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Comment by avip | Hacker News Reader

I don't do much hiring, but when I do I make an active effort to avoid reading candidates resumes.

I've found it's not possible for me to enter an interview with an unbiased mind having read a resume.

This feels weird to me.

If you have advertised a job and I've given you my resume, it is to give you some information you can use to avoid wasting your time and my time.

Just like I would hope your advertisement is accurate and useful enough to let me decide if it is a good use of time for me to send you a resume (e.g., saw an ad for "react developer" -- got to the interview and they were looking for a "server side java dev" -- I mean -- wtf?).

Not reading a resume before an interview feels... rude. It feels like the path that leads to you asking a Java/Go programmer to do a Javascript coding challenge in 50 minutes, which is a waste of everyone's time.

It is rude. People put lots of effort into resumes. But it's ruder to reject a candidate based on age, gender, martial status, education or lack thereof or doing non sw jobs in the past.

I always talk on the phone before and that's where we both make sure the interview is of relevance.

If you can't read someone's resume without rejecting them based on age, gender, marital status, education or lack thereof, or for their non-sw work history, then it sounds like you're not a very good person to be interviewing candidates. The concept of "unconscious bias" might be true in an academic sense, but in a very real way you should be treating people with respect regardless of their characteristics, especially during an interview process. Not reading someone's resume isn't just rude, it's supremely disrespectful.

I take a completely different approach, because I have been on the receiving end of disrespectful interviews and I won't stand for it and I don't expect the candidates I interview to accept it either. I carefully read the resume and research the candidate far in advance to the interview. I only ask questions during the interview which are open-ended, not trivia questions, and are directly related to either the content of the candidate's resume or things we're actually doing day-to-day on my team.

The dog and pony show interview style is intensely disrespectful and so is the idea that you won't even read a candidate's resume. I've walked out of interviews where both have happened, and I hope everyone on HN gets the personal confidence to do the same. I'm a professional, I expect to be treated like a professional, and I return that by treating those I interview like professionals. End of story.

Being cognizant of unconscious bias doesn't make someone a bad interviewer, in fact, it makes for the opposite.

It sounds like you've had some combative interviews in the past (it sucks - I've had them too) but that's not the same as being aware of biases.

There's a difference between being cognizant of unconscious bias and being disrespectful to your candidate. I am cognizant of unconscious bias, so cognizant that I know it plays a much smaller role in biased outcomes than conscious intended bias. I read candidate resumes and I treat candidates with respect.

The parent is disrespectful to the candidates they interview and I am being charitable in taking their explanation about bias at face value.

>it sounds like you're not a very good person to be interviewing candidates

We agree on that one, but the alternatives are worse. Would you like to take my place interviewing? It's a time consuming task I'd love to delegate to someone more experienced.

I would honestly love to take a job that was 100% focused on interviewing and hiring technical people. I have been through so many bad interviews (on both sides of the desk) that I think it really should be a dedicated position staffed by people who actually understand the major defects in the industry.

You can always apply to triplebytes and get exactly such position :)

<disclaimer: my affiliation with triplebytes is that they've rejected my application twice - possibly cementing parent suggestion that I'm underqualified to interview developers>

I hate interviewing (on both sides of the table), but I’d much rather do it than have someone else do it because I hope I can make it marginally less harrowing for the candidates.

I guess I’m a terrible interviewer, but so far the candidates we hired have worked out.

> age, gender, martial status

What resume has this information? This is all stuff you can infer from the interview itself.

Yeah, age I can understand. People usually list their college degree along with the date of graduation, so you can usually make a good guess about their age.

But, I have no idea how you gather gender or marital status from a resume.

Most names are gendered. Can I tell 100% that Jane is female from the name? Of course not, but then I can’t tell with certainty that someone who graduated in 2011 is ~30 either.

It’s fairly common in my experience for CVs from European candidates to have marital status/other family information (and often a photo!) on them. I don’t know why and I just ignore it.

Very true. I suppose I worded my earlier comment poorly. You can generally infer age and gender from one's name and education dates (of course, not always). But the point I was trying to make it that this would not be explicitly on there, particularly marital status. But looks like even there I'm wrong.

Pictures on resumes? That's a new one for me.

Yeah. It was super weird the first time I saw it on >80% of resumes I was screening for a director position in Europe. I asked my HR contact over there and she didn’t seem to think it was unusual at all.

Then don't have the interviewer read the resume, but have another person reading the resume give them the basic information about the expected skills.

Not reading resumes can be part of a process to efficiently discriminate by age, because it's precisely older people who have an interest in you reading a resume, because it's they who have important stuff there.

> It feels like the path that leads to you asking a Java/Go programmer to do a Javascript coding challenge in 50 minutes, which is a waste of everyone's time.

Depends, we always give someone a super small coding challenge (literally write 4 lines if you know how to, and the longest I’ve seen is something like 15), and any decent Java/Go dev could do that even if they had to learn JS on the spot (probably not necessary, but...).

But yeah, I agree with your main point. Not reading a resume is rude.

You're being downvoted but I've had the same experience as well. They bias interviews that are supposed to be performance based.

Resumes are a carefully crafted signal paper targeted at getting past an algorithm, recruiter, and into an interview. They're chock full of brand names (both education and company) and keywords. There's also unconcious bias based on the person's last name, locations that they've lived in the past, and so on.

I've found the best thing to do is skim their past job roles, to set expectations for where you can start with the level of difficulty in questions.

"last name" ??

In what way I could see some edge cases, which one where you thinking of ?

Names are known to be a vector for bias in resumes: https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

What? Unbiased mind after reading a resume? I'm expecting you to read my resume when I apply for a job. I hate it when recruiters call and ask how many years I've done X. It's right there on the resume. If you don't read it, you're wasting my time, as well as your own, if you're doing hiring.

Less information means more bias. You may not have the bias that comes from misconceptions about the information on the resume, but now you have the bias that comes from assuming a "typical" resume whatever that is in your context.

I don’t get it. Isn’t that the entire point of resumes?

Good job you postings as AC - other wise your employer would be a lot of peoples "call first" list.

Btw that's the PC way of saying blacklisted.

Biased with more information?

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