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Comment by mpweiher | Hacker News Reader

> decision you've already made

Abso-fucking-lutely, pardon my French.

To be a little more precise: unless you're going into an interview totally unprepared, there is a résumé that you've read, hopefully read carefully. I make a decision, based on said résumé, whether I would like to hire that candidate. Maybe "decision" is too strong a word. Hypothesis. Yes, hypothesis is better.

That means I have some sort of mental model of what the candidate might be like, what they can do and whether and how they fit.

If the person is invited for the interview, the hypothesis is "yes, I would like to hire this person".

The purpose of the interview is to try to disprove the hypothesis. If you fail to disprove the hypothesis, hire the person.

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A lot of companies instruct their interviewers to "default to no" when making hiring recommendations. Effectively the opposite of what you're suggesting.

I knew a lot of interviewers at those types of companies who wouldn't bother to read resumes, either. They'd cite "bias" or something.

I recently applied to the Civil Service in the UK and they asked me to produce an anonymised CV, namely remove my name and contact details

In principle I like the idea but I think they should ask to also remove the company names and perhaps dates, as it could be straight forward to work out who you are based on companies and dates.

As to how effective to remove bias, it's hard to say as I've not seen any A/B testing done with this, but give the massive push to get minorities on board, I'd hazard a guess that it's not as effective as they had hoped

> "default to no" .. opposite of what you're suggesting.

Not necessarily, just depends on how easy/hard you set the bar for disproving the hypothesis. It also is somewhat inherent in that you really are trying to disprove the hypothesis.

On the other hand, if, after reading the résumé, I do not want to hire this person, why on earth should I go on to interview said person?

The "default to no" part is, IMHO generally correct, because false positives are a lot more damaging/costly than false negatives. My perspective may be warped here, because I have worked for companies that get LOTS and LOTS of applicants. At some the team would screen hundreds of résumés a week, of which maybe 1-2 were somewhat interesting, and that was after the HR screen. Oh, and I also got to clean up after one of the candidates → colleagues I said no to and the rest of the team approved... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The issue with defaulting to yes is that then you're going to be a hiring a lot of mediocre people who say just enough to appear "okay".

I think the oft-repeated adage "A players hire A players, B players hire C players" kind of falls into this.

"A" players want to hire people better then themselves who elevate both themselves and the team.

Not getting into how most "B" players see themselves as "A" players (dunning-kruger?), unconscious biases, or people who are just bad at playing interviewer (esp. people who have done it a certain way for their entire careers and are unwilling to even think that a different process might yield betterresults).

Don't you find resumes incredibly low-resolution? "4 years of Java experience" seems... Just not that predictive of ability. Could mean they're great, it could mean they're a disaster. Many people with 2 years experience will be significantly better (& cheaper), because they put the work in to improve faster.

How to you drill down & distinguish?

Most resumes say more than that, though: they'll tell you where the person worked for those 4 years, and give some indication of both the type and level of work they did.

If I were hiring for a position that required X years of Java experience, and saw a resume that said "X years of Java experience" (or even "4X years") without any further elaboration—no section of actual work experience—I'd be, at best, deeply skeptical.

I mean I was being hyperbolic. My point is, none of that stuff is high-resolution information. It doesn't strike me as a reliable proxy for ability. And we all know that! Blindly hiring off resumes (let's assume we've filtered out all the people who outright lied) would be a disaster.

You pass on the resumes you don't find interesting, and yes, that's probably most of them. At that point in the process, it is the resume writer's job to make their resume interesting, not the reader's job to figure out what about this blandness might be a hidden gem.

And if that leaves nobody, you keep looking. One company I was at that was pretty good at hiring would much rather leave positions open than hire "the best of the current lot". Other companies were the other way around, and ended up with much lower quality.

And certainly if "N years of X experience" is all there is it won't be particularly interesting. Pass.

If you have improved faster, there should be work that you've done that you can reference, know-how you've amassed that you can assert you have (and I can somehow check). And if you've done the work of someone with 10 years experience, but you've only been at it for 2, yes, that will be noticeable. Very much so.

So make your resume interesting. Without going beyond what is there. One candidate had as his headline that he was a "Software Architect". Cool! First, very obvious question: "So what's Software Architecture". Stammer...stammer...and then after a while some random buzzwords about "best practices".

Now obviously there can be various different answers, and while I have my preferred and that one is obviously correct (Hah!), you should at least have something reasonable to say there if you make that the headline of your resume.

Ok, but every other company is also thinking this. If you only interview candidates who are exceptionally good at advertising themselves, you're selecting for applicants that are harder to hire relative to their actual abilities. The valuable talent is better than they seem on their resume. Do you not worry about identifying that?

Like, the "it will be obvious" thing... I'm just not convinced. Sure, if you speak to someone you can tell pretty quickly, but on a resume? What concrete evidence would you expect to see from someone who's only been in work for 2 years? I can think of a lot, but not much that you could convey in that format.

> The valuable talent is better than they seem on their resume.

Don't really think so. Don't confuse "plain" with "uninteresting".

I remember coming across my dad's resume at some point. It was plain as heck, but included such choice sentences as "Experience leading a national car manufacturer" (paraphrased). Ahh. Tell. Me. More.

> Do you not worry about identifying that?

Not particularly, no. First, I don't really believe that this is true, second, I worry a lot more about false negatives than I do about false positives. Third, it's really not that hard.

> Sure, if you speak to someone you can tell pretty quickly, but on a resume?

That's why you have the combination: the resume tells me if the person is interesting, the interview tells me if that was actually true.

> I can think of a lot, but not much that you could convey in that format.

Why not? Unless you're mixing up the two (again). I also see that I couldn't convince someone that I am interesting on the resume (in a "beyond doubt" fashion). But that's not the resume. That's the interview. The interview is about triggering interest.

I think you're making this harder than it is.

Heck, just write: "After only two years on the job I was doing the work of people with 10 years seniority". There, done. Interesting? Definitely. True? Well, it better be, and I am going to see if that is true to my satisfaction.

After all, it could be that the people there just sucked.

This is actually quite informative & helpful. Thank you.

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