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Comment by sjhuang26 | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps the "polish" of the resume is a signal for "professionalism and attention to detail." But I worry that the professionalism of the resume is a signal mostly for wealth and social status, factors which should be ignored in the hiring process. So I think that unless the resume is atrociously formatted, its "polish" should be ignored.

I read an article on LinkedIn [1] touching on a similar issue. The ideal resume quality standard is "not a lesson that every school or household teaches equally" and giving undue consideration to it may be "creating unnecessary barriers to entry for certain groups."

However, I think your experience in the hiring process is valid and would be open to changing my mind.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/business/talent/blog/talent-acquisi...

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Hiring is, as a whole, biased for the wealthy etc. Being privileged gives you a leg up on everything, from quality of education, to coping skills, to general health, so you would totally expect all parts of hiring to be biased massively towards privileged people.

I don't think a resume's level of polish is more biased towards social status than any other part of the process, and as such I think it's just as reasonable as anything else to filter on.

Anyway, resume quality is arguably just as relevant to a software job as being able to whiteboard code, if not moreso. Structuring design documents in a way that wealthy people like them (i.e. the old white dudes who run the company) is one of the most relevant job skills you can have to be honest.

At least in some job roles (B2B sales, management, professional services like consulting or legal, PR, media, etc) the social status and personal network is a genuine advantage that makes them more effective in that job role and more useful for the employer, so it should not be ignored. In some jobs you're hiring them to do a task within your organization, but in many other jobs you're hiring them to influence others outside your organization - and there status, connections and reputation are pretty much a bona fide occupational qualification.

> But I worry that the professionalism of the resume is a signal mostly for wealth and social status

What?

It's just generally easier to do more things well/professionally when you're well off and have the time to work on it or hire someone to do it.

It's similar to the issues with standardized testing in schools. If your parents are wealthy and able to get you better test prep or tutoring, you'll do better on the test, and likely be actually more academically successful aside from it. It doesn't mean that one should totally ignore that signal, but it does confound it if you're trying to be fair about things in a more holistic sense.

I think of it in tech as being acutely similar to folks who complain about recruiters who care a lot about your side projects or OSS contributions. If you're rich and successful, you have more time for those sorts of things than someone who's less well off and taking care of their family or such outside of work. That doesn't mean that someone who maintains a major OSS project isn't likely a good engineer, but that you should understand that not everyone who is a good engineer can casually do a second job on the side.

If not mentioned or on the resume, explicitly asking whether a candidate has contributed to OSS or has done side projects outside of work is extremely inappropriate. The answer may be, "No, I attend temple nightly after going to occupational therapy for my disability and taking care of my children." Then you will have to document this for HR because you done gone messed up.

That answer is not proportionate to the question, and the question is totally fine.

You can ask a candidate "have you worked with React before". You can ask a candidate "It's not on your resume, but do you have security certifications". You can ask them "do you have any OSS projects you contribute to or like".

Those are all reasonable questions.

The imagined answer you mention "may" happen for any question. You didn't mess up if you ask "do you know React?" and the candidate answers "my last job used Vue, and I didn't have time to learn it on my own due to having 2 religions, 6 disabilities, and 12 kids, so no".

Asking a candidate for work-related experience is not "extremely inappropriate", and your imagined answer is not realistic.

Exactly. I've always been told in hiring/legal meetings that it's ok if the candidate voluntarily discloses information about their religion/race/family status, you just can't go looking for it, and you probably shouldn't follow up about it.

Essentially, as long as your question has a reasonable answer that doesn't involve bringing up any of the protected attributes, it's fine.

I'm somewhat curious if many indications of competence can be considered indications of wealth / social status?

Does this disqualify them from consideration?

Resume quality IS actually pretty easy to pick up on. Some folks go totally overboard for non-design roles - I'd say there probably is a tasteful middle ground (ie, not super long with pages and pages - I've had folks do essentially powerpoints) and not just a mono font list in all caps (often some kind of auto resume spam mess). If you take the time to do a 1 or 2 page MAX clean resume, quasi responsive to posting, with a brief email note you are ahead of 60% of candidates already. With this hiring market it doesn't matter - employers will chase you anyways.

Some fools will spell JAVA and GIT as things on their resume. Massive negative signal. This one I honestly calibrated: biggest sign you’re a clown is if you call this shit JAVA. Not even Fortran calls itself that.

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