Comment by 0xbadcafebee
7 hours ago
This insanity only exists because the tech industry is standard-less. No formal education needed, no formal training requirement, no apprenticeship, no software building code, no professional organization. Resumes have never been a good predictor of success - and why would they be?? Even if they're truthful and it's "impressive looking", that doesn't give you any assurance of knowledge, of who they learned under, what they learned, that they passed some minimum criteria. We might as well be rolling dice. So why not an LLM that randomly assigns scores?
Do you think fields that have formal criteria don’t use resumes with keywords? I bet Lawyers look for school names and big law firms all the time.
Credentialing helps maintain a quality floor. Does this person have basic employable skill? Nothing more. It actually doesn’t help you identify levels of talent and skill which is a universal hiring problem.
We do have a credential - a CS degree. And you can see it is a mixed signal. Employers can choose of their own free will to take risks on employees that do have this credential, or not.
Mandating by law that you must have a CS degree doesn’t seem to help our field as we famously have high performers across the spectrum of formal education.
I have no data to lean on other than my experience and intuition but I’d say that’s not the case. My domain is corporate finance, which encompasses a lot of structured roles and certifications, yet I consistently feel the Resume is just a poor device for making any judgement calls. Having people summarize their career into 1-2 pages of bullet points just doesn’t mean much. Especially now that keyword packing is a thing. It’s just meant as an introduction/sniff test to open the door for a conversation. Then it allows for deeper more probing questions to be asked. This where you’ll assess how impactful their contribution to a project actually was. Were they really living up to your definition of a manager, or were they more so an IC that had a lot responsibility. Stuff like that.
> Resumes have never been a good predictor of success
Applies broadly to the world, it’s not unique to tech
The problem is we have too many applicants to phone screen them all. For a lot of jobs today you end up with 10,000 applications, which is why these automated resume-skimming systems exist, but unfortunately this page shows how they basically don't work
People seem to hit a wall when flooded by resumes. They feel like there some needle in the haystack they need to find and it’s overwhelming. But you don’t have to read all of them. Or talk to all of them. Or use a system like this to filter.
If you know what you’re looking for, you just start skimming them and maybe ranking them based on your own rubric. If it’s an obvious “no” you can usually tell within 5 seconds skim. Once you have a handful of high ranking ones, stop, and talk to them. Repeat as necessary until you have a short list of people you’d want to hire. There might be 9900/10000 resumes you never even looked at and maybe one of them would have been slightly better but you can’t let perfection be the enemy of progress. Stand by your convictions of feeling the candidate is qualified and capable and meets what you expect and hire them, get back to business.
Having been in “talent shortage” mode for a long while I’d rather have 10000 resumes than 3. Having to pick one from a suboptimal selection is an awful position to be in, but sometimes a necessity.