At this point, isn't it generally accepted that all tech interviewing sucks, and companies would do better throwing darts at resumes?
If all interviewing is bad, and all companies are not bad, there's no benefit to judging a company based on that process.
I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. Most companies seem to be interesting in improving their recruitment processes - but certain fundamental systems and assumptions are treated as inviolate and sacred.
Here is a quick but incomplete list of the ones that come to mind:
- Open-ended unstructured interviews are the optimal way to evaluate candidates.
- Whiteboard coding is an acceptable, reliable, and reasonably accurate way to gauge coding ability.
- Algorithms and data structure knowledge predicts overall software engineering capability.
- Culture fit (in however nebulous ways) is a stronger predictor of future performance than standardized evaluation.
The list goes on.
The tech industry overall seems very interested in improving recruitment and hiring, so long as these fundamental tenets are never violated. Suffice it to say, this stands in contrast to tech's (in)famous claims of thinking outside the box, breaking the rules, and holding nothing sacred to disruption.
I've personally seen companies try to improve candidate sourcing, scoring systems, interview scheduling, etc etc, but practically never any of the above. Companies try really, really hard to optimize within an extremely narrow band of parameters.
What they don't really want, is to take on people who are noticeably better than (or different in any way from) the people already working there.
1. Pushback on work sample tests from the recruiting companies.
2. Upper management wondering why it's so hard to find candidates that can pass our work sample tests.
3. Suggestions that maybe we should be using an online coding test. (multiple choice questions of poor quality)
It can be really difficult for companies that don't have a lot of in-house experience here to figure out how to hire good developers. Much of what is known in Silicon Valley style companies isn't really known by HR in a smaller company in the midwest. They don't typically read HN or follow the tech blogs. And unless they luck into hiring a vocal Senior Developer like me to specifically guide their recruiting and interviewing process they won't even realize how badly their hiring process is.
Everyone who works at a company, got there by passing through the] interview filter. A bad interview process has everything to do with the company, particularly in organizations that have grown a lot in the recent past.
At the time I was interviewing with another company who seemed interested in me, but expressed a deep suspicion of new hires after having been burned in the past, and told me outright that they were skeptical of me, and that I could very well turn out to be lazy and unproductive. After three interviews in three weeks, they still hadn't made any offer. So when another company comes along unsolicited and asks me to join them because they know I'm good at what I do, I took their offer. When a company demonstrates that they value you, you're going want to work for them instead of the one that doesn't.
There are a few people at my current company that were hired with an interview based on the company needing skills that weren't available from referrals from employees, but that's uncommon. I don't even know if our company has any sort of standard interview process.
Were they on time to the interview? Did it seem like a good culture fit for me? Do they seem positive about working there? Was the interview full of poor communication? or confused looks?
Or perhaps by actually reading resumes instead of keyword-filtering them. Really, it's not that hard.
"Throwing darts at resumes", OTOH, is exactly what many companies seem to be doing right now. Specifically, the practice of setting up a "chat" with an internal recruiter (who inevitably tells you that they think you'll be a "wonderful fit") before passing the resume over to the tech side (which is when you find out whether they really think you're a potential fit or not) comes to mind.
This one is a two-way street. I launched a resume writing side-business a couple years ago (resumeraiders.com) because I saw how poor many developer resumes were and how they were getting ripped off by resume writers who had no experience in hiring or in tech. Most were just failed writers.
If you expect a recruiter to read a poorly-written 5 page resume when the yes/no interview decision could have easily been made based on a summary and a few decent bullet points, that's not on the recruiter. If you think the 5 page resume is some kind of anomaly, ask the recruiters at your company how common they are.
Her resume was 1 page. It's the first time I've ever seen a 1 page resume in my life except for someone out of highschool with no history or experience.
Mine is 4 pages. I've worked really hard to cut it down to that while including relevant things and nice formatting/readability/white space. Compared to some of the 10 to 15 page resumes we get here for people who have done so little, it's positively succinct.
We had a chat, and we just had to agree that it was a cultural difference.
But still, I admit, if anyone asked me here, I'd say "you can't have a one page resume, unless you are literally applying for McDonald's and have done nothing with your life, this isn't twitter"
The resume doesn't need to include everything you did. It's a highlight reel, not a bio. You don't need to list every responsibility or even every accomplishment.
If I forced you to tell me your background in one page, you'd be able to do it if you have any sense as to what is most impressive, what is important, and what isn't. The reason your resume is four pages is that it's acceptable where you are.
I once reduced a 26 page resume to a couple pages for a non-US client. It's usually just triage and deleting, some sentence "refactoring", and formatting. Not too tough, as long as my client doesn't have too much emotional attachment to every detail from their career.
Almost anyone can fit their entire experience onto a single page. You don't need to write an essay for each position—just highlight a few bullet points.
Oh sure! I can cut it down to 1 word if I want: awesome :p
One of my points is, I have literally not seen a 1 page resume before outside of fast food/janitorial work. Before chatting with her, I would have advised her to fix that up, because no one will take her seriously with a dot point resume that looks like it was put together to hit some automated text search and no natural human reading. I admit after some discussion, I fell back to "wow...they're not even pretending they're nothing but a keyword search meat grinder", because I do respect her so I thought she was telling the truth. And now I've got additional corroboration from HN.
I think there are arguments for longer/shorter resumes. In my, and my jobs/culture defence, I need to see you can write in plain English, have some sense of aesthetics, prioritisation, presentation. By that age I expect you've worked in several jobs (about which your summary might be my first impression/knowledge) and dot points aren't going to cut it, because your job titles, product names and keywords are meaningless noise to me: I joke my grandmother is an entrepreneur/CEO and has worked with everything. Your dot point resume looks like an indian from mechanical Turk put it together by amalgamation of keywords from job ads and pop culture. I want personal details, but summaries, on your projects, products, papers, in plain communicable error free English. 1 page screams kid/unprofessional to me. 2 - 4 pages unless you're 50 - 60 and have written 100 books, done something truly remarkable.
Now I'm not saying its right, I'm just saying that's my world.
> Your dot point resume looks like an indian from mechanical Turk put it together by amalgamation of keywords from job ads and pop culture.
> 1 page screams kid/unprofessional to me.
Your 4-page resume is unprofessional, overlong, self-centered, arrogant, and naive. You apparently are so bad at English that you can't even write concise summaries. A long resume screams that you have an overinflated ego and have no sense of professional decency.
A short resume doesn't imply a lack of aesthetics or English. I certainly paid attention to the design of mine. [0]
If you can think of a nice way to convey the same sentiment/message, but without the offence, I'm all ears and would happily edit the post.
Again, let me stress, I think there are arguments for long and short. I do not advocate for right and wrong, merely try to convey the reality I'm in, given that it's so different apparently from SF.
Realise also, in good faith, how offensive the "1 page resume" sounds to my ears. There is not any hyperbole present when I say I haven't ever seen one. Indeed, the only reason I believe it exists is because otherwise intelligent people I respect have told me it does, and now hacker news backs that up.
Really though, is it so hard to believe that people think that summarising yourself down to a page (as opposed to three or four...lol) is also an offensive idea?
Are we really so departed from one another that we believe that we can't just agree that the way our two respective cultures do things is offensive, especially given the fact that neither of them appear to have much success with outcomes regardless of which culture is in play?
But...
You do realise what "mechanical Turk" is...as in...the Amazon service called "mechanical Turk" based upon the chess playing automaton, and that it's basic premise is often westerners paying people from poorer countries, say...India, to spit out quick small pieces of work for them.
There is no offense intended in these statements :/
It's offensive to imply that people with 1-page resumes just had it generated via mechanical turk. I've spent hours perfecting my resume to have a good layout and clear copy so it could fit on 1 page.
You really need to adjust your value system. Writing a short resume is harder than writing a longer one. In fact, I have a 4-page "master" resume which I pull from to build my 1-page version.
> There is no offense intended in these statements :/
Of course there is. You don't call skilled professionals "kids" unless you're trying to be offensive. Don't play dumb.
One of the important lessons we learn in this life is that we're responsible for the offense we cause (or more specifically: the offense implicit in what we say), not the offense we intend.
For government jobs it's even worse, there you basically do have to write essays against the "selection criteria" (don't get me started on what it actually achieves, again, I'm not trying to advocate).
The general rationale is often on several grounds:
-to create a "merit" based document trail - to create a basic barrier to entry that has to be crossed for all but the most basic positions. Think of it like a spam filter/ensuring candidates who want THAT job as opposed to just A job. The very thing you don't want is to have hundreds of 1 page dot point resumes coming in. How would you possibly find the time to go through them? You want to stop people applying just by sending in a generic summary resume and clicking a button. You want people who are willing to put a bit of work in to apply specifically to the job you're advertising.
It is not uncommon for me, for instance, to write a cover letter for each job, and craft a specific version of my resume for each position, emphasising and exposing those parts of my experience most applicable to that particular position.
You can only really do one or two of these well per week, but that's kinda the point.
That reminds me of another technique - that is you select roughly half of the resumes from the stack and bin it. Nobody wants to work with unlucky people ;)
"Eh, I don't have time for this. Let's get the junior people to filter resumes and do phone screens. Especially when trying to hire senior people... Too many resumes? Just make them do a 3-hour HackerRank session first. It's what all the other places are doing..."
Except I've had good interview experiences. So, no, there are better and worse kinds of interviews. Just because it is an overwhelmingly neglected aspect of the industry is neither here nor there.
The rest of the company didn't care enough to fix a bad interview process. That has plenty to do with the rest of the company.
>isn't it generally accepted that all tech interviewing sucks,
No. The interview process I went through was phenomenal. And my job is very pleasant and rewarding.