Comment by jonnathanson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonnathanson | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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.

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.

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!"

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.

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.]

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.)

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.

'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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The CurVe package for latex does exactly this.

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!

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com