The New Résumé: Dumb and Dumber | Hacker News Reader

The New Résumé: Dumb and Dumber

online.wsj.com

31 pointsprakash21 comments

IME 'you're overqualified' = authoritarian management. A classic book worth reading is 'On the psychology of military incompetence' by Norman F. Dixon, if you don't mind extrapolating the observations to other contexts.

Extrapolating from other contexts is one of the most powerful exercises. Especially useful if you are in what appears to be an entirely novel context.

Not necessarily ...

If you're 'over-qualified' for a particular job, then you're either going to be promoted or switch jobs very quickly. In either case, the company still has to spend a lot of time and money training your replacement.

Just finished reading a piece that says "you're overqualified" == "you're too old" == lawsuit

http://www.hrtools.com/insights/beth_crosby/age_discriminati...

If employers are that worried about someone jumping ship they can always make them a contract employee.

That way they get the smart guy or gal AND the security of knowing they'll be around for a while.

Hiring duds just because they'll stick around for a long time seems self-defeating in a very fundamental way.

hiring duds also leads to hiring more duds once work ramps up and the current set of duds can't handle it. Rinse, lather, repeat...

I read the subtext of that article as "take a job that will pay you less than your worth because that is all that is available right now."

I was surprised when the article mentioned tech people lowering their expectations.

I've had a few friends in my city (Chicago) get laid off only to land higher paying jobs in 2-3 weeks.

Is that just a big-city phenomenon?

Here in New York we're having a miserable time hiring new grads for IT, worse than last year. We recently signed on with a headhunter, just for the sake of trying something else.

Are you just not getting any interested candidates, or are the candidates you find proving unqualified?

Outside of absolute necessity, there are other reasons people might want to work below their current capacity. The archtypical "day job." I've been working on a personal project which I hope to evolve into a business. I took some time off to do this in March. My finances are starting to run low and I've been looking for an easy job which will pay my rent and maybe have health insurance, and have had many of the problems described in the article. I was offered a job as a CTO of someone else's startup, but the nearby college won't hire me as a PHP drone.

I quit my job last October to try some writing (which unfortunately isn't going well) and some studying. I, too, am running short of funds, but got hired for a low level position at the local Walmart, which more than meets my bills, and gives me plenty of time to think about what I want.

Ironic that someone with 26 years of marketing experience had trouble figuring out how to present her resume.

The problem is more nuanced that that.

She is having to present herself as something she is not for the sake of getting whatever company to buy the product she is selling. She isn't lying as such, but she is electing to not tell certain truths that can get her potential employer rather irked if they find out later on she was just culling her resume to appear like a good fit. This is especially true if she does what most employers worry overqualified candidates will do, and she jumps rather swiftly to a more senior position elsewhere. Then it will be pretty obvious what happened, and she'll have a bad reputation with at least one firm.

This is not necessarily true.. My resume was slim since i recently graduated, i didn't get much call backs at all. The resume was the problem, when i started adding more technical jargon, specifically tailoring to what the tech or knowledge that the job required, that's when i got calls.

I found out that your degree does have a SIGNIFICANT factor, but it depends on the company. Boeing for example, 99.9999% of the time will only read your resume if you have a Engineering degree, heck the higher the degree the better. Same thing with Microsoft, Google, etc.

Learn to write a better resume, meaning dont throw stuff you know down. Put things that apply specifically to the job you're applying for. In this case she said she sent out 100 times? With what, the same exact resume? That's a mistake.

"I'd never feel comfortable putting a really high-level candidate into a lower level position," says Ms. Eilbes, who recruits for Manpower and other clients."

This is why headhunters would fuck up the whole world if given half the chance.

It's also exactly the opposite of what real achievers know to be true. Real progress begins once people are bigger than their jobs.

Agreed.

The headhunters aren't the only ones to blame though. They operate off of the notion, often correct, that people who fill positions they are totally capable of doing with extra time left over, they will encounter perpetual resistance to the progress they want to motivate. Eventually, they will get fed up and move somewhere else that either isn't averse to change, or where they don't have time to think about progressive ideas.

The headhunter is just playing the averages, since she'll probably collect the same fee regardless. She won't be rewarded differently for that one overqualified hire who turns out to be a major catalyst for progress at a company, but she'll be penalized the same for all of the overqualified hires which hit the brick wall of bureaucracy and leave.

"Eventually, they will get fed up and move somewhere else..."

This has nothing to do with the fact that they were bigger than the job. They knew that going in.

It has everything to do with the fact that their talents have been wasted and a great opportunity has been squandered by their management, who also knew that going in.

"Real progress begins once people are bigger than their jobs."

Interesting, care to elaborate ? thx.

There are so many examples and arguments I could make, but I'll leave you with just this one...

If you needed open heart surgery, would you prefer the surgeon who has done that exact same surgery 3 times or 100 times and published new procedures about that surgery? One has just been "promoted" into his job and the other is much bigger than his job and aspires to the next thing?

There's a much simpler explanation which I find equally plausible.

If the job you're applying for doesn't require a master's degree, then why waste the reader's precious attention on something irrelevant? As a programmer applying for a web development job, would you mention that you know how to program x86 assembler? Probably not.

Let's not forget that the word "résumé" is French for "summary". You're not supposed to include everything!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com