I've worked with people who are incredibly effective engineers but are bad at promoting themselves through their resumes and who interview poorly.
Figuring out how to not to overlook those people is a great way to build an outstanding team.
It's surprising how many companies are bad at the interviewing process. How bad they are at the eval process (resume and interviews). It's still giving vitamin and not painkiller vibes though.
I have been working in this space for the last few years as an indie hacker solopreneur. I'm currently working through customer discovery on this exact problem (eval candidates more effectively) and if you (or a delegate) could make time, I would really appreciate it.
Some companies have such unrealistic expectations too. Here's one from a company that I bailed out of. Would have been an interesting company, I think, but not world-changing.
This is literally how they described their process:
Phase 1: Initial conversations
- 30 minute recruiter screen
- 60 minute resume deep dive
Phase 2: Interviews
- 15 minute hiring manager screen
- 2 x 45 minute engineering
- 60 minute overview of your past projects, including presentation
Phase 3: Further interviews
- 30 minute second interview with hiring manager
- 30 minute values interview
- 30 minute leadership interview
- "additional interviews as required for position"
- 30 minute recruiter call/discussion
- 50 minute l33t code
- 50 minute systems design
- 30 minute in-depth presentation to a committee
- 4-6x 45 minute group interviews covering l33tcode and system design as well as my presentation
By the time I would have been done with this it would have taken basically a day of real time not to mention prep work for the presentation and every other interview.
The pay was good but not life changing.
I’m an engineering manager and can see the difference like night and day and don’t give a damn about self promotion skills.
I built an internal workflow engine at a law firm. It worked really well for the use case.
I can spend all my time convincing you how cool of a project this was but what I should have done is buy Jira.
Knowing that you built an internal workflow engine is much more interesting to me than knowing you were a "senior software engineer".
It gives me something to ask you questions about in an interview - I don't need to see the proprietary code to have an interesting conversation about how you designed it and what you learned from the process.
I've been in the position of reviewing résumés for hiring, many times, and the list of companies gets a brief perfunctory glance when filtering, and then a second glance before the interview when looking for prompts to get the candidate talking.
Projects are going to get a much closer look, to get an idea of what they did, what skills they demonstrated, and what we should spend more of the interview talking about.
The purpose of a resume isn't just to present a list of companies and dates, it's to get the candidate to next interview stage without annoying the hiring manager, and then to be a useful reference document in the interview itself.
We don't have more than a few minutes to scan through any particular candidates resume and decide to progress or reject, and a resume that doesn't immediately express why the candidate should go to interview is a bad self promotion.
The resumes I like best avoid waffling paragraphs of information without clear highlights of relevant skills (the information is usually there, it just doesn't stand out against the background text), and stick to simple dot points of clear personal achievements and demonstration of skills relevant to the position being applied.
It's frustrating how many quite possibly great candidates hide themselves in their resume and are subsequently dropped into the too-hard basket.
This isn't a great example, but I mean things like "Lead the architectural design of the new search and recommendations features, built on top of Elasticsearch and PostgreSQL."