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Comment by ainiriand | Hacker News Reader

<rant>

Some time ago I went to the Dublin open house because they were opening news teams here and one of the positions was backed api engineer. Considering that I've been doing the same for almost 10 years and that I got personally invited to the event I decided to apply to the role.

They rejected me even before having a personal interview. I wonder what is happening behind the scenes but it was very demoralizing. Was anything wrong about my CV? About me? Am I too old? Right now, I prefer to stick with smaller companies, they have clearer intentions when contacting you and they are much more easier to approach.

</rant>

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In my experience, it's incredibly difficult to get a strong positive signal from a CV. You can definitely find red flags (my favorite example: people describing themselves as experts deep learning with 1 year of experience and zero publications) - but, after removing the obviously unqualified, the next steps have very low accuracy.

Honestly, it might have just been a sourcer/recruiter fuck up. If you can at all, ask a friend (or even a friend of a friend) if you can get an internal referal and bypass the broken resume filtering step.

Even worse, at some big companies, recruiters will ignore direct referrals and ask you to submit the resume internally through their req system. But then resumes get lost anyway.

Good recruiters accept internal referrals directly.

Honestly I dont that is true regarding CV, sure you can filter some extremely easily but its also pretty easy to see the good candidates even if there resume is terrible. Following up with a phone call will confirm it. And rarely result in an inept candidate. No offense to recruiters because they put in the work of sorting. But finding quality candidates to actually interview, those are easy to spot.

Better a rejection than complete radio silence, though.

I went through a job hunt a couple of months ago. CV screening was by far the most stringent part of the process for me. I passed all of my phone screens and got offers from most of my on-sites, but getting an interview from an application was a crapshoot. Thankfully most rejections at that stage were prompt and unambiguous (though as you say, not helpful/informative.)

Lyft was an exception, though. Their application page said something along the lines of "We respect your time, so we won't respond back if you don't make the cut." Pretty ironic, not responding back is about the most disrespectful thing they can do at that point in the process -- certainly worse than a curt "fuck off".

(By contrast I loved Stripe's interview process.)

(stripe head of engineering here) I hosted the open house in Dublin, thanks for coming and sorry to hear about your experience; even if it doesn't end up being a fit, we always want candidates to feel respected rather than demoralized. Without knowing the specifics of your situation, I do want to be clear that there are obviously a lot of factors for us to consider when evaluating candidates, but age isn't one of them.

Another anecdote: about a month ago I applied to Stripe and was rejected within a few hours. I had some truly mixed feelings about that! On one hand I was deeply appreciative of their prompt response, but on the other, it was a super quick rejection!

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