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Comment by enraged_camel | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that you make an effort to not read resumes. Do you explain that to people you interview during the first call? The reason I ask is that, if a hiring manager asked me things that are already written on my resume (e.g. what did you study in college?), I would definitely be annoyed, as my default expectation is that they should read the resume before the interview.

Don't get me wrong, I understand and agree with your reasoning. I'm just curious how transparent it is to the other side.

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We weren't super transparent about it, but we tried really hard in a lot of other ways to take hiring seriously as a customer service problem, so maybe we came out ahead anyways.

Thank you for the response Thomas. That makes a lot of sense.

I've been arguing for a resume blind hiring practice for years and one of the kickers is that you also need a resume question blind approach.

So really "what did you study in college?" needs to come off the list of things you ask (at least as part of the filter).

The way we do it now, the initial call person reads your resume, but we categorically do not reject based on the initial call (or the subsequent tech phone interview(s)). So, we get the advantage of being able to talk to someone about their experience and helping them make a plan to get hired, but also the advantage that our process is actually resume-blind.

That's a red flag on the company though, isn't it? Why would they be asking you to recount what's on your resume?

this is true and at many companies the hiring process is so broken, the interviewer might have only an hour or less heads up that they will be interviewing someone. i have done that maybe twice, and since then i refuse tomdo interviews on candidates without more prep time.

on the reverse of that, i have sometimes avoided topics that the candidate was familiar with because i didnt see relevant experience on a resume. that was a major miss, and ive tried to avoid using resumes for shaping the interview topics since.. i see the resume now as more of a signal of what the person is interested in (since most of us carve huge swaths of our experiences out, and tailor them for the job we apply to anyways).

When I was at EA, I would get an email saying I had to interview someone that afternoon, here's their resume, and here's the title they're interviewing for. It was ridiculous.

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