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Comment by dan-robertson | Hacker News Reader

I’m curious if you have much evidence that this is common? I suspect it’s mostly a myth that is easy to believe (it can feel good to believe it because it means you were removed from the applicant pipeline because of stupid computer reasons rather than because you don’t appear to meet some bar to a human, even if that bar is a stupid thing like prestige) and oft repeated.

I definitely think it’s likely that most people on hn don’t work for companies that do this, but maybe hn just skews toward certain kinds of tech jobs.

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It happens in big companies. My team is hiring about 100 people in the next 6 months.

For external candidates, we see less than 30% of all resumes. As with all things, 80% of the rest are junk and another 20% are potentially viable candidates.

Exactly.

It would seem most of the over-confident “it’s a myth” comments in this thread are from folks not familiar with typical processes for hiring in the 100s to 1000s.

You shouldn't be hiring that many. The company might, but the managers and people doing the interviews should be looking at maybe 20 positions per year. They can read résumés themselves and give it some thought.

Who sorts which 20 out of 20,000 resumes go to which managers? Not the managers. Who is “the company”? That’s who is keyword searching/matching/filtering.

The hiring manager. We have got tired of hr rejecting great résumés because they don't understand keywords. They have no clue that qt and qt5 are the same thing, and if we put both keywords on they reject someone with only one. Nor do they get that someone great with c++ is almost automatically great at qt. I'd be happy to teach c++ to someone with rust or Haskell experience if they are willing to learn. (And if it is rust we are open to new work in rust, though we have a lot of legacy c++ you will maintain)

We consider ourselves lucky to get 50 résumés, and if even one isn't obviously disqualified that is a miracle

In college I got the advice that if you couldn’t highlight text on your resume then a bot can’t read it and it might get thrown out. And if that might cause it why risk it?

I think the fact it’s low cost to avoid and high cost if it occurs keeps most people just doing it regardless of whether it’s true or not

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