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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

by 0xbadcafebee1 days ago|

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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

by conductr1 days ago|

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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.

by groundzeros20151 days ago|

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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.

by 0xbadcafebee7 hours ago|

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The first big problem is the reliance on the resume at all. You can't express "talent and skill" in 2 pages of bullet points. In the best case the person who's good at making themselves look good actually ends up being that good. In the worst case you pass up an amazing hire because they didn't make the "right" bullet points. We need to stop using resumes, full stop.

But the second big problem is the competence floor. For 10 years now, I've worked with people who can barely do the job, and I often suspect don't understand what's being asked of them. We need people to apprentice so they are taught the correct lessons by a master engineer. There's a reason all the trades do the same thing. It ensures confidence that this person has been vetted and can do the job. Will they do the job? You can't guarantee that. But you also can't get more confident than "a master engineer said they're good to go".

I'm one of those people who dropped out of high school 25 yrs ago and got himself into tech. I was way too green; I had "talent", and none of the rest. I went to a sysadmin bootcamp (which went bankrupt and took my money) and got a couple certs out of it, which didn't help me get hired. I wanted someone to tell me how to do the job, so I could get hired and do the job. I wanted a trade school. What I ended up doing was bullshitting my way into positions and learning on the job. I'd rather have been confident in my abilities from the start (or apprenticed until I was confident).

by groundzeros20157 hours ago|

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> You can't express "talent and skill" in 2 pages of bullet points

This is a universal problem though. You only have 2 min of a reviewers time to sell yourself. That’s all a resume is.

> For 10 years now, I've worked with people who can barely do the job

I saw a lot of this before but it’s not been my experience lately. Probably because work for companies that do value degrees.

Once again, we have a credentialing option, it is just (correctly) not enforced.

> We need people to apprentice

Nobody really does this anymore because it’s so inefficient. Even trades which use those terms are really just a regulatory stamp (like professional engineer), not a close teaching relationship.

Apprenticeships were traditionally between very young men 12-14 and lasted for 8-10 years.