I cannot tell you how bemused I was after leaving that interview. I’d done months of degrading stupid ‘tell us some trivia about JS’ interviews, and here was someone that (apparently) just wanted to judge whether the information on my CV was true.
This is funny. I’ve interviewed so many candidates who think keyword stuffing their resume has no consequences, but then you get them in the interview and discover they couldn’t actually tell you much about the languages or frameworks they listed other than very high level descriptions.
When I do resume reviews for people I try to push back on some of the keyword stuffing, but there’s a lot of resistance. There’s a popular idea that resumes are just for tricking the ATS and nothing more, but then these people get in front of someone who actually wants to discuss their resume and it gets ugly fast.
They do that because HR looks for it.
>frameworks they listed other than very high level descriptions.
Would you remember the details of the framework you worked on 10 years back? Especially give that in the 10 years you went through another 15 frameworks?
You've described a beautiful symbiosis.
Half the people in the interviewing process see keyword stuffing as pointless bullshit, and only care if you can reverse a linked list in a language of your choice.
Half of them only care about keyword stuffing, and will send your resume in the shredder if you don't do it.
And the third half see anyone trying to avoid the nitpicks of the second half as a person to expose as a fraud.
Me: you've listed Java as "Expert", perhaps you could discuss about <favorite footgun in project>
Interviewee: sweats for a bit, finally admits only used Java factory factory and copied lots of code
Me: ok great, let's move on, you've listed Rust as "Intermediate", lets...
Interviewee interrupts, admits they know how to spell Rust and watched a couple of videos of crabs
Other questions were met with equally disastrous responses.
It probably helped that I was just bullshitting the fringe cloud stuff, the actual languages/framework everyday related skills were all true.
I don't get to see the fat stack of resumes they get, only the stuff HR has already approved and passed on to me to further review. I asked them about their process, and they basically prioritize anyone who has the exact keywords on the job listing, and they more or less straight up ignore anyone who doesn't.
We had a lot of frontenders that HR filtered out because they only had React on their resume, but not Vue or Svelte (both of which are much simpler than React, so even a complete Vue/Svelte novice would do fine if they were good at React). Similarly when we were looking to fill a Ruby (NOT Ruby on Rails) dev, they filtered out people that didn't have specifically Ruby and instead had `Ruby on Rails`.
You can't even blame them, half of the stuff in the job listings sounds like complete mumbo-jumbo to anyone not directly involved with the stuff. After they told me about the Rails thing I sat down with the HR team and gave them a high-level overview on this stuff, but it still happens from time to time, especially when the job requirements/description changes every once in a while. Plus, the edge cases here (is someone good at Python OK to let through for the Ruby job? What if they have an Elixir background? Or just JS one? etc.) are basically infinite, and you can't educate them on every single possible variety of technologies out there.
The only real system would be to have the devs evaluate every resume that comes in, but that comes with its own set of problems, too.
It was pretty much made to sift through bulks of data and idenitfy similar concepts, so it's kind of funny in this AI gold rush that I haven't heard of a proper example. The application and impact is obvious, and it's not like HR's only job is resume grokking so minimal displacement.