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Comment by xwdv | Hacker News Reader

As a hiring manager you’d be inclined to disagree.

If resumes could be standardized and easily searchable for information it would help find candidates much more accurately and quickly without having to read.

Even better would be if there was a verification standard where you could get a blue checkmark on your resume meaning all the information is accurate and not made up bullshit, then you could limit searches only to verified resumes and do less investigation or third party background checking.

It pushes industries forward.

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That sounds like it pushes hiring managers forward, not industries. You get a benefit out of making it easier to fill open spaces, at the cost of everyone else's unique life experiences.

We have a "verification standard" in the form of diplomas and certificates and neither of those have fixed the hiring issue so far.

If you want to skip background checking, just make people bring their proof of certification with them to the job interview. Of course, those certifications barely mean anything in most fields of work, but it's an exact equivalent of the blue checkmark system you propose.

I get that hiring is hard, but that's why hiring managers exist in the first place. If we used a nicely standardised, automatically validated system, all recruiters and hiring managers would be out of a job. Why pay someone to do that stuff when you could pay a cheap machine learned AI to fill a list of requirements for you?

> If resumes could be standardized and easily searchable for information it would help find candidates much more accurately and quickly without having to read.

I see how that can be useful from the recruiting side of the table, but fail to see how the candidate benefits.

Think back to the first time you wrote a resume. For me and all of my college buddies at least, it was super stressful, because we had no idea what it was supposed to look like and nothing but vague rumors to go on. If there were a straightforward canonical answer for how my resume should be formatted it would have saved me quite a bit of work and quite a bit of stress that I was doing it wrong.

A standard requires people to agree. When I was in college, I was told that a resume was a list of buzzwords and past jobs. 1 page max. That got me quite a few jobs. When I interviewed at Google, people were like "this is it?" when looking at my resume (not that it mattered). I started doing interviews and saw the resumes that ended up at Google and they were all multi-page affairs with details about all the projects you worked on at a job. I started doing that, only to be told "wow, that's a really long resume". (Hint: if your role requires 10 years of experience, applicants are probably going to have a long resume!)

The key point here, I guess, is that a lot of people have told me my resume is in the wrong format, but I still got the job. What's the right format for one employer is the wrong format for another employer. So there is no way to win. I now have no clue how to write a resume, but it also doesn't seem to matter.

(Still bitter about how few people ever look at my Github, though. People put that as a custom field in their automated system, and then the interviewers have nothing to say about my projects!)

What if the blue checking organization becomes politicized and rejects your resume for arbitrary reasons?

You could probably only try to verify local education - for the foreign education not that easy. Even employment (even local) is very hard if possible at all. For example, I work for a large corp X as a contractor. It pays my agency Y. Y pays my umbrella company Z. Z pays me as its employee. There is hardly an easy way to link me to company X yet I've been there for 9 years.

Half the companies I've worked for have gone out of business or been acquired. Good luck verifying them.

Effective way to select for only young employees, I suppose.

I see what you're driving at -- but that implementing that "verification standard" (i.e. standardized, continually updating 3rd-party background checks) would be a huge undertaking, and a larger than cottage-sized industry in itself.

Way, way more than a matter of parsing a bunch of standardized resume documents.

Who puts this blue checkmark and verifies?

This. Outsourcing judgment is far better in theory than practice. Hiring is and will remain messy.

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