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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

The roughest outline for hiring as far as I can follow it is start with 100 resumes, filter it down to 10 by picking ones that are nicely formatted, then filter down to 1 by interviewing. Each level of filtering should be structured so that it biases towards technical competence.

It isn't really a licensure examination because, as you point out, the industry doesn't bother to put the resources in to make sure anything is systemically analysed. It is a process to balance supply and demand of jobs.

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90% of the filter is resume formatting!!!? I'm open to hear your experience but that sounds like an arbitrary filter which limits your pool more than it selects for talent

It can depend, but yeah.. when you're filling 1-2 jobs and have a stack of 500 resumes, you're going to do quick filtering based on some pretty arbitrary decisions. Worse is that the recruiting companies will often do weird things to any formatting you have done. If even 50% of the applicants are technically qualified, dumping 90% at random is still likely to get you where you need faster.

It's worth taking the time to ensure your formatting is consistent, with no/few spelling and grammatical issues.

It will also vary by market/location. If you're looking at jobs local to you, it could be very different, especially for those jobs wanting domain experience. Different business sectors also congregate around adjacent businesses... so the choices and technology in one City will vary greatly to other Cities. As will the development process itself.

Missed the step where they filter out anyone w/o a degree in CS from MIT/Stanford/Berkeley/UIUC/CMU.

As someone with no formal degree, but approaching 3 decades of experience, this last (recent) job search was rather brutal. Not enough feedback to know if/what was going on. Could be lack of formal education, could be my age (legal or not).

Got any tips/suggestions on how not to be filtered out because of "formatting"? Got any great examples to share?

I'm allergic to resumes that recite every single technology the candidate has ever used, leaving little said about what they accomplished using said technologies.

That's true and that's how I tried to have my resume but I've had quite a few recruiters saying something like "I cannot see a list of technologies you know". Which has been the opposite of what I've been told in the past, where impact and goals are more important.

So one can never win it seems :D

In my experience, pure black-and-white text does extremely badly.

If someone is in a position where they have to read through 100 resumes, there is a limit to how often they can look at a paragraph-formatted WYSIWYG text edited black and white document that says "I did well at school, I worked some jobs afterwards, now I want to work here". They blend together something shocking.

It is worth having a tasteful dash of colour or maybe a formatted header/footer where possible. Low bar, but there is a big pool of serially unable-to-get-past-screening candidates who can't clear it and you want to stand out from them if at all possible.

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