Hiring is a filtering game. With 100 candidates, first thing you do is filter out 80, I wish more candidates would understand this.
Pro-tip: no one wants to see a Nikon in your profile picture and no one cares about your photography hobby on your resume. I'm talking to you, half of the tech community on Linkedin!
I agree that many of the filters that people use are bullshit.
(You've most likely also read https://web.archive.org/web/20120501193533/http://raganwald.... too, a point in which is that other BS filters act just like the toss-half one in that they aren't really useful when your qualified applicant proportion is small.)
You'd be surprised. Might not be so explicit, but randomness (ie luck) plays a huge role in filtering process.
Even the CEO, who has skin in the game, won't be entirely dependent on making the best possible hire (hopefully).
Most job seekers are terrible at job seeking. What does that say about how good managers are at hiring?
(Also, managers has to look at hundreds of different candidates.)
Who said hiring is fair?
>Any company that would be this lazy as to potentially throw away their best candidates in the first round of filtering on criteria that has such little actual signalling is not one that I would want to work for anyway.
For most companies (not talking Facebook and Google level stuff) it doesn't really matter -- and they could care less if you would work for them or if they get top talent or not. Any decent-ish programmer can do the work they require, so they are OK with being lazy in hiring.
I am very curious how the balance of power can be tipped so drastically in the other direction in some places.
In my experience it was enormously difficult to find qualified candidates, especially if HR or recruiters were allowed to pre-filter candidates using relatively superficial judgments. A fizzbuzz test easily eliminated more than 80%.
Certainly one wants an edge, what I find confounding is that none of the advice dealt with proving actual ability as much as being shinier and flashier than the next candidate. I guess I was naive in thinking that kind of superficiality had diminished relevance in this industry.