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Comment by navs | Hacker News Reader

sigh

> Rule #2: Take a long hard look at a candidate’s social profiles.

Is not having a LinkedIn account going to come back to bite me, even when applying for dev roles? I've had even senior devs at popular local dev shops say LinkedIn is a "necessary evil" because it:

1. is easy to grep

2. you can find whether a candidate has similar connections to you

3. recommendations

I get New Zealand is small and the social graph for LinkedIn can be well utilised because of this but I just don't want a LinkedIn account. Is a traditional CV so bad?

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In California at least, looking at an applicant's social profile can reveal information the company is not allowed to ask for or use in the hiring decision.

LinkedIn wouldn't qualify since it's a public resume, but checking out an applicant's Facebook page or Instragram would likely give rise to actionable legal claims if the applicant is rejected. This doesn't mean you'd lose, but you'd pay out a chunk of money to defend the lawsuit and other candidates would avoid your company.

LinkedIn isn't public. It is inaccessible to people like me who haven't accepted the LinkedIn Terms of Service. The formerly porous auth wall has recently been made tighter.

I wonder how this affects whatever California law you were referencing? (Honest question. I have no idea as to the answer.)

Also, what should Facebook tell you? Worst case you don't hire someone because you don't agree with their political views or hobbies even if they'd never brought that up during employment. A public web search can make sense in cases where clients would also potentially google your employees (e.g. sales reps or managers). But for a developer that shouldn't play a role.

Australian here, but I've worked for NZ companies before.

Especially down in our corner of the world, it's all about who you know. If you've got a few people you've worked with where you can go "hey I'm looking for a new job soon, heard of any openings?", that'll get you wayyyyy better jobs on average than what ends up hitting the public job advertisements.

Speaking from experience, advertising a job publicly is what you do after you've asked everyone you know if they know anyone personally who would work well.

I'm in NZ too, I vaugely put some stuff on my linkedin, but I don't use it and don't keep it up to date. When I recruit people, I wouldn't use linkedin at all. If I look at the people I'm linked to, who I know pretty well, the profiles almost have an inverse weighting. The averagish people I know seem to have extensive profiles with many connections, and with many bold claims of capability. The people who I think are seriously good often have seriously poor profiles ( of those that do have them ) and often only linked with whoever sent them requests. Maybe that's unique to software devs, or maybe it's unique to people I know, or maybe it's unique to my subjective opinion of other peoples capability. Either way, I really don't think too much of linkedin.

Similarly, rule #4: Google candidate. What happens if candidate doesn't have Google presence? Or if there are other people with the same name as the candidate who have weird websites or videos posted somewhere. Give me a break, let's not get paranoid about hiring. You can always let someone go.

There's a guy with my name, roughly the same age as me, from the same hometown who's a recently paroled pedophile. All the top results when you search my name are about him.

So yeah, I'm not enthusiastic about Googling every candidate.

Alternatively, my "Google Twin" is literally a rock star. Obviously we are quite different people by look and by crook, but this is a coin with at least two sides.

That's all the more reason why you should have a web presence!

Not everyone can have that, esp. people with a history of stalkers or abusive friends/family.

I recently found out there's not only with the same name as me (it's a fairly unusual name--I haven't previously heard it outside of my family), but also went to my university. It would be very easy to get us confused.

I took my partner's last name when we got married so I no longer shared a name with murderers, drug dealers, a corrupt politician. Now I share a name with a farmer, two people in the Netherlands, and a hobbyist jeweler. Much better.

Maybe it was because I was a junior developer at the time, on my first real job, but I found LinkedIn to be practically useless in New Zealand, specifically Wellington.

The Wellington tech scene is small enough and tight knit enough that I had no need for LinkedIn, things tended to get around by word of mouth as much as anything.

Since moving to Australia, I've actually started using LinkedIn and it was very useful for finding leads for work, and I still get recruiters periodically contacting me for positions.

I still see no utility in LinkedIn beyond using it as a job hunting tool though. I've never posted anything to LinkedIn, and never read anything on there either.

I find it handy because most of the time I know some shared connections and I can chat to them about the person (like you said, New Zealand is a small place). I know what you mean, I avoided creating a profile for the longest time, especially because they were doing a lot of shady stuff around sending emails to all your contacts. However I find it to be a genuinely useful tool now.

In saying all of that, I'm not going to write you off for not having one and if your CV can give me the same info then that's fine. I just think it's best to use what's available to you - if you're in Wellington like I was, you're pretty much 2 degrees of separation from anyone else so finding someone to vouch for you that's trusted by the person hiring you is easy using LinkedIn.

How long should a CV be for New Zealand companies?

A friend in Wellington (Andrew Amesbury) recommended that I rewrite mine with more details, even though it's now 7 pages instead of 2.

I worked at Fisher & Paykel Healthcare in Auckland while on a Working Holiday visa in 2011-2012. I still have some friends there, but they now outsourced their recruiting so internal references don't help as much. My previous boss (Mark Titchener) is retiring.

I'm looking to move to NZ later this year. The Skilled Migrant Category visa is the fastest route to PR anywhere in the world. I've been in Taiwan to get the required 3 years of continuous relevant work experience.

If LinkedIn is important, then please tell me what to change:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-burkimsher-b855bb8/

What are some popular web forums in NZ? I've found a couple of jobs through online communities, and was invited to visit Google in Taipei based on a post here on Hacker News. But staying in Taiwan won't solve my nationality issues, whereas moving to New Zealand would provide a safe, stable place to call home.

3 or 4 pages should be about right IMHO, most tech hiring managers don't want to read your complete life story, just figure out if you look like you have the right skill sets and experience.

At a quick glance your current CV is light on specific technologies and languages. i.e. are you an embedded C programmer? Ruby? PHP? Net? Can you use Github, docker, whatever. most of this is just to get past the "HR filter".

I know New Zealand is not Australia, but a resume of 3 or more pages is too long for anyone but the most seasoned of professionals (I'm talking 40+ or 50+ years of constant projects and achievements). I'd keep it short and sweet at 2 pages, 3 at an absolute maximum.

I religiously stick to the one page max rule.

2 pages is what I go for. I've started leaving out older jobs in favour of pointing them at my LinkedIn profile for more in depth info for older positions.

I'm never going to rule out the candidate without online profiles, but it would have been a nice way to get some confirmation or another perspective on what I see in the CV. Without access to your profiles I'll just have to work a bit harder to get references or evaluate how truthful your backstory is.

In NZ my own linkedin is perhaps enough to help with that. Perhaps if you aren't using linkedin yourself, you don't understand how it can be used against you, or how it is helping other candidates? (just thinking..)

I don't think it will hurt for dev roles. I wouldn't be surprised if over half of the people on LinkedIn are recruiters, so it must be critical for their own careers.

I think these social networks are really important for candidates like this catfish, but for those of us who know WTF we're doing, I kind of doubt it. It's certainly a trope that developers are antisocial. If you know what you're doing, it won't be hard to manifest people with credentials who will talk about it.

If you're antisocial, how will references know or remember you, and how will you remember who to cite as references?

Using my brain, like humans did before LinkedIn. It's quite easy for me to remember who my bosses were and which of my junior devs can actually produce code and which cannot. There's no need to be fatuous. If you can't recall who you worked for most recently, you have a much bigger problem than mere introversion.

> Is not having a LinkedIn account going to come back to bite me,

In SF bay area, no. Of course hiring is local so YMMV.

"Necessary evil" is the exact phrase I've used to describe LinkedIn for many years now; it's really sad.

If I hire you, what other commonly used tools are you going to refuse to use?

facebook?

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