The importance of resumes has been overstated for many years now, and I look forward to the day they are phased out entirely. Minor grammar changes are not what is making the difference between getting an interview or not. Years' worth of work cannot be distilled down to 2 lines on a piece of paper, and recruiters/hiring managers already know this.
Employers are looking at your education, companies you worked at, years of experience, and maybe a vague idea of what your work area was before this. Just this info is enough to make a decision for whether to call you for an interview, and after that the resume is useless.
As others already pointing out, seems like you're making huge generalisation here, which appears to be incorrect.
Being on employers side, I give little-to-no attention to education. Seen MBAs with no critical thinking or skills whatsoever and dropouts with very diligent and knowledgeable approaches.
For me, resume is not just a boring list of what you did, but also the way it is written - lucidity, points emphasised, etc. It all speaks loudly of personality.
And yea, if there are grammar mistakes it most likely will go to bin. Not because I particularly value grammar (which I do not) but because resume is usually supposed to be diligently written/reread by the candidate. If he/she didn't bother to do that properly - the damn thing that potentially land him/her job - this negligence says for itself, further projects, had there been any, will not be cared properly.
That's my opinion which is in no way representative or absolute in it's truth. I'd like just to pinpoint that there may be few opinions on the matter.
I place quite a bit of importance on cover letters. Cover letters that are concise and clear and professional don't come up often, and are always highly appreciated. Well written cover letters and resumes also correlate highly with the professionalism and abilities of candidates, in my experience. I hire mostly for non-technical positions, and I am mindful that in highly technical positions, maybe past work speaks for itself, and there's less emphasis on cover letter and resume.
> For me, resume is not just a boring list of what you did, but also the way it is written - lucidity, points emphasised, etc. It all speaks loudly of personality.
Do you require the candidates to have written the resume themselves? Otherwise it's risky to read so much personality into it.
Resumes are usually required to be truthful, sometimes this is even verified, but I've never seen a requirement that I can't just have an agent write it for me; like how students write essays.
Agree with you here. No, there is no such requirement and it's probably not necessary because it's goal is just to get an interview (or not to get it).
It's not a magic stick allowing to make a perfect choice, more like an assessment option. That's being said, sometimes it worth to give a shot to someone whose CV is sub par.
Up to a point, all resumes are reasonably well written. Now if you are filtering the top 10% of these resumes based on writing.. you are likely to get people who at best are good writers and no different from other candidates' resumes you rejected.
Do you want good writers? Maybe, but not everyone. I honestly do think the importance towards grammar and "writing" in resumes are overstated.
Perhaps to my poor choice of words you have assumed that selection is being made based on good writing. it's not that simple.
We have to define "good writing". Good doesn't necessarily means CV written in a way for Shakespeare to become jealous to lucidity. It has to meet bare minimum - as in have zero grammar mistakes.
To make an example, you probably won't go to a first date in your pyjamas with stains on it but will dress nicely. The date (and whatever follows) may not be up to your expectations, but if you do use pyjamas, it most certainly will. Not because your pyjama is not magnificent but just because having negligence in dressing properly shows arrogance and disrespect to someone who joins you.
If you need a Windows admin that states proficiency in Wnidows in the CV, you can infer that not much attention has been put on the CV. If not much attention has been put in the much important first contact with your company, what’s the experience going to be n months down the line, with e.g. powershell scripts that don’t come with spellchecking?
Mostly, hiring has a biased risk matrix. You don’t get hurt by missing a good candidate so much as hiring a bad one. So that makes you conservative in choices. Obviously 1 typo can happen but think about 5 to 10. If you have a lot of CVs to wade through, awful documents going to the bin is not a bad first step in the process.
I've also been on the employer side for a couple of teams. I see the resume/interview process like dating: When you just meet someone that interests you, you go out of your way to look clean and nice on your date.
When I see sloppy resumes or feel the interviewee is not interested/engaged during the interview process, I can imagine how they will be once I hire them.
Thank you for throwing away my resume based on a minor grammatical mistake. I have no interest of working for a team whose supervisor is actively avoiding people whose first language is not English. I would rather work with skilled people regardless of their country of origin.
If you pardon the way I am going to put it - you seriously may have to work not just on reading, but also on comprehension skills. English may not be your native language (and it's not mine either), but if you demonstrate hostility with passive aggressive tone and rationalise it with made up arguments (looking at the part where non-english speakers are "discriminated"), being on hiring side probably I will give you a chance to apply your skills elsewhere.
As to being non-native English speaker, you may not be able to create perfect wording - that's fine, but if knowing this you're too lazy or entitled not to speel check it at least -it has nothing to do with knowledge but just plain negligence or ignorance.
If you say on your resume that english is not your first language, I'll pass the mistakes for sure. And I may even admire the quality of your non-mother-tongue english.
With this arrogant posture, I would think of you as a dodged bullet tbh. Btw even though I'm not the original commenter, I agree with her sentiment. And English is not my first language.
Why is it so extraordinary to ask people to pay attention to what they are doing. Specially when going for something that supposedly interest them?
Imagine you are on your first date with that boy/girl that you DIE for. Would you take care of every detail ? Would you groom yourself, comb yourself even though you are not a barber or a stylist? Now THAT is showing interest.
> Employers are looking at your education, companies you worked at, years of experience, and maybe a vague idea of what your work area was before this.
Speak for yourself. The biggest signal I have when deciding whether to call you for an interview is your resume.
I have never considered education so far. There’s 2 states: I know the school, and I don’t know the school. I’ve never known any school so far.
Anyway, your resume decides how enthusiastic I’m going to be when starting your interview. Which is going to make things easier when that time comes.
This is a reminder that a lot of this comes down to the whims of whoever is staffed at HR. I’ve often read contradictory advice about resumes in articles written by people in charge of hiring. It’s not a big surprise, a lot of these views are arbitrary (though they will insist otherwise!)
I agree. You apply to 20 identical places, only 2 call you. One called you because you worked at ACME, the other because they saw the word WIDGETS on your resume. It was the same damn resume and the perfect action word or format did not matter all that much. But I still spend hours on resume, even if it helps improve 1% of my chance it is a good exercise. I've seen people with terrible resumes, I don't want to be one of those.
Not only that, but if you re-apply again to the same 20 places, the 2 that call you will likely be different than the previous 2 because a different person looked at your resume this time.
> I know the school, and I don’t know the school. I’ve never known any school so far.
Either you're interviewing bottom-tier candidates or haven't paid any attention to schools that are out there. If you're in the US, you should be recognize the names of the top 25 CS schools. You might not know their rank, but there aren't any obscure names on that list, and they graduate a lot of students.
I was commenting that it's weird for someone screening resumes to not recognize many schools. Hypothetically, I could see you going to Harvey Mudd (great school) and a hiring manager not knowing about it. All the resumes aren't from those schools, though. You'd think a Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, CMU, Illinois resume would have passed by at some point.
When I was a hiring manager, most of the candidates I ran into came from international universities I had not heard about. Instead, I interviewed people based on the projects they had worked on.
In the other extreme I've even heard people here in HN argue that MIT and Stanford graduates are often mediocre, which is very different from my experience.
Hiring is hard and we all do it differently. YMMV.
> At that point I might as well memorize them all.
Read through the list. You'll probably recognize a lot of the names. Out of 50, if you pay much attention to colleges in the US, I bet you'll recognize 40 of them.
It becomes outright silly when US recruiters are charged with going through non-US resumes. We've had an Irish engineer being asked if this German university is "Ivy league equivalent". To which the only possible reply is "how the hell am I supposed to know?" There's 50-ish separate education systems, have fun making any sense out of it.
That’s amusing. The German university system was actively designed (or modified) after 1968 to get rid of all such prestige hierarchies. There are real universities and there are universities of the applied sciences and that’s really it. Every German university is a high quality university.
This is because in my experience, CS degrees are incredibly popular and a lot of people get them even though they may not be particularly good at programming or even enjoy it. 20 years ago, I'd put the CS degree higher up, but today Universities have lowered standards significantly and are minting lots of CS graduates with dollar signs in their eyes.
But that's not how it works because those with only a college degree are (for the most part) not competing for the same set of jobs as those with work experience. They are competing for internships, and when it comes to internships, you are going to hire someone with a CS degree over someone with an EE degree. Therefore you are right, when it comes to internships.
When someone has only a degree and no work experience, that's a risky proposition -- those candidates should be routed to internships so both sides can get to know each other without a long term commitment. In all the companies I've ever worked with, we've never hired straight from college without it being an internship. More likely than not, an internship will result in a job offer if it goes well, and IME most do go well. That means that in practice, it's much easier for college graduates to enter the labor market. But they enter via internships that are converted to offers and generate work experience. Then the work experience is all that counts and the degree becomes a checkbox.
In other words, your college degree is important, but it's important to open the door to your first real job by getting you an internship. After that, it very rapidly decays in importance. This is because the work experience is so much more informative and relevant than the education. I've never looked at anyone's grades or honors, and it's not uncommon to have a lot of employees without a college degree if they have proven their skills in other ways. This disregard for grades or degree and focus on actual skills is what makes things like dev bootcamps work (for good or ill).
I might be biased since I don’t have a CS degree, but I consider having a degree in the humanities a potentially more positive signal than a typical CS degree. It could indicate that the candidate is able to learn programming and software development on their own, and are interested in the field enough to “switch” careers despite being in an apparent disadvantage.
In contrast when you screen resumes you invariably come across people who apparently managed to get a CS degree without learning anything. They won’t be dissuaded from applying to technical positions but if one doesn’t have a CS or related technical degree they probably have some confidence in their own ability.
There’s also a factor where some employers simply pass on resumes if the candidate does not meet strict degree requirements. This also increases the average quality of the non-CS degree holder a bit.
> It could indicate that the candidate is able to learn programming and software development on their own, and are interested in the field enough to “switch” careers despite being in an apparent disadvantage.
Call me cynical, but if I were to see an art history major switch to programming, I wouldn't think "this is a person that decided he loves CS more than art history", I'd think "this is a person that loves art history and ran out of money."
Of course that's all from the resume. Once you actually meet someone and work with them, you can find out pretty quickly how passionate they are and where their interests are. But we are talking about making judgements off of resumes, which again is why work history trumps all. If someone succeeded at a place with similar requirements to yours, that is a much more important signal of qualification than education, so once you land that first job, whether you were an art history major or cs major isn't so important. Might as well study what you love and then figure out how you fit into the labor market later.
Why are you assuming all the CS candidates are not passionate about the degree. It doesn't make sense. Many are deeply passionate about CS and will learn on their own. This is compounded by the theory in uni and learning opportunities.
> Why are you assuming all the CS candidates are not passionate about the degree.
I don't think I said or suggested that?
What I implied is that people tend to look for jobs related to their degree if they don't have a good idea what they want. There are those passionate CS degree holders and dispassionate CS degree holders applying for a (say) software dev job. There are probably very few dispassionate humanities degree holders applying to the same job. It's some signal, and I don't think one has to dismiss the importance of a CS degree to see that.
> 20 years ago, I'd put the CS degree higher up, but today Universities have lowered standards significantly and are minting lots of CS graduates with dollar signs in their eyes.
In addition I’ve heard of an seen a number of things in CS programs to make me question their quality. I can’t speak to the other degrees.
I'm in a senior position with no degree and the absolute best engineers I have ever worked with almost all have music degrees.
Edit: it's also worth noting as an ex-hedgie that in technical roles most of the firms specifically filter for people with musical ability for this reason.
The best people in any field are the ones that passed the harshest filter, and pole vaulting from music to programming is about as demanding as it gets.
Some of the best developers I’ve worked (and work) with are from a music background with an interest in computer music also. I guess maybe part of it is that at a certain point in writing music software you really need to be using C++, and audio software in particular is quite unforgiving due to its real-time nature, so you have to learn some fundamentals to write performante code? But I’m sure there’s more to it than just that.
I’ve also worked with some really smart people from a physics background.
Yeah I think that's mostly accurate. I also think that learning signals processing/sampling teaches you an enormous amount of practical, transferrable skill.
Similar kinds of problems come up in physics, so for me this tracks.
People can be petty. I've seen no shortage of candidates get passed on because of spelling mistakes or something equally silly, and it happens a lot more than you'd like to think. Maybe the resume reviewer is having a bad day, or their dad told them "people that do X are dumb" and so anytime they see X they think someone is dumb. I've even worked at places that fast-tracked candidates from USC because the founders were from there.
People are biased, and those biases will come across.
> I've seen no shortage of candidates get passed on because of spelling mistakes or something equally silly
I wouldn't use this as the only basis to pass on a candidate, but it'd certainly be a red flag[1]. If you can't take the time to even run spellcheck on your CV - a document you have specifically crafted for presumably serious people to read - what does that say about your attention to detail at work?
There's room for leniency, obviously, because even professional proofreaders miss stuff and not everyone is writing in their native language, but some baseline level of competence is expected.
1. I'm usually hiring people in design and product, not engineering, so ymmv.
It says a lot. Just because it is a bias, doesn't make it wrong. I've meet enough people in my career that would prove the rule about attention to details.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point (or maybe this is your point), but doesn't this take effectively invalidate the entire human interviewing process? The whole thing is just a series of actions (portfolio review, phone screen, whatever) that give the reviwer(s) a set of mostly subjective data points from which they infer a candidate's fit for a particular role.
I've had plenty of recruiters that could ignore silly resume mistakes and find gem candidates. I've also hired candidates with horrible resumes, and it's never been a problem.
Evaluate a candidate based on their experience and qualifications, everything else is just to satisfy our own egos.
> Evaluate a candidate based on their experience and qualifications
Well, as I said I typically hire in design and product, so "proven ability to produce high-quality written content" is often an important qualification.
I'm a stickler for typos, but I would note that sometimes resumes are sent by recruiters who have reached out to the candidate and are trying to get them hired (so they can get a commission). These recruiters will sometimes edit resumes — even PDFs, in my experience — and can sometimes accidentally inject typos or formatting oddities.
One reason that recruiters want to tinker with your resume is to remove contact information, so they can ensure that the company can't reach you without going through them.
I was livid when this happened to me, especially after I made clear that I did not want the recruiter to send any documents on my behalf.
It could also be because they're looking for easy ways to filter out candidates if the applicant pool is particularly large.
Think of it as dimensionality reduction—many people claim to be detail-oriented, but mistakes on a resume are an easy way for reviewers to verify that claim.
I fear this would filter out a lot of perfectly competent engineers whose native language is not English.
Spelling issues are inexcusable given how easy they are to catch (I hear Microsoft Office has a spell check feature), but grammar issues beyond that should largely be overlooked.
I used to work with someone who had been a manager in 80s Britain (high unemployment) and he said they threw any applicable in a brown envelope in the bin.
It wasn't about skills or experience or culture fit, but about getting the hiring done in a sane amount of time.
But they're not easy ways. There's absolutely no correlation between resume quality and candidate performance, and they're just idiosyncrasies we develop over time. We trick ourselves into believing these signals are important, when they're not.
> There's absolutely no correlation between resume quality and candidate performance
I don't think that's entirely true. The resume is a product of a potential hire, and it gives off the first impression of their organizational and writing skills. While it shouldn't be the _only_ deciding factor, that first impression is an important signal for a hiring manager who has to filter potentially hundreds of candidates.
That's like saying a first date is in indication of a couples future. It's a bit silly. Sure, if it's absolutely chock-full of errors that could be a sign, but one or two are the kind of things you're supposed to ignore.
> that first impression is an important signal for a hiring manager
Only because people have been trained to judge others based on petty things, so people have responded in kind. Not because it's actually a valuable effort, but to give people one less reason to throw it in the "No" pile.
It sometimes can be indicative. We recently had a resume with an error in the birthday (would have been only 1y old by that) and a couple of other errors. Candidate didn’t even know who he was applying for and should clearly have been filtered out by HR. If you list technologies with spelling errors, like “Sql” you clearly don’t know what you’re talking about.
> like “Sql” you clearly don’t know what you’re talking about
This is the kind of silly leap I'm talking about. People infer WAY too much from something like a word in a digital document and extrapolate that into something they use to impact a persons life.
I had an employee that insisted on asking candidates what they're 5 year plan, and was insistent that long-term goals were serious indicators if a candidate should be hired. She would give candidates thumbs down if she didn't like the answer, even if they could do the work.
You're taking it out of context. I'm not saying that taken along it's a strong enough negative signal to filter, but it makes me being alert and I'll drill more into these items. But there are a lot of resumes that are clearly low effort and have a bunch of these mistakes - those are in my experience always indicative of the candidates' quality.
Resumes have been on the verge of death for decades now, yet they are still with us.
Yes, once you get in the door and get an interview the resume is worthless. Except it's not.
The interviewer may need to run you past someone else. Will he/she reach for their carefully curated interview notes and pass those on? No, because they haven't written them up, or they can't be emailed, or the recruitment system is rubbish or [some reason].
But the resume is still there, a nice Word doc or pdf that can be easily emailed around.
Source: too many years building recruitment systems.
Literally! I can count on one hand the number of interviewers who have asked me about my past work experience. The most important thing seems to be whether I can regurgitate various tree operations on a whiteboard. It's only a matter of time before they cut out the middle man and start hiring candidates by (university_ranking, hackerrank_ranking) in lexical order without as much as an interview.
That seems crazy to me! Whenever I conduct interviews questions about specific situations from their past experience are most of what I ask. "Tell me about a time when..."
I find they can very quickly uncover potential red flags. They can also lead to interesting discussions that leave both me and the candidate enthused about progressing to the next stage.
For software engineers, even all the extracurricular software activities is useless! Its like sure maybe have a public github, but the only endgame from actually contributing to a project is just an imagination that you'll stand out for a recruiter to actually say hello. It doesn't give you a leg up on any hiring manager decision, you have to solve the silly algorithm problems, system design and behavior interview just like everyone else!
The recruiter was already open to saying hello just because you said you can code for other people.
Not sure I agree with this one. Over the last few years, I've had tons of consulting work purely from my activity in the OSS ecosystem. I also got my last two jobs because of my activity in the OSS ecosystem. "... I saw your GH profile and noticed you have significant contributions to XXX, we'd love to have you join the team". I didn't have to do any algorithm questions for those organizations.
> I didn't have to do any algorithm questions for those organizations.
okay. many organizations would not make that exception. and there are many stewards of key open source dependencies that have talked about how they couldn't pass interviews to places that heavily use their software.
> even all the extracurricular software activities is useless!
I'm one of the jerks who does a coding interview; but for the people who do interviews on what you've done, having something on your resume that you can talk about is a good thing. Interviewers want to hear that you've got deep experience in something and can explain what you did at a high level and in detail. If you've got that from work experience, great; if not, something you did independently is nice too; otherwise it's got to be coming from classwork, which is ok, but kind of iffy. Ideally, two, maybe three projects you can talk about is good to touch on in the resume.
> Employers are looking at your education, companies you worked at, years of experience, and maybe a vague idea of what your work area was before this.
Isn't this what a resume is? Just the list of those things that Employers want to look at.
It isn't what most people think a resume should be, looking at the very article we are discussing as well all the "resume consulting/polishing" services out there.
Plus, employers are anyways going to make you fill out all this info separately in their recruiting system.
When I look at a CV I want to see someone's achievements, ideally quantified. What are they proud of, how have they helped their previous teams/products/companies to succeed, are they passionate about what they do.
Resumes are still needed to get you to interviews so they are never going to disappear... Plus you seem to forget that HR uses resumes to filter candidates even before the hiring manager ever sees anything.
Employers are looking at your education, companies you worked at, years of experience, and maybe a vague idea of what your work area was before this. Just this info is enough to make a decision for whether to call you for an interview, and after that the resume is useless.