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Comment by suby | Hacker News Reader

It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game and attempting to maximize their chances for success. It forces people to make a choice where they're effectively rolling the dice as to what the best course of action is -- either they optimize for the reality that resumes are largely computer screened, or they optimize for humans hoping that it's not. I don't think you should blame people for optimizing for what is likely the most common scenario.

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>It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game and attempting to maximize their chances for success. It forces people to make a choice where they're effectively rolling the dice as to what the best course of action is -- either they optimize for the reality that resumes are largely computer screened, or they optimize for humans hoping that it's not. I don't think you should blame people for optimizing for what is likely the most common scenario.

At first, I disagreed with you because I assumed if Chip took the time to write this post, she must be linking it or at least making it clear from the job postings. I just checked the job postings[0, 1], and they never tell the candidate that a co-founder reads every application personally nor give any indication that they're handling applications with more care than the average company (and the average company treats candidates like garbage).

So, I agree. If you don't tell candidates that you're unique in the way that you process applications, you can't expect candidates to approach you differently than they approach most employers, who reward keyword stuffing.

I have a similar hiring process to the author, but I spell out in my job posting that I, the founder, am reading every application personally.[2]

[0] https://jobs.lever.co/claypot/7b38b49f-baa4-42b6-a58f-bab653...

[1] https://jobs.lever.co/claypot/9c6fedbf-3c91-4a48-98b9-467d00...

[2] https://tinypilotkvm.com/jobs/support-engineer

Great way to filter for people who actually want to work there and aren’t just shotgunning resumes though.

Do you think the people who play the ATS game are doing it because they don't want to work at the place they're applying to?

That's a pretty specious conclusion.

No, it means they want to work but definitionally when you are sending out ad many applications as you can you stop caring about the individual qualities of a company - that comes later, when it becomes relevant.

As far as I can tell, the company in question (Claypot) has <10 employees. How many people do you think have even heard of them, let alone want to specifically work for them? Approximately all of their applicants are going to fall into the other bucket.

This chain is about "people who play the ats game" specifically, not claypot.

I tried this in the past, it never worked. Resume spam is waaay better. That said it still is bad. In my whole life I got to technical interview stage only 8 times, and 2 of these were referrals...

Every time I've tailored a resume to a job I've at least gotten an initial screen. Tons of resume spam that resulted in silence though.

Everyone's experience is different but on average, tailoring has better results than spam.

> I have a similar hiring process to the author, but I spell out in my job posting that I, the founder, am reading every application personally.

I mean, the real question is if the job candidate will actually believe it.

From personal experience, I put my website's URL into my CVs. When you bother to visit the website, I have a little shibboleth there that says to mention a certain thing in the job interview and I'll give you $50. I've only ever had one person ever mention that in ~20 years of the shibboleth being there, and I gave them the $50. I used to put the shibboleth in the CV, but it felt a bit crass after a while.

Also, great note there at the end of the application. I would believe you in this case.

I'm pretty sure I would get into a significant amount of trouble with my company's people team if I accepted $50 from a candidate. I honestly would consider the presence of this offer on your website as a red flag.

Yeah, if I really wanted to know if someone had clicked through to my website, maybe I'd put something like "Ask me about the time $THING" But, really, an interview doesn't seem like the time to play cutesy games.

You don't have to accept it, you just have to mention it.

OTOH, I'm pretty sure most companies have rules against hiring candidates who offer money to the interviewer (even if the interviewer declines, the candidate is rejected anyway).

Just FYI, pretty sure that you're thinking of a word other than "shibboleth".

They're using it the way I would expect if their only experience with the word was that episode of The West Wing. Which is to say, not correctly.

Ah yes. I didn't understand how it was being used then either.

>> repeat “hot” keywords, fill your resumes up with random metrics, etc. not only doesn’t work on us, but also hurts your chances.

> It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game

Particularly when they started out by saying they're "looking for reasons to say yes", not for reasons to say no.

YES! I thought, well say "yes" to my list of technologies I'm familiar with. If you want to hear more about how I acquired those skills, you could ask...like with a process of engaging with applicants. Let's call it an interview.

My view of this: you're playing the wrong game. "Know your audience."

If you're applying to megacorps, fine, optimize for searching in a resume database. An early/mid-stage startup doesn't want to select for people who have megacorp offers; that's a waste of time.

Once upon a time I knew of a college job board that required resumes to be uploaded in HTML. I heard of multiple startups that would simply View Source and check if the resume's HTML appeared handwritten or if it contained the tell-tale meta tags set by Microsoft Word when it exports HTML. (Said job board was replaced by a new system that uses PDFs, sadly.)

Was it explicitly said that the HTML needs to be handwritten?

Because otherwise, I don’t really see the point of that approach. People using whatever tools allow them to produce an adequate result in an efficient manner, that’s a good thing. For some people, that tool might be Microsoft Word.

If the specification said “use HTML format” and the application was indeed in HTML, I don’t see a problem.

I was first introduced to HTML in high school when I didn’t have a Microsoft Office license. That meant that I actually did the opposite for writing assignments and hand-wrote my HTML document to print from a browser.

Not to take away from your point in any way. This discussion just reminded me of that and I realized the irony.

The lack of specification is likely intentional there - apparently they're not trying to distinguish between people who can or can't follow a spec; but rather they observe that for some people the obvious or default or simply easiest way to get a bunch of text in HTML would be to write it in Word and press 'export', and for other people the obvious or default or simply easiest way for them to do the same would be to write HTML directly. It seems plausible that those are two quite distinct groups of people, and apparently they prefer one over the other.

Which one is the contraindication? Word converted to html or hand written?

I personally wouldn’t care. I can see good reasons for both.

This seems like a strange asymmetric take. Aren't people who fill their resumes with word soup penalising people who don't play the games and instead fill their resume to actually be read, and convey actual meaningful information and projects to the reader?

The discrimination is already built into the system, so if you have to discriminate, if i was hiring, i'd want to do so against the game players. At least in high skill data science-esque jobs, the ability to hire for people who aren't playing games and actually doing the task seems like a plus. and additionally, if you structure your resume in such a way, you filter for companies in such a way as to avoid the dystopian megacorps and managers who expect you to play games.

that being said, I've yet to figure out a way other than networking or optimisation to reliably get past any institution big enough to have a significant HR presence professionally incapable of judging the things they're notionally hiring for. I've had the experience where I've found HR has culled resumes and chosen which ones go through to the decision maker, which is incredibly frustrating when they're by definition unqualified to be making such decisions.

ps: I will read every resume I see. I despise word-soup/algorithmic/ business catchwords/someone told me to use active language resumes.

Strange, they may have changed their text since you read it, because this is what I see:

> We read every resume. This means that a lot of tricks you’ve read about how to beat automated screening such as include certain phrases of job descriptions in your resume, repeat “hot” keywords, fill your resumes up with random metrics, etc. doesn’t work on us. They can even hurt when you apply to companies like us, because the resume space used for these tricks is the space you aren’t using for things that are relevant to us.

Emphasis mine. They're not penalizing folks for the alphabet soup, but pointing out it's a lost opportunity when you have finite space.

Yes, it looks like they've edited the article within the last three hours. Not sure what else if anything changed, but the original is still up on archive.org

https://web.archive.org/web/20230125042620/https://huyenchip...

So they're apparently not counting it against someone, which is good.

There is no fairness in hiring (nor anywhere else). I once saw a hiring manager pull a resume out of the stack and throw it away because it was printed on cream-colored paper. I glanced at it--it was impressive in general. Certainly a plausible hire at a place like Google.

That's okay. You're not writing a resume to get hired. You're writing a resume to interest the places you'd like to work and repel the places you'd be miserable at.

This is a good point. Unless you are desperate for a job, you can be strategic. You could even list things that are a turn off for you. Companies that bin your CV because of honesty and trying to get a good fit are probably not a good fit.

Unless you are going against an entire culture, for example you want Fridays off but applying to high frequency trading companies.

"he wants Saturdays off? hard pass" - fintech hiring manager

What game? If I send someone a document, I expect them to read it. If I send them a list of repeated keywords just to rank higher in a dumb algorithm that I'm hoping they use, and it turns out it's a human now staring at a page of repeated words... I don't find it surprising that the human is not impressed.

> It forces people to make a choice where they're effectively rolling the dice as to what the best course of action is

The best course of action is to make good resumes. If the scanner can't pick them out, the company will notice in any spot checks that it spits out only garbage. If you optimize for a computer, computer says yes, then a human opens it to see what your experience is and what to talk about in the (phone) interview, human would still see you're trying to cheat their system (which could be a good thing if you apply for a hacking company, perhaps).

> If the scanner can't pick them out, the company will notice in any spot checks that it spits out only garbage

This is giving the companies a huge amount of credit. The problem isn't that the only spit out garbage, just that they are 'unfairly' rejecting strong resumes.

> include certain phrases of job descriptions in your resume

Especially this one, because I do that for the human reader, not just for the machines.

The point of the resume is to show that you meet the requirements for the job—asking a candidate to rephrase the job requirements in their own words actually obfuscates the parallels between their work history and your requirements, creating more work for everyone involved.

TFA: You should be:

- Making commits on github everyday for a year

- Making many pull requests to popular open source projects

- Show commitment!

- Spent 3 years traveling the world before Stanford.

Meanwhile, has no real technical commits/PRs on GitHub herself... ever. No streaks to speak of... ever. https://github.com/chiphuyen

This is such an elitist and superficial article.

> It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game and attempting to maximize their chances for success.

If a resume just lists word soup, you’ve really given the reader no choice. What you should be doing (if you want to work somewhere where humans read resumes) is not keyword spamming, but using those key words in sentences that are also meaningful to humans.

Everything is just signal, strong or weak. In my experience, those who are applying to both computer-screened jobs and human-screened jobs are not suitable to work with me.

It's just like if you write that you are an expert at JAVA, GIT, and Python. Java is not an acronym. Neither is git. Is it unfair that I judge someone negatively for this? Perhaps you would consider that so. For me, it's just signal. If I'm wrong repeatedly, I will have a higher hiring cost and someone will beat me in the market. I am making those choices for the business on a hundred different axes constantly. I have no problem trusting my intuition here.

Don't worry, it sounds like you're an absolute nightmare to work with, so I doubt any of the candidates that didn't pass your filter are missing out on anything. Win win!

Well, I see it as us not being a match. It is good that those who don't want to work with me have all the information required to do so. I try to be as transparent as possible.

I, on the other hand, would pass this filter and highly appreciate working with someone who maintains it.

Not spelling it JAVA or GIT is a minor, but important detail in an industry full of acronyms. People who miss out on small details like this are also make massive mistakes elsewhere in their work and tank the productivity and morale of their teams as a result.

To be fair, misspelling "Java" as "java" or "JAVA" is both a signal about Java knowledge and a signal about understanding what's canonical English usage in the U.S. So it's somewhat biased against non native English speakers.

But at the end of the day, software startups want hackers. And hackers know how to spell Java.

I didn't list "java" as a misspelling. It could theoretically refer to the command line program of the same name that the applicant knows about.

Spelling it JAVA means you are ignoring that it could stand for an acronym. I don't see how that's biased against non-native English speakers; languages other than English have acronyms. I suppose it could perhaps against speakers of languages that don't have the concept of uppercase/lowercase; but then wouldn't you expect speakers of these languages to reproduce the (unfamiliar) name "Java" exactly?

The funny thing is that while talking about attention to detail you say things like '...miss out on small details like this are also make massive mistakes...'

Given that this is a forum and low stakes, I just find it rather amusing.

> It forces people to make a choice where they're effectively rolling the dice as to what the best course of action is -- either they optimize for the reality that resumes are largely computer screened, or they optimize for humans hoping that it's not.

You are making that choice, though. Any time you make a resume, you are making choices about the profile of the one reading it.

> I don't think you should blame people for optimizing for what is likely the most common scenario.

Not interviewing a candidate is very different from "blaming".

> It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game and attempting to maximize their chances for success

If you bring up the topic of attending _college_ on here, there will be at least five people who say "I make a point of never hiring college graduates, because I knew one once who was incompetent". Penalizing people who play the game is something of a sport in nerd circles.

Some people edit their resume for each job they apply to. It appears that we've stumbled across a good reason why.

Remember, every hiring manager has different things they look for; and different criteria for accepting / rejecting a resume.

Which means that unless you can get info on what a particular hiring manger's preferences and annoyances are, your chances of surviving a résumé screening are indistinguishable from chance.

Almost every time I'm given advice (by people who should know, by being SHRMs having X years experience as a hiring manager) that isn't taylored to a specific reader, I learn yet another hardline contradiction of somebody else's advice. For example, another commenter here asserted that you should use sentences (to put keywords in perspective/context), which I've heard multiple times, but I have far more often been told to use phrases and keywords because sentences take too long to read. Proponents of each seem to view it as a MUST, and auto-reject anything that looks like the other. This same pattern holds for almost every bit of résumé advice I've ever gotten.

Some people even say to submit multiple different copies with different style variations "so that one might get through, while others say that if they receive more than one for the same role, they discard the candidate.

["Include $this!" | "NO! Never include $that!]

There is no Win.

Only "do a thing, until somebody tells you to do a different thing".

> Which means that unless you can get info on what a particular hiring manger's preferences and annoyances are, your chances of surviving a résumé screening are indistinguishable from chance.

Often you can figure that out from the job description.

Rarely. There's almost never a "Don't format/say like X; do it like Y instead." analogue.

Instead, completely arbitrary rules are in play with hard disqualifiers unshared. Things like:

"Every job should have at least four bullets."; "But only one page, or I chuck it"; "But-but, if it's only one page, _I_ wonder what they've been doing with their life (except new grads), and chuck it."; "Don't include more than title, company, and duration for irrelevant jobs."; "But any job without details looks like they're hiding something or didn't accomplish anything there."; "Start with a mission statement!"; "Never waste my time with a mission statement."; "ALWAYS include a cover letter, or I chuck it."; "NEVER waste my time with cover letter, or I chuck it; if it's worth saying, it should be on your résumé."; …

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