-mail, phone, nothing. (My options and interests at the time were admitedly a bit too narrow, and geography worked harshly against me.)

Worse yet is when you interview somewhere and then never hear back. Thankfully that only happened once to me.

Otherwise it really depends on the group and the culture. It doesn't bother me when Megacorps use standardized tests or puzzles (large or popular groups need some sort of advanced filter), but I prefer the hiring process at smaller companies to be more personal.

Actually, that debacle is one of the reasons why I decided that my next job would be at a startup. So yes, it definitely matters.

>To filter out the total idiots, I ask people to give me a one-paragraph answer to one of 5 technical-ish questions.

from my recent job change (several offers). After supposedly reading my resume and after half an hour on the phone the company's staff recruiter asked me to write a paragraph on how i see my fit to the company. It became immediately obvious to me that there is no fit. Somehow that wasn't obvious for him. Next day he's calling and emailing - they really like to talk with me in-house and where is the paragraph? Couple days later - the same. Day after that - they really like to talk with me in-house. The paragraph somehow isn't mentioned anymore. Good luck guys. I hope you find the programmer(s) with a hobby for essay writing.

A paragraph isn't an essay. Even though essay writing isn't a crucial skill for programmers, clear and effective English writing often is, especially when you need to explain technical issues to non-technical people. Besides, good writing ability is often a pretty good indicator of general, well-rounded intelligence.

man, i'm not arguing about the importance of the essay writing skills (this is my weak one, and i know how important it is). My point is about when in the process you make candidates hopping through the hoops and the height and the number of the hoops. I don't have enough time to jump through all the hoops of all the employers that early in the process. It is like in marketing process - awareness, consideration, preference, action, loyalty - insisting and expecting action (buy) immediately at or instead of awareness.

Anyway, the process of filling a job vacancy is about mutual fit. Somebody, who'd like the process would obviously be a better fit to that company culture than me, so the filter does work.

Yeah, it sounds like they don't care about that, which is lame. And honestly, asking for a paragraph after you've talked with somebody seems weird.

In my case, it's basically a Turing test. I ask for it along with the resume link. It's just to weed out the obvious dolts. (Who, as somebody else mentioned, are unfortunately 90% of the applicants.) The questions I use are here: http://needfeed.com/about/jobs

I'm pretty sure that anybody would want to hire could toss off an answer to one of those in 5 minutes. Which, given that I'm going to spend 10 or 15 minutes reading their resume, their blog, and (hopefully) their open-source code, seems like a fair trade.

Right.

"We need someone to do real-time object-oriented programming."

"I do real time. I do object-oriented design and programming."

"But do you do real-time object-oriented programming?"

"Yes."

"I don't believe you."

Their loss, not mine. Employers, listen: Your recruiters come across as idiots when you do this.

I've flustered a lot of people asking them which definition of "real-time" they mean at the current moment.

Google?

At least from my experience, the Google recruiter I worked with was very knowledgeable of the software domain.

Perhaps HR departments are counter-intuitive. Why can't a manager of a department or team hire their own teammate?

When I meet such corporate bureaucracy I'm always reminded of this paragraph from one of PG's essays[1]: "A group of 10 managers is not merely a group of 10 people working together in the usual way... for a group of 10 managers to work together as if they were simply a group of 10 individuals, the group working for each manager would have to work as if they were a single person—the workers and manager would each share only one person's worth of freedom between them... the result is that each person gets freedom of action in inverse proportion to the size of the entire [corporate] tree. Anyone who's worked for a large organization has felt this."

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html

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