> Bemoaning that non-technical people are the first to filter resumes is silly because it’s not going to change. What can change, however, is how they do the filtering. We need to start thinking analytically about these things, and I hope that publishing this data is a step in the right direction.
This is only true for very few companies (massive ones like Google). If you are running and engineering team of < 50 I think it makes a hell of a lot of sense for resume review to be on the engineers. 10 minutes a day of resume reviewing gets you through a ton of resumes (it takes me less than 60 seconds to determine if I want to continue talking to someone from a resume) at very little cost. You don't want your engineers handling scheduling etc., but resume review isn't really much of a time sink until you are getting tons of inbound all the time, which many companies wont ever get to.
And this:
> As you can see, “good” resumes focused much more on action words/doing stuff (“manage”, “ship”, “team”, “create”, and so on) versus “bad” resumes which, in turn, focused much more on details/technologies used/techniques.
Is highly biased by the fact that she was hiring for a web dev company. Resumes including words like "systems", "C++" and "algorithm" were considered bad because they received no offer. You don't really need the distributed systems guy who can write highly performant C++ and actually understands how to apply algorithms at a standard web dev job.
The grammar one worries me. I wonder if that was corrected for country of birth, e.g. if this is an apples for apples comparison of native English speakers (USA, Canada, UK, Australia etc) or if it includes non-native speakers.
If there are people of non-English decent, I wonder if they would be more likely to have errors, especially grammatical, that are understandable. If that is the case, this may simply be a correlation to poor interview performance, and a bias towards the singular group of native English speakers, and that they may have let great programmers go.
Now, I'm not saying it is true, I am just saying that is a possibility that would alarm me when errors on a resume is such a huge indicator, and wonder whether that is not something they should be correcting for.
If having worked at a top company is more correlated with success than any combination of one's own metrics, then I'd look for ways to improve the recruiting process.
Some comments: -- If you're running a good company, then the resumes will be filtered by technical people, not HR. There really aren't too many of them (if you're big enough to be getting thousands of resumes, then you have enough engineers to do a first pass.) And don't just give the resumes to these engineers, you need to train them on what to look for.
It is already changing that Engineers filter the resumes and not HR. Good startups do this.
Hiring -- especially for a startup-- is absolutely the most valuable thing, and it is a valuable use of engineers time (but only have engineers who want to do it and care about the hiring process do it.)
"Before I share the actual results, a quick word about context is in order. TrialPay’s hiring standards are quite high. We ended up interviewing roughly 1 in 10 people that applied. "
A non-technical person (yeah yeah, I don't believe for a second she was ever an engineer, that's vanity talking) is eliminating %90 of the applicants and they think that's a "high bar"? No. That's randomness.
-- Top Company.
I love that she thinks having worked at a "Top company" like Amazon is an indicator of success. I pick amazon because I've worked there and its in the news lately for being totally poorly managed. That poor management means the engineering side of the house is a total and absolute mess. Bugs I fixed in 2006 are STILL BROKEN. Because they were regressed due to mismanagement. The QA team that was focusing on that area is totally disbanded. This areas of the site has not improved at all, and has in fact gotten worse over the past 10 years-- and it's critical- it's product search!
So, they will hire people from Top Companies (and put them thru the incompetent HR filter) over better engineers with good side projects.
Great.
This seems pretty reasonable; "having worked at a top company matters" could speak more to the hiring practices of "top company" than to anything else.
A candidate who worked at a "top company" was (probably) already prefiltered by "top company"'s hiring practices.
Holy selection bias Batman!
So the people with resumes so awesome that they could land an interview despite having no CS degree did well in interviews? Color me unimpressed.
I can't comment on the typo thing as it never seems to be a problem in my team. But here are some thoughts for the hiring culture in China. I am a technical manager and currently taking care of a team of engineers in a large online education company. I do recruiting myself.
> having attended a top computer science school doesn’t matter.
Matters to me. Unlike in U.S., the selection process for college/university entrance is more effective in China, especially for top schools. I am not saying those from less top schools are not as good. It is just more efficient for the resume screening. The education system has done this much better than a short interview or resume.
> listing side projects on your resume isn’t as advantageous as expected.
Somewhat agree. It does have some impact, but I will read the code. It is advantageous for me as I can see his previous work in deep details.
> GPA doesn’t seem to matter.
Hm... here nobody lists GPA unless it's very high, and high GPA means nothing to me.
> having worked at a top company matters.
It does. Former employees from Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (BAT) are more welcome, for the same reason as the top school thing. The selection there is much more strict and cruel. But I often ask the question 'why you leave B/A/T while they pay better and are generous in stock options?'. The question implies my concern that the candidate leaves B/A/T for some weakness that may also have bad influence in my team.
The branding of top company is a double-edged sword. While you are enjoying the branding, you must be prepared to explain why giving it up.
The more I read this, the more skeptical I become. All this shows is "What characteristics are most likely to get you an offer?" This is a little important from a narrow process metric, but isn't valuable to the company's bottom line.
2 more important questions: 1 - "Which characteristics are more likely to appear in high performers than low performers and non-hires?"
2 - "Are we over-weighting or under-weighting certain characteristics in our recruiting process based on our knowledge of question 1?"
Question 2 is actually much harder to answer. For example, if you find no correlation between GPA and performance, it isn't that GPA doesn't matter, it's that you're already weighing it properly in the performance decision. (It could be that you ignore it, or it could be that you give it tons of weight, but either way, the lack of correlation to performance post-hire means you're doing the right thing)
I've read and re-read this post a number of times. It resonates because hiring is broken and companies are looking for ways to triage the process. Yet when I look at the data points being captured, I ask 'what is really being measured?' Ability to work and ship product or Hoop jumpers? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10073663)
A new hire at a Startup can and should look more like what I found at lighttable, cf 'Meet the new guy': http://lighttable.com/2015/01/13/light-table-hack-night/
The progression from plugin contributor to new hire is measured in actual results and peer interaction, not through second order measurements. Adapt or die.
>> listing side projects on your resume isn’t as advantageous as expected
I am surprised by this "finding". Why would side projects not be advantageous? Don't side projects establish that the candidate is actively keeping up to date on technologies and is so passionate about it that he/she works on it even outside office hours?
Previous HN discussion on this post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6326477