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Comment by htrp | Hacker News Reader

>At a Fortune 50 company I worked at, my boss got in trouble because he sweet-talked someone in HR to print out all the resumes they rejected and secretly deliver them to him.

I did exactly this, though I'm pretty sure I'm not your boss.

As a side note, HR's insistence on doing the initial resume review and phone screens usually skews the entire recruitment process. I've had situations where HR gave me 20 resumes and didn't even look at the rest.

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Our HR just checks if they completed the application correctly, i.e, included a CV and (if requested a covering letter). If they fail this bit they don't get to the sift. The sift of CVs/resumes (to whittle down for interview) is done by developers and so are the interviews.

This sounds like an amazing hiring process. Hopefully it becomes more common.

A CV should not be necessary

Edit: My apologies everyone. I actually read this as "cover letter" instead of CV.

I agree a resume (as noted below) should be required, but CV (academic style) is probably a US term not applicable here.

Sorry!

How else can i whittle down 30 applicants to 5 or 6 to invite to interview?

edit: saw another response which said a cv was a resume, this is correct. In the UK we use Curriculum Vitae (CV) instead of resume. They are the same thing. Not sure what you may have thought a CV was, however I would be interested to know.

In the US a CV is a comprehensive list of all previous work in the field, while a resume includes only the most recent/relevant experience. The term is primarily used for academic positions, where it includes a listing of all publications.

They could be meaning a resume as used in the US. Outside of the US (or at least in a number of European countries) what is called a resume in the US is referred to as a CV (though my understanding is that it's generally a few pages long, not a single page). Though this comes not from first-hand experience, but a lot of in-depth conversations with friends/coworkers from overseas, so I might be wrong here.

Our HR was like this too! They were amazing. They sent a spreadsheet with each applicant in it, greyed out the ones who didn't follow instructions, and bolded the ones that they thought I should read first based on how close their applications were.

I read all of them, even the greyed out ones, until I'd read enough to trust that the HR team's filter was well-calibrated, and I also let the HR team know when they got it right/wrong so they could improve their filtering process.

Overall it worked great but I understand that such functional HR teams are the exception, not the rule.

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