He who submits a resume has already lost
residentcontrarian.com
residentcontrarian.com
Most candidates really only submit a resume. The chances of getting to the interview stage with this approach are almost zero.
Because everyone does this, you can easily stand out. Simply answer the following 2 questions briefly in plain English.
1. Why do you want to take this role?
2. Why are you a good fit for this role?
Example:
1. I've read through your website and documentation and are truly inspired by your vision. Especially that you're working and X thing really got my attention as I know that Y and Z are super important for the customer segment you're working on.
2. I have previous experience in this field and wrote an open source library to solve some of the issues you might be facing (link).
Simply out, show interest and explain why you're a good fit.
I've had too many candidates who never checked out our landing page (https://wundergraph.com). We're doing a lot of innovative stuff in the API segment. If you apply for a job with us and you don't have an opinion whether you like what we do or not, it's really hard to gauge interest.
The question I'm asking myself is. Why should I read your CV when you didn't bother skimming through my landing page, docs, or open source repository. What's the purpose of sending a CV when I have to do all the hard work?
Like telling a girl/guy you love them before first date.
One hand folks complain about automatic scanning and rejection based on just the CVs and here we are complaining about the one instrument, a job seeker has, to express interest in the company.
To go with your date analogy, a cover letter might not need to be a love declaration, but maybe a message that looked at the other’s profile rather than just “what’s up”.
It’s the cult like exuberance that seems to be demands by GP and sibling comments.
As an aside, I saw a cool job not long ago where they wanted your application email to have the subject line "$demonym reporting for duty", where $demonym is the cutesy name, like metamate that employees were supposed to call themselves. That is cultish, and puts me off applying way more than being asked for an sentence on why I'm a fit for the job.
A lot of applicants simply send their resumes to any position that is vaguely relevant, without diving into the details of the role.
A little bit like Van Halen's "Brown M&M clause": https://effectiviology.com/brown-mms/
If they sent the CV, they did deliberate apply for the job.
I always hated writing cover letters, always felt like the employer wanted me to do some groveling before I earned the right to be graced with an interview.
Good thing now I have ChatGPT for the rescue.
In these circumstances definitely. It's a tall ask to accurately evaluate someone romantically or professionally based on a profile/resume and a few hours of face time. I think unions have a good method of doing this actually: people no one wants to work with wash out.
https://bitslap.it/blog/posts/playground-it.html#part-i---ma...
The automatic system separated it and nobody looked at it.
This really is a filter. We don't want job applications from people who are looking for a job. We're looking for people who actually want to do work at WunderGraph.
We're the first to build a Backend for Frontend Framework, unifying the ideas of API Gateway, BFF and package manager. Our long term goal is to build the GitHub for APIs, a collaborative platform to enable true collaboration between API producers and API consumers.
Either you're excited about this as much as we are, or you just send a CV.
We're not offering you a job. We offer you the opportunity to work together with a smart bunch of people on a very hard problem.
It's simply not enough to say "hi". It's fine if your focus is your private life and you really just need a paycheck. A lot of corporates will fight for you. On our end, we need to filter out people who really just want to fill a role to make ends meet.
It's really not about loving what we do. That misses the point. It's about transparency of our goals align.
> We're not offering you a job. We offer you the opportunity
This gem right here sums up what an employers market means. Every employer thinks they are special and wants an employee who's entire life's journey was only a preparation for the singular great moment of meeting you and building your vision, all for the a great compensation package of 65k/year and dental.
But guess what: you are not special, you are just a workplace and you compete in the marketplace for talent just like everybody else. For economic reasons that have nothing to do with you, you have more negotiating power for a limited time. That is all.
And it goes both ways. These days I pick a job based on whether the work is going to help me learn what I need to make progress on my side projects. If I was searching locally that would be an entirely unreasonable filter, but so far it's been win-win.
I think it’s perfectly legitimate to not want to hire people with this attitude. Just a few people with this attitude can completely ruin an early stage company.
And the same goes in the other direction: I don’t want to work for anybody who sees me as a commodity they’ve bought in a market. I’m sorry, but I am special: there is only one of me on this planet.
So while it might be true for GP's company, it's not true for the vast number of available jobs. If you are not in the cap table (or have only unfavorable terms), then by definition you are something the company has bought on the market and that's exactly how the company is thinking about you - else the ownership situation would reflect it. It's a business, not a social club, you either own the capital or you are the capital. Expecting anything else in exchange for you unique snowflakiness is self-delusional and the road to abject bitterness, as many ex a googler and twitterer found out.
There may be only one person exactly like you, although with 9 billion people it remains to be proven. But you sure are replaceable by many others with approximately the same set of skills.
"...20 years"
Ohh sorry, we can't hire you. It's a "culture fit" issue. (We aren't allowed to say it's an age filter! It's "culture"- we aren't ageist!)
Look: It’s not that we disagree about how the world works, it’s that we give it a different emotional coloring. Yours sounds bitter and resentful to me.
I spend 8-10 hours a day at my job. That's far more than with any of my friends and typically more than even with my spouse in the average week. My coworkers, at least a significant fraction, better be amazing. If somebody comes and basically says, dude, it's just a job, leave me alone, I leave them to their misery. If I am forced to work with them any significant amount of time, I quit an go work somewhere else where I can build meaningful connections with people around me. Cause let's face it, co-workers are a friends substitute in this day and age.
If you really believed what you were saying you wouldn’t have to rationalize it to yourself by claiming that people who don’t think like you must be miserable.
> Cause let's face it, co-workers are a friends substitute in this day and age.
That’s on you. If you’re using coworkers as a friends substitute it’s not surprising you get people who want you to leave them alone.
So does nearly everybody else. I was never told by a recruiter they are looking for somebody to work on mind-numbingly simple things in the company of idiots.
That isn't always an inaccurate description.
It didn't sound to me like you're asking someone to be a zealot, sycophant, brown-noser, or some kinda corporate drone who drinks the kool-aid and wears the company swag. But maybe I'm misreading?
I say this because I'm fairly niche in my skillset for animation and design, and I only really reach out to studios/ agencies for this very specific skillset, and will turn down jobs (or refer others who might be a better fit) where it's better suited for a generalist or outside of my range. Like, I like doing work within my niche, but it's not my everything or even my core identity.
Doesn't sound like you're asking potential candidates to profess their undying devotion and pile on gratitude. That's just my take. Felt like people might have been reading your comments in a slightly exaggerated interpretation and it could use some other perspectives.
What we're really just looking for is a healthy mix of passion and experience in the field. I believe that people do their best work when it's easy for them to wake up in the morning, they have low stress, they like their colleagues and don't hate the stuff they are working on. Even better if you're passionate about the work you're doing. That gives you a lot of energy to actually perform the work, and for us we're getting great results. This makes our company more valuable, we get more customers and revenue. We can increase your salary and you live a good life. Everybody wins, no?
So people should not try to read something into what I wrote above that's simply not there.
Tell my why you want to work at WunderGraph. Tell my why you think you'd perform good work. That's all.
Please don't write a cover letter. Keep it simple. The best of the best can say a lot with few words.
I guess this highlights the problem with the whole recruitment space. This company put out the equivalent of a bad generic resume while complaining about potential employees putting out bad generic resumes.
[...]
>It's really not about loving what we do.
You do realize your contradicting yourself right?
Honestly, young wide-eyed new-grad me (which I bet is your target hiring demographic) would have totally bought into your baloney of "making the world a better place through minimal message oriented transport layers"[1], but as a gray beard I'd really be happy to be filtered out of your resume screening, as it reeks of cargo cult BS. I'm paid to do a job, not to join a cult and make that my life and working identity.
I apreciate your honesty though and I hope more companies do this so I can easily avoid them and save us both the time.
It might be about confusing passion for the company with passion for the type of work that is part of what the company needs to be carried out as one and the same.
If those things were clearly separated in the attitude of companies when looking to hire maybe people would be more willing to help both the company and in turn themselves succeed.
Otherwise, it's a bit like professing your unconditioned love before you know what you've bargained for, and that seems backwards.
I think this can be a trap. I'm not saying that your company does this, but I've learned to be wary of this. We've all heard of game programmers who are in endless "crunch mode" for less salary than they can get elsewhere. They accept this precisely because they want the opportunity to work on something they love. But is it fair of the company to abuse people like that? Is it really the right choice to work at a place like that?
Again, I'm not saying your company is abusing anyone. But when I feel this sort of vibe coming from a company that I'm applying to and have no insider knowledge of, it makes me think there might be that sort of abuse going on, which makes me less likely to want to apply to the company.
I am sure your employees love to to work with your other colleagues on an exciting problem, however, it is just a paycheck in the end.
This is the reddest flag of all on any interview process for me. I discard all companies with this attitude.
Working for a company is not a privilege, it is merely an employment.
Hyperbole is not an argument.
"you have work to do, and have the money, I can do the work, and want the money"
But I don't. So it is a transaction and you are one in hundreds of options I have over years. And you should also treat it like that.
Not enough to start my own company, but enough that the options leaning towards those will have the nod. You can be engaged without dedicating your life to it.
For those with not that strong convictions. Picking up reasonably interesting roles and fields where they have some skill coverage is entirely reasonable way to do things. Go for roles and companies you can be content with.
to give an example, i really love what valve is doing for gaming on linux. i would love to work for them. are you suggesting that i should start my own gaming company?
if i really like a company, i want to see that company succeed, not start another.
also, for myself, i really don't want to work for a company whose business i don't believe in. i would, if it was the only option, but if i have a choice then i prefer to work for a company whose business goals and practices i can agree with.
with startups in particular, there is also the issue that, if i don't believe in their business, that means i won't believe that they will be successful and then it doesn't make sense to work there.
But on another level, either because you're getting equity, or because you'd like to stay employed for a while, "believing" in the company is a shorthand for saying you think that the company is going to succeed, so that your equity is worth more, or so that you don't find yourself out of a job on someone else's schedule.
- Dave Chappelle
I doubt many plumbers cite a love of modern world development, when they get hired for fixing toilets, or that people assembling washing machines have a passion for clean clothes for other people... or even people working for google don't really have that much passion for collecting other peoples personal data and exploiting it to show ads.
By the way, this definitely doesn't mean to glorify an organization and what they're doing. Far from it. They're just in it for continued existence and making some money, I suppose. But it is nice if an organization has some social utility, as compared to, say, sell advertisements for crap no-one needs. And I think, if that's important to you, you can refer to that when you're applying for a job.
Of course, if you're working in a field where there's much more candidates than jobs, this is pretty meaningless because you have to take whatever comes your way.
there is a difference between the choice of profession and the choice of company after learning the profession.
above we were discussion which tech company to work for, because most of us here are in tech. but tech companies have a wide variety of business goals and practices.
plumbers not so much. they do plumbing. they all have the same business goal, the differences are where they operate and how nice the coworkers are and the work conditions and pay.
for a tech company it makes sense to ask, do i like their product, independent of the job i'll be doing there. for a plumber not really.
I saw a recent interview with the director of the world food bank. So jealous.
If it were not for the way to get medical benefits via employment, I would pursue a passion versus sit in front of a keyboard and type things up that will not exist in 6 months.
FWIW, it's a fairly large tech company that pretty much everyone on HN has heard of.
Unfortunately there’s a really strange thing that happens in very long interview processes, is the employer starts to think something is wrong because the process has taken so long, despite the process being driven by them.
Anyhow, to your situation…. It is now an employers market and some of them need to feel loved.
So you should effusively tell them that you love the company and love the job.
Personally I don't feel great contributing to the trend of ghosting everyone, and sending a thank you note adds a sense of closure and completion.
The idea of putting in hours, or days, of effort only to learn the salary is minimal just seems like waste of time for everyone.
Weeks? That's just stringing you along, and by the point I'd wonder if they're even intending to hire anyone.
Put a table under each where each row represents your steps though their process, columns are mostly time stamps, offer published, time elapsed since previous step, time since publication. When you've added it to the document, when you've applied, when they responded, when the interview was (if any) Final row (if any) should describe why you rejected the offer.
If you just didn't get hired the entry may be removed.
Put a version number on the document and a pass-worded link to the most recent version.
IOW a detailed survey of the landscape.
That, or there was 'something' that made them not pull the trigger with you, and they are waiting to interview more candidates.
I'll suggest to keep looking elsewhere,FAST, even if you get another shitty offer, you then can send them an "ultimatum" telling them about your other shitty offer.
You don't have to accept the other shitty offer.
I don’t think we have ever this mean to a candidate though.
You pay people for their labor. Most people view that favorably. The ones who don’t you probably don’t want to hire.
Requiring people to join your cult seems a bit much imho.
Idk, GP has maybe been… over-expressive about their opportunity, but it’s still good advice that showing an interest is going to make you stand out more. Saying “do you need code written because I can write code” says nothing.
I’m getting work done on my house and the guy who’s getting the work is the one who spent a bit more time looking at my house and assessing what needs done rather than a cursory glance. Isn’t it understandable that employers want at least some engagement?
To your point "in the interview...", I think hammers home the post's key point that the real process is the interview. Everything else is just to get you there.
No other profession in existence expects candidates to dance on command the way we are expected to. Why do I have to prove over and over and over and over again that I can solve fizz-buzz or some other, similar brain teaser whose solution I more or less memorized. Why can't employers look at the plethora of code-related stuff with my name attacked to it that's out there on the Internet, ask me a few questions, and conclude that yep, he in fact knows what he is doing and probably did in fact work at these places he has listed on his resume.
For me personally, I have been in the industry forever. My battle scars are my certifications.
So... what you write may be true, but it seems to me that many employers are not ready to accept proofs of "base-level skill".
*except be willing to work 50 or 60-hour weeks for 20% below market rate
The part I was complaining about is narrowing down the pool in the first place, the pre-screening, the part you mention:
> Why can't employers look at the plethora of code-related stuff with my name attacked to it that's out there on the Internet [...]
You wish (and I wish). The answer is because everything that can be gamed will eventually be. Each time I'm hiring it gets worse. Examples:
- GitHub profiles are still a decent filtering system, but people have learned how to game that with hello world-esque repositories in the area of interest. So you have to take a really close look at the actual content of the repositories themselves. Sometimes they have complicated file structures, lots of files, commits etc., then you have to actually look at the code and find it's just a "baby's first app" copied from some tutorial on how to game GitHub repos for the interview. They also plaster their GitHub bio with all these stickers and icons and programming languages copied from some templates on how to make your GitHub look attractive.
- Resumes are getting to be worse, a certain class of people say they worked for 5 different Fortune 500 companies, thankfully they all use the same template so you can filter them out. Others just keep lying over and over or embellishing their experience so hard it's basically a lie. If you're trained at it, you can filter them out because you notice patterns, similarities etc. but if you're hiring for something that you don't have experience in then it's getting harder and harder to distinguish. Sadly it's caused me to automatically assuming someone from certain countries are BSing it if their resume sets off my BS meter in any way.
- I used to use Discord communities related to something I was hiring for with a #jobs channel (for example, Flutter), but those "gamers" have figured that out too, and now when you post there, you get a bunch of BS applicants. You can sometimes tell because they don't really bother setting a profile pic or anything for their Discord, so you know they probably just joined to game the system.
All in all, when the application process is over, I am ending up feeling more and more irritated at the amount of time I have wasted filtering and filtering and filtering.
I dont have a Discord profile pic or personal info filled in in principle. Ive also disabled the exhibitionist “I am playing this now” feature. That makes me a scammer right?
Or maybe … privacy oriented?
I know someone who plays that GitHub profile game where they, at first glance, appear to be a contributor to ~20 teams' projects. I can tell you inside of a minute though, that his profile is bullshit. I think it's a great idea to ask the candidate about their public GitHub projects (I also think it's a great idea to ask candidates about their past jobs and make the interview as much like a two-way conversation as possible).
What if there were a system where, for each applicant, it were to A) automatically verify the dates of employment with past employers (perfect for a call center in the third world), B) web scrape any linked SO/GitHub/Medium profiles and evaluate "novelty"/legitimacy, and C) look for certifications (ideally there's a central authority like what doctors and lawyers have - Merit[0] is a startup building something like this)? Surely if something like TripleByte can mint money (at least for a time) when they're MANUALLY vetting candidates, there's a market for an automated/semi-automated system of vetting that still delivers a lot of value by, instead of finding the wheat in the chaff, simply removing all the straw from the chaff and leaving the wheat-finding to individual companies (who tended to do that anyway, even with TripleByte).
In Tech, I really prefer 1 -2 pages tops in a short crisp CV; no extra text and weird sales pitch.
Why? 1) Your actual experience, what you did, how your career progressed etc. matters most. That stuff goes beyond promises, wishes and dreams - but shows the sweat and tears. Github repo links etc: big plus 2) We are all humans that have a mortgage to pay, feed a family etc. I’m not disappointed or mad if people apply for a job for the money and fame. 3) I probably have yet to meet an engineer that would enjoy writing prose about why a job posting and company “were his life long dream”.
I never ask why people apply for a job or switch either. Personally, I would never have had a good answer my self - because you seldom know what the actual job or culture or projects will be like.
Most HR people prefer the 5-page, write-down-everything-you-have-done resume. I know because I have tried both routes and because of the feedback I got I have ended up maintaining 2 versions (long and short)
A company where resumes are pre screened by HR is anyway a no-go. From my experience this has pretty much disappeared in 2023.
I need smart people that want to work and are willing to do that work with my team; I don't want or need someone to promote the party line, that's why we have Sales and Brand teams, I need people who for some amount of time are willing to spend their time and skills on our problem sets. Our problem sets aren't so unique, so I also want them to stick around for awhile (not forever, that's unrealistic). Finally, I need and want people that can at least be cordial with the existing team as opposed to disrupting it.
If I ask my colleagues who also decide on hiring, probably they'd have different wants and needs, maybe echoing the parent post, I don't know for sure. There's what my colleagues say and then what they think when deciding. It's a crap shoot for the candidates for sure, and I'm very sympathetic to this; it's also a crap shoot for us as it means that depending on who takes the interview, a different set of criteria is being used, so it's a real risk; autocratizing isn't good either because then it means higher chances we can't evolve the team.
Hiring is a real mess, and I have no good answer on making it better, just that it needs to be. The short list of problems I think are pretty universal for candidates and employers includes:
- It's an inefficient and time consuming process for all
- It encourages both sides to lie to each other for legal reasons and because it's the only way to get attention
- It's too easy for misinformation/weak points to cloud the process with misinformation, intentionally or otherwise
- Everyone has to make decisions based on incomplete and often inaccurate information
- The interests of employers and candidates are set up to be at odds, even though it shouldn't be this way (salaries, benefits, demands on time/skills, emotional costs, etc)
With CVs/resumes, I probably spend no more than 2-5 minutes on them, and it's usually with ctrl+f to hunt down the keywords for skills we identified would solve our problem set and to give me something to talk with the candidate about during the interview, and the interview is mostly to figure out "does this candidate actually have relevant experience here or it's just keyword spamming?"
I'm very lucky that at least one of our Talent Acquisition teams is quite good and their initial interviews/screenings have a higher success rate than the other TA teams, so I've come to rely on that a lot, but it's still difficult as the TA team are not technical persons, and despite their earnest interest (and KPIs) to get us in touch with good candidates, mistakes happen.
I really wonder what hiring would look like if work wasn't a requirement for people to survive, that is, in a world with universal income and guaranteed living. The work still needs to be done, but the candidates in this scenario have a much different incentive since their literal livelihood doesn't depend on them getting the job. My hope is that it would mean candidates choose to apply because of their genuine interest, and the type of problems the company tries to solve suddenly become a much more competitive currency we barter with. I think some might say that it already is like that, but I think that's an incomplete understanding of how hiring has worked for a very long time.
So I'm really not sure how to make it better and more efficient, and how to get past the awful situation we have now; I hope that removing the "you need this job to survive" can gain traction and make it better, but the cynic in me says this isn't likely in my life time.
For the time being, what I would recommend for technical candidates is the following:
1. Be cordial with the recruiters. You don't have to suck up to them, but if you can't at least be cordial with them, I have low hopes you are going to be cordial with the people you need to work with every day. The recruiters have their guidance on what we're looking for and yes it's going to be basic and limited stuff I told them to check out; they aren't going to understand everything about our tech and work naturally, but what they're screening is the basic stuff that they can understand so that I don't have to check these basics. They want you hired also remember, because it is their job to get people hired; at least the TA teams I like are constantly advocates for candidates they think have a chance, so don't burn bridges with the persons who are sticking up for you internally†
2. Keep your CV relevant and concise. Concise doesn't mean short, write what you think we're interested in, but make it parsable. I want to be able to understand what tech you've worked with, your responsibilities regarding it, and to have some items for us to talk about. Hundreds of bullet points or listed items doesn't help me if it buries the relevant experiences for me under layers of irrelevant experiences. Length, specific words/phrases, it's not as important even for the auto-screening tools. Just take a small amount of time to make it well formatted, free of typos, and it's likely fine. Freebie CV generators are perfectly fine, and preferable to CV templates in Word or other hand rolled CVs. Length doesn't matter as we're just going to ctrl+f anyways.
3. Make it clear what problem sets you're interested in, and during the interview, ask questions so that you understand if our problem sets and day to day are among your interests. I'm usually happy to talk about our day to day pretty directly so that you have a complete picture on what you're applying if it means
4. Just be cordial during the interview; I don't need people to flatter me or the company, and I just need to see you can work with the team; I don't learn that from hearing how great the company is.
† I'm fully aware that many Talent Acquisition Teams are quite awful, and many recruiters are not like I described here; nevertheless, they are often still the only advocate you'll have unless you know someone on the inside. I think most hiring managers rely heavily on their TA teams regardless of how good they are, so at least be cordial with recruiters.
- The founders/cofounders think they have come up with the best idea ever, when objectively the idea is novel but garbage (usually a solution looking for a problem), and only want to hire people eager to smell their farts all day long (and probably on some nights and weekends, too).
- The interview process is unnecessarily complicated, despite the supposed ahead-of-time vetting done by TripleByte (which used to tout "skip to the final interview", but in reality is "skip the computer-graded, timed Leetcode Easy brain teaser"). In the worst-case, a company had me interview with 4 different people throughout the week, give a 15-minute presentation on a coding project I worked on, and then they expected me to work nights and weekends for an entire week to "test drive" me (the irony here is that while they get an idea of what it's like to have me as an employee, I don't really get to see what it's like to work for them as a company - it's not like I am in their Slack channels or participating in meetings.
- The pay isn't that great. Again, the founders are delusional, think it would be a real privilege for anyone to work for them, and seem to believe that they cannot be too selective. "Give me a candidate who has familiarity with NodeJS on the backend and [Scala/Ruby/Go/Rust] (because why not), is willing and able to work nights and weekends (but it's okay because we offer uNliMiTeD PTO), all for the generous, generous salary of $130k/year.
If you don't draw parallels between these and Wundergraph, kudos, but with each of the startups I interviewed with, I could feel myself becoming more and more jaded until I just gave up. A year later I'm still at my current job, and I'm glad I stayed, but I put a lot of energy into those interviews, hours spent even before I had my first interview, just researching the company, looking at their code (if any of it was public) and coming up with thoughtful questions. Why did these four companies not want to give me a job offer? I'm not sure. It could certainly be cultural more than technical. Despite my cynical attitude now, I promise you I came into each interview with enthusiasm, respect, and genuine interest in the role.
I was also sure they all knew where to find my LinkedIn, Medium, StackOverflow and Github profiles, which all give insight into my abilities and (I think) prove I enjoy writing code and building stuff, and most importantly, that I could probably handle whatever frontend-for-a-database app they were building. Let's be real, most apps aren't that complicated.
Also, there’s the irony that TripleByte went from a language-agnostic in-person (virtual) interview to very specific quizzes. So instead of saying “this dev knows how to dev”, they now say “this dev knows C#, Python, SQL, and JavaScript”
That sounds about as genuine as it is grammatically correct.
> 1. Why do you want to take this role?
> 2. Why are you a good fit for this role?
Good employers know this, they experience it from the other side (testing an employee fit takes time in action, and several times they fail predicting it). Also people can and have to form themselves into the role, no one born fit. Pretending to know the answers already when there could be none yet either shows a will to bullshit or being clueless. None of which are desirable (in most cases, bullshiting is useful for some organizations, of course).
What are the honest and reliable answers here? (in generic case, not for those through backdoors)
1. I need to work for money pretty soon and you just have this open role which I think I could fulfill some way.
2. No chance knowing that at this stage however on the surface and based on both of our public history and things we project about orselves the chances are good.
No way standing out by pretending along such vague or obvious questions, that is basically the generic approach at this elimination stage what everyone is doing. I straight up refuse writing childish essays called cover letter too, ranting about how good fit I am and how thrilled I am applying to this specific role and specific organization happened to have open position when I happened to look for jobs, what a great coincidence and life purpose! I send either nothing, empty page (when the submission system tries to enforce it), or contextual facts about the application. Role relevant facts are already in the CV/Resume. We could talk about intentions and fit in person, not through robotic HR elimnators. If this is no good for the employer then we are definitely no fit.
Well, you're being paid to do it, the candidates aren't.
The article we are discussing here claims that there already is an asymmetry in the sense that the applicant has to put time into polishing a resume while the company does basically nothing.
So, you are going even further by essentially requiring the applicant to first write an open source library in the space before they are interesting?
(well, at least contributing to an open-source library in the space to get an idea of the domain while applying)
If your buying say, steel, presumably you care very little about the supplier, their story, etc. You want specs (carbon content, hardness, annealing temperature, whatever) and price.
Likewise, hiring people as commodities, you don't care about the cover letter, you want to know where they went to school and want experience they have.
If you're trying to hire a person as opposed to a commodity, you will care a lot less about the specs and more about the person, and want to hear their story.
Otoh, I'm going to try and remember this the next time I make a CV and see if i can make it a story. If done well I can see this as a powerful way of presenting yourself. (And for clarity, I mean a real story that gives a sense of the person, not the story of some career progression)
This is a good baseline for a working relationship. They can be a good employer, with good salary and decent benefits. They can treat their employees fairly, offer some okay work-life balance, etc
And as an employee, I can be a good one. Always being professional and polite, striving to keep a healthy environment among the workforce, and using my skills effectively to help the business while doing my job.
Seeing each other as a commodity is fine. My worst job experience was in a startup that really didn't see things this way.
Prior to starting WunderGraph, I've worked for a Full Lifecycle API Management company. It's was my best paying and most satisfying job before cutting my salary almost half to make my startup burn as little as possible.
I found this company because they had an open source codebase, written in Go. Coincidentally, I've built a library (https://github.com/wundergraph/graphql-go-tools) to build GraphQL API gateways, also written in go. At that time, they were only supporting REST. So I wrote them and offered the opportunity to add GraphQL to their API management capabilities. That was it, perfect match. Fast forward 2.5 years later and they have all sorts of powerful GraphQL API management capabilities. I think it was great for everyone involved.
So it's not about loving s company or a cult or anything. It's a about finding a good match between candidate and employer, and making it super easy for the employer to "spot" that from the very beginning.
It's probably more practices like this, where the prospective employee has to enthusiastically profess subservient, slavish devotion to a company in order to be considered a viable candidate. You're writing GraphQL API glue. Everyone knows you're doing it to pay the mortgage. It's not a transcendental experience.
By contrary, the direction we were headed until recently made more sense. A company wanted some service provided. They'd look around and reach out to someone that likely was the best fit and contact them.
For example, if I was hiring a plumber, and some guy told me he was "inspired by my vision" and sought me out by reading everything on my website about my family, I would assume he had mental health issues and certainly not hire him.
Wait, why are you applying to a position that makes you feel this way? You feeling this way is a signal that the job is not for you.
By presupposing some ideal type of candidate and using that as a main signal, I think you're blundering and missing out on good candidates. I see that with a lot of startups that have more ego than they ought to.
>Why should I read your CV when you didn't bother skimming through my landing page, docs, or open source repository. What's the purpose of sending a CV when I have to do all the hard work?
How are you doing all the hard work, and aren't you getting paid to do that work—so what do you care? The candidates have a lot more to lose, it's much easier to skim through a CV than try to grok your homepage, repo, docs etc., and perhaps the more experienced engineers know the cost-benefit analysis of wasting their time going through arbitrary hoops after being burned many times before.
And to answer your question in a way that 99% of your applicants would like to, but your high-horse approach is stopping them:
1. To make money so I can pay for rent
2. Because I have previous experience with the tools and technologies you're using
And given that they're an early stage company (my company is as well), I have had employees who were working as a boring day job for the comp alone, vs those who do it out of genuine interest in the space, and it excites them. Both types of employees are useful to have, but the latter are far more indispensable to me. Given a choice between either type of candidate, the latter wins every time. The mindset has to be different between "big stable megacorp" and "scrappy startup".
Jfc - I know a lot of founders personally and they’ll all say that in private. You’re online - on an anonymous forum. You’re not at risk for saying something that we all know. Stop lying.
Wannabe-capitalists call it "exploitation" and pretend they're badasses comparable to the truly horrible kinds of exploitations that happened 100+ years ago (or in some other parts of the world they never been to).
So I can completely relate to wanting to be picky.
I'm not familiar with how things are normally done "over there", but here in Norway all the "how to write a job application" tips that the media writes about here every now an then includes some expert saying to go to the website, read what the company is about, read the job opening description carefully and write something relevant to that. Not unlike what you mention.
WunderGraph is an all-in-one solution to build, integrate, deploy and monitor modern APIs. We empower developers to ship faster and with confidence.
What does any of that even mean? If I'm submitting an application, it's because you listed specific skills and experience requirements and I meet them. I'm not going to {insert euphemism here} just to satisfy your ego.
Your hiring approach favors bullshitters.
Take all the buzzwords from the landing page and ask ChatGPT to write you a cover letter
Dear [Recipient's Name],
As a passionate professional who thrives on delivering fast and reliable user experiences across platforms, I am excited to apply for the [Job Title] position at Wundergraph. Your organization's commitment to providing an all-in-one solution that empowers businesses with confidence caught my attention, and I am eager to contribute to the growth and success of your team.
Having worked extensively with various technologies, I have developed a reputation as a full-stack powerhouse, proficient in creating and implementing seamless solutions. I am vendor agnostic, ensuring that I can seamlessly integrate diverse technologies, regardless of the provider. This approach has led me to create products that are truly transformative, leaving no room for guesswork and providing a smooth, efficient experience for users.
Throughout my career, I have focused on products and services that are trusted by clients and loved by the community. The feedback I have received for my work is a testament to my dedication to excellence and my ability to deliver exceptional results. With a "batteries included" mindset, I am always prepared to go the extra mile, ensuring that every project is executed with precision and consistency.
I am particularly drawn to Wundergraph because of its emphasis on providing solutions that require no DevOps intervention. Your organization has a proven track record of producing top-quality products that transform businesses and enable them to scale effortlessly. I am confident that my skills and experience will allow me to make an immediate impact on your team.
In conclusion, I am excited about the opportunity to contribute my expertise to Wundergraph as we empower businesses to thrive in an ever-changing landscape. I am confident that my experience as a full-stack powerhouse, combined with my passion for creating fast and reliable user experiences, will make me a valuable asset to your team.
Thank you for considering my application. I am looking forward to the opportunity to further discuss my qualifications with you and explore how my expertise can contribute to Wundergraph's continued success.
> 2. Why are you a good fit for this role?
"I need someone to pay me a salary so I can make rent. I have valuable skills that match the position, but working for you is not the dream of my life. I will probably quit after a few years if the project is boring or I find a better paying opportunity."
There have been times I was really passionate for a company, and it shows in my cover letters. But when you're looking for a job and are considering hundreds of positions, I have no interest in writing some bullshit story how I have been dreaming of working there since childhood for every single company I am applying for, especially if they're unknown or have limited public presence.
And it is hilarious, sad, and mental that companies expect prospective candidates to lie and/or debase themselves like that. Should I ask any plumber when I have a leak under my sink to tell me why they think they are a good fit for the role, and where do they see themselves in 5 years?
I'm not looking for charity, I am very good at my job, I can create value and improve your product, how is this not enough?
(I know I am looking for contract work these days, and being so outspoken will hurt my chances, but honestly this has to be said. I do not like lying, nor spending 3 hours becoming passionate about your company, just to fall through the cracks and not even get a rejection letter. You need work done, I am good at doing it, let's talk.)
"Fit" means hitting many axises, especially efficient results.
Cover letter and selective resume emphasis tailoring are targeted product marketing.
Candidate should research the company and possibly the career of the interviewer(s).
Candidate should have a 45s elevator pitch on why they should be hired.
Be prepared and demonstrate unique and essential usefulness.
This can easily be turned around: why should an applicant spend time looking at the landing page or docs, when in all likelihood her application will not be read, and will be filtered out by an HR person who doesn't understand the work and whose only job is to reject the maximum amount of incoming people so that the pipe doesn't get clogged?
It'd be ineffective for someone looking for a job to spend any significant amount of time on any given job ad.
Job hunting is like dating. It's a numbers game.
And it doesn't rely on anyone's true qualities, but on how the other party perceives those qualities. You have to make the other party desire you, either because they want to be with you, or because they convince themselves that you will make them look good.
It's been almost 10 years that my default answer for the question "why do you want to work here" has been along the lines of "I don't know if I want yet. A recruiter from your company reached out, so I'm evaluating you guys during the interview too".
If the market changes back to favor employers I can go back at faking interest.
Them bills, they keep coming.
Instead, I'm getting complexity questions whose solution amounts to "do a cumulative sum?"
Sure some jobs happen outside the resume submission system, but most of the employment market works via resume submission.
There’s no value in reading this post.
You definitely have higher odds with a more nepotistic route, but I think he's still right - most jobs go to applicants that apply using the standard process.
I assume you at least have some level of charisma that would make others think of you positively at combined with skill. As well as some willingness to go to events as you say.
You and I think though are somewhat exceptional in that regard; I assume most people would have gotten their jobs with a bit of a mix of the two in varying ratios.
I occasionally have people I used to work with ask me for help getting a job. I usually encourage them and give them some interview pointers, but ultimately I have to say “Here is the link to the posting, go apply and good luck!”
I am just employee number 52214. I don’t have an HR button I can push that says “fast track this swell guy!”
You also know the structure inside: meaning you can say hi to a hiring manager you may or may not know, and say “check this guy out - I vouch for him”
The startup I had worked at before, I was hired because I went to a local un-conference, Portland BarCamp. I ran into someone I know from the Personal Telco Project, which started back in the early days of 802.11 wireless networking and was trying to promote free access points around town. Anyways, he knew someone else there that was hiring for a startup, so he introduced me and we talked and I went in for an interview and got the job.
In either case, it's not like friends are directly getting me jobs (as far as I know), it's more that my network of acquaintances aligned in a favorable way and I was in the right place at the right time.
Never heard that term before.
BarCamp started as sort of a reaction to an O'Reiley event called FooCamp which was invitation-only, and in Portland it ran for a number of years until it got replaced by Open Source Bridge which ran for a few more years. I'm not aware of anything like it in Portland now, which is a shame.
Admittedly, my resume is excellent, but jobs can absolutely happen from just sending in an application and a resume. Even really good, high-paying jobs.
The post also claims that a hypothetical “golden curriculum vitae” literally created by angels would not “increase your chances of getting hired at all.” This seems completely oblivious to the actual role resumes play in the hiring process. There’s no question that a good resume can make an applicant stand out, and predispose interviewers to favor a candidate.
The reason the author gives for his strange belief is:
> The employer is very, very clear in terms of everything they do that they don’t trust your resume even a little and give it exactly zero weight - else they wouldn’t waste manager time interviewing you to get you to rehash it.
But I’ve never been in an interview, on either side, which involved a “rehash” of the resume. Resumes and interviews serve different, complementary purposes.
However I think the OP drastically underestimates the proportion of wholly unqualified on paper people who apply for most jobs. I'd put it at 50% for most and up to 90% for some. So you can see why people go down the nepotism + chums route.
As someone who has a deeply weird CV and life experiences / social circle that is pretty much orthogonal to most techies it can be difficult, as the nepotism / chums route is not available. But just writing a cover letter to the JD and company gets me a fair way usually.
"Chatted with someone at a networking event" seems like an extremely weak signal, and I'd be suspicious of that type of hire.
I don't think that is being honest.
> aren't hiring "their chums" out of some unethical sense of helping their friends who don't deserve it, they're hiring people they know and who they have good reason to believe are going to help them succeed
No one says "I'm going to unethically help people who don't deserve it," so let's discard that part.
They're cheating at the normal hiring practice, not allowing other candidates in, because they think it gives them some sort of advantage. And that doesn't look entirely ethical.
It's only deemed "business unethical" if someone can prove discrimination in court, though. And that's honest.
No, they're not "cheating," they are taking a shortcut to a known good candidate so they can get their job done quickly. If you need an employee and you know of one that would meet your needs, you have no obligation to search far and wide just in case there's someone else who's just as qualified out of some sense of fairness. The fact that some organizations behave as if that's a requirement is simply a self-imposed (or sometimes contractually-imposed by some other org e.g. via government contract) safety mechanism that helps reduce the opportunity for corruption (or the appearance of corruption).
Ahh yes, the "significant amount of time doing unpaid labor" of sending my resume via email, which took me all of 5 minutes.
That’s such a strange way to look at it… if a company advertises, are they doing “unpaid labour to help me manage my purchasing”?
I think the author never worked in hiring for an org that got a lot of applicants. When I was a hiring manager, we sometimes opened reqs and got hundreds of applications within the first one or two days.
Life-hack #2: Use ChatGPT to write it in 2 minutes
Alternatively (shameless promotion): Use a special-purpose tool I wrote for it, which uses the GPT API https://aicoverletter.me
Using a system based on recommendations would give popular, attractive, well-connected people an advantage that's unrelated to their skill level. It would make job hopping more beneficial because you'd get to meet and connect with more people.
Maybe it's unreasonable of me, but I slightly suspect the author would prefer recommendation based hiring because it'd benefit them rather than because it'd be a better system for everyone.
I think the apparent conflict comes into play when we treat your point and my point like they are mutually exclusive. But they don't have to be - the resume system can be horrific and the alternatives can be bad in other ways, all in one swoop. It would honestly be weirder if it weren't so - it would imply a perfect process.
For what it's worth, I'm not exactly proposing a "system based on recommendations", and I'm not sure how that would really work if I was proposing it. I'm more saying that the kind of treatment people get when they can bypass the resume-first system is much more human - ideally, there would be a fix that would bring the resume-first system up to the nepotistic treatment level, but I don't claim to know what that is.
That's of course incorrect if every applicant on average makes 100 job applications. That means you're lucky if you get one of those 50 before some other company makes them a better offer, which is why you have to keep a couple of choices open until the papers are signed.
That means there are two open jobs for every applicant (with some fair assumptions).
Heaped on the table before this committee are 483 forms of application, with testimonials attached. All the applicants are Chinese and all without exception have a first degree from Peking or Amoy and a Doctorate of Philosophy from Cornell or Johns Hopkins. The majority of the candidates have at one time held ministerial office in Formosa. Some have attached their photographs. Others have (perhaps wisely) refrained from doing so. The chairman turns to the leading Chinese expert and says, "Perhaps Dr. Wu can tell us which of these candidates should be put on the short list." Dr. Wu smiles enigmatically and points to the heap. "None of them any good," he says briefly. "But how--I mean, why not?" asks the chairman, surprised. "Because no good scholar would ever apply. He would fear to lose face if he were not chosen." "So what do we do now?" asks the chairman. "I think," says Dr. Wu, "we might persuade Dr. Lim to take this post. What do you think. Dr. Lee?" "Yes, I think he might," says Lee, "but we couldn't approach him ourselves of course. We could ask Dr. Tan whether he thinks Dr. Lim would be interested." "I don't know Dr. Tan," says Wu, "but I know his friend Dr. Wong."
I did many interviews, and stopped to read the CVs after a while. I tried to find a pattern between the CV and the candidate's programming skills, but found none. Nothing.
You just want to turn yourself into a good candidate for that next role, you shouldn’t care where you find it. Even if you’re successful at getting internally promoted, there’s a good chance you’re going to accomplish those goals slower than if you’d just looked elsewhere.
Not just things you need to do again, but they might even ask you to solve an arbitrary problem you've never seen before in 40 minutes, with someone watching and not helping, knowing your livelihood is on the line if you fail. And they have a hard rule that states you must create a working program, so even if you can express your ideas and make it very clear you'd get to a correct and efficient solution eventually, if it doesn't run in under 40 minutes, you're out. It's a mini coding competition, and you are set up to fail.
I recently got laid off from a job that actually boosted my resume quite nicely, the work made me a specialist that triggered several big name companies to reach out for this niche thing. I was told multiple times that I'd effectively passed 80% of the interview sessions, but their tests, for whether I'd been able to memorize all common algo approaches and my ability to regurgitate them in a short amount of time, were beyond my abilities.
> This leaves five candidates - a hand-picked elite, a top 12.5% of qualified candidates.
What kind of bullshit could have been in those 10 submissions that those got prioritized but none of them found suitable enough after the first round of interviews? I do not dare to imagine. And what was the HR thinking while eliminating the 58 other candidates coming up with 10 unsuitable on top? What are their criteria, nice words and pretty bulletpoints? I honestly been worried what kind of organisation will this be to work for based on their high level of selection mistakes, if it is wise accepting a position there. But it turned out most people there live up to the needs of the organization and it is a pretty ok place (no perfect place exists). Even if no real top gets in - get eliminated among the 58 misfortuned not having pretty enogh submission paperwork for the HR's taste - those do could learn to do the job decent enough in the end, apparently. The recruitment could not ruin things too much. : )
I contrast this most heavily with, say, someone the company has done cold outreach to get in touch with; like, yeah, there's a reason you did the cold outreach, they probably look like a good fit. But more importantly the power dynamic is different - the employer had to go to the applicant and ask for their attention. The applicant feels like something the employer might "lose" if they don't play their hand right, as opposed to someone who should feel honored to take the lower-mid of the payrange.
The only thing I can come up with is Equalture.com, though it is more about generating more "fairness" between applicants rather than making the UX of applying better
There is an incredible number of factors that determine how good a prospective employee is to a company, and none of them can be easily represented with a list of job titles and qualifications. You can find people with impressive resumes and they are terrible employees: lazy, stupid, unmotivated. There is a vast amount of people with unimpressed job history that would be perfect candidates even to work on a very specific piece of technology if they are smart, quick to learn, driven, ambitious, enthusiastic or any other soft-skill.
My best interview is my first, as a 19 year old high school dropout: I must've mentioned that I had played with Linux and knew C and PHP. They asked me something along the lines of "what does ifconfig do?", "can you configure Apache?" and "tell me a little about your projects in C", and got hired. They only needed to know I was able to learn undirected, was passionate about computers in general. Of course this was for a junior position, but still, none of that 3 interviews, whiteboard leetcode bullcrap that is so common nowadays.
tl;dr: Candidates are to their resumes what a chef's meal is to the list of ingredients.
It sounds as though you're saying it's not the list of ingredients, it's what you make of them.
On the contrary, the interesting chefs, you can tell from the list, as there are delightfully unexpected choices and twists on the list.
This absolutely POPS on a resume, and is one of the indicators I look for.
Point is, resumes are overrated.
So that leaves out resumes for the rest of us that actually have a life outside work.
On the contrary, good roles need a good resume (CV) process to cast a wide enough net to find great teammates.
1. The idealistic teenager version of this does exit: at companies that value craft and domain know-how.
2. The ratio is not 10 delusional to 40 qualified, the ratio is 40 delusional to 10 qualified, maybe. (I've reviewed 5 figures of resumes.)
3. A bad company has unqualified screeners, in a disinterested department, as described in the blog. That's indeed terrible. Don't apply there!!!
4. A good company, screening is performed by people with mastery of the area, well qualified to pattern match resumes to the performers on their team. You can often tell from the job descriptions (or your network) when this is true.
5. Bad filter is as described in the article, while a good filter puts all plausible resumes through, regardless of any nonsense in the job description like "8 years of ChatGPT prompt crafting experience required" or "Masters required".
5. In good company, plausibles are given to the tech or team leads hiring who are interested in finding candidates with standout value adds, these generally are not on resumes.
6. This is done not by bullet match for "did this precise thing before" (the rubric from non-domain aka contentless managers) but by understanding candidate attributes (e.g. an attribute to learn new domains quickly) and is tetris-ing a well qualified cloverleaf of attributes for evolving solutions in the problem space -- and being able to see these attributes between the lines of how a dry resume is written.
. . .
Finally, most importantly, the candidate is not making a resume for the company, but for themselves.
As a craftsperson in a domain, it's worth "curating" your CV. CV stands for curriculum vitae which in Latin means "course of life".
From apprentice, through journeyman, to mastery, there is a roadmap, and the as-yet-unwritten portions of the CV are more important than those on the page.
By writing this down for yourself ahead of time, you can chart a course that lands you where you intend, or keeps you on a path you find rewarding. Diff yourself against that path, making intentional corrections as you go.
While at a job, journal the outcomes you delivered for the team, and the company, that made a difference. When you've gathered all the power-ups you need, crystallize them onto the CV, and start your own pattern-matching against the next role on your roadmap. When you find a role (internal or external), go for it.
When you manage yourself proactively this way, and apply to roles at companies that value craft, you're not working for the resume process, the CV process works for you.