
A Plan for Résumé Spam - raganwald
http://raganwald.posterous.com/a-plan-for-resume-spam
======
tptacek
I wouldn't be OK with you sharing with other people the fact that I
interviewed with you, especially if it was on a formalized routinized basis
and most especially if it was to drive some service that computed my value as
a candidate.

Things - 'tptacek - is - OK - with is a _very_ poor measurement of how good an
idea is or isn't (unless it involves Javascript crypto in which case I am
right), but I thought you might want the data point. I like to think of myself
as an A-player (or at least an A- player), and I'd skip talking to your
company if I knew it did something like this.

For what it's worth, I think a better way to supply talent to your team is not
to depend on a steady inflow of resumes to begin with, but to actively
recruit. We do classes, we give talks, and I yell at people on Hacker News;
all of these things have outperformed job reqs for us on recruiting.

~~~
btilly
_I wouldn't be OK with you sharing with other people the fact that I
interviewed with you..._

PARTICULARLY not if through those other people there is a reasonably high
chance of it getting back to my employer.

You could avoid that by having the service not provide any level of detail,
just a "yes/no, this person passed threshold X requests in time T." But if
that got popular then I guarantee that craptastic employers would get the
bright idea of, after hiring people, having lots of fake companies report
interviewing them. This would make their current employees have trouble
getting interviewed elsewhere.

~~~
joe_the_user
By your own line of reasoning, then, this could not be successful.

~~~
btilly
Not quite.

The initial idea, as presented, would likely fail to succeed once people were
aware of the risk. The amended version could succeed, but there are high odds
of some abuse.

The pertinent question then is whether the abused version is worse than the
current reality. My gut says that most employers won't abuse it, and it would
prove to be at least a somewhat useful filter. So despite my negative tone, it
at least has a chance.

------
edw519
_There's a huge inefficiency in the hiring market, and someone is going to
make some money solving the problem._

There are huge inefficiencies in _everything_. That doesn't necessarily mean
there's a problem. The only ones who think that hiring is a problem are those
who haven't solved it.

Think of it as a bell curve (what a surprise). Some companies suck. Most are
mediocre. But a few have it figured out.

I've been on both sides of this process more times than I can count and I've
noticed that the companies that do it well have a lot in common:

\- They rely on up front third party aptitude and personality screening to
eliminate 95% to 98%. They pay, but it's a bargain.

\- They use interview quantity (lots of them, by phone and in person).

\- They use interview quality (peers, supervisors, customers getting well
below the "surface").

\- They use variety (interviews, testing, get-togethers).

\- They check references without a canned checklist (logic path driven, in-
depth).

\- They use HR primarily for formalities.

\- They take their time.

\- They "solve a long term problem" for all parties involved.

I admire your desire to solve a problem that affects so many, but I wonder if
your approach is the best way. Maybe it's better for the mediocre to do what
already works by copying the excellent. Then they wouldn't have such a big
problem to solve.

~~~
lsc
the only time I've ever even seen a third party aptitude or personality test
before an interview was when I was 15 and I worked for some temp agency moving
things around in a warehouse. In the 15 years hence, working as a programmer
or SysAdmin, I've never seen such a thing. Coincidentally, that was also my
last drug test.

Now, I don't use illegal drugs; Hell, I could easily pass one of those 'hair
tests' that see if you have used marijuana in the last few years. Still, as an
employee, my assumption is that if you require a drug test or similar, you are
not a company that will respect me as an employee. My assumption if you made
me take a 'personality test' would be that your company is run by idiots.

The rest seems to be pretty good advice, assuming that you are a company that
can't just hire people as a contractor, and then let them go if they don't
work out.

this is what I do at my company: If someone looks good, I hire them for a
short project. If they don't do well, they get paid for their time and sent on
their way. Personally, I think it's more respectful than grilling someone for
4 or 8 hours without pay, and it probably gives me a better idea of how good
they are.

~~~
megablast
You make a good point, but as for telling how a company will respect you,
because they ask for a drug test, you may be a little off.

If it is a big company, HR practices will have nothing to do with anything
else in the company, so don't judge the department you will be working in by
what HR makes you do. On the other hand, a company that lets HR have free
reign to do anything, may cause endless suffering as HR feel the need to make
themselves more "integrated".

I recently interviewed for a developer in a government position, and decided
that the people doing the interview are the ones are out of their depth, and
should be unemployed. They clearly had to technical understanding where it was
required for their job, and got very confused by the simplest question.

~~~
buro9
HR practices disconnected from a respectful approach to the individuals
involved can certainly reflect on the general approach of a large company.

HR is one of those neglected things, if they've gotten that right then they
tend to have other things right. It's also something that you hope will be
invisible and will "just work" when you're there... you want it to be
friendly, respectful, and efficient.

I would say that if HR appears from the outset to be burdened by needless
bureaucracy (an aptitude test when you acknowledge the
position/department/legislature may not require it) definitely checks the box
of reflecting a corporate culture that allows such crud to creep in.

I don't go for any positions that: 1) Require me to jump through silly hoops
when there is no benefit from anyone to doing so. 2) Bog me down in
bureaucracy before I've even begun. 3) Require me to give access to any
personal data that they do not have the legal right to ask for.

On that last one, I'm talking about social networking credentials, overly
invasive background checks that don't relate to the position and so on. I was
fine with the Home Office and GCHQ asking questions about my finances, running
criminal record checks and contacting friends and family as part of a security
vetting process that they have the legal mandate to perform... but I wouldn't
be fine with a large company performing such things.

------
harpastum
What if someone set up an "almost hired" list? That is, after a company
finishes its job search, it can send a few names (with applicant approval) to
the service.

Other employers can enter names from resumés they have received, and find out
if that applicant made it to the final lap on any recent interviews.

There's no direct benefit to companies putting the names in, but it could be
seen as a 'pay it forward' sort of service -- if you benefitted from this,
please put your finalists in after you choose your hire.

One important distinction the service would have to make is not allow
_browsing_ of names, only specific name-lookup, so job-seekers can only be
found by companies they're applying to.

~~~
joe_the_user
There are dicey and unpleasant issues involved in sharing information about
your hiring process.

 _... especially if you're going to be talking to people who are presently
employed..._

------
crux_
There's a bunch of obvious problems, off the top of my head: People should be
able to to look for a job without necessarily tipping of their current
employer. Ambition and hard work, unless expressed very carefully, could well
become an endless trap. Those who work in industries with terrible
unemployment will continue to be stigmatized even after they abandon their
search in their old field and strike out into new ones. There's potential for
abuse, e.g. Apple could falsely report all its current employees as submitting
bajillions of resumes and thus prevent them finding other jobs. There's the
problem of recruiters who submit resumes indiscriminately on a job seeker's
behalf, sometimes without permission or even the seeker's knowledge.

------
ig1
An interesting idea (I'm sort of involved in this space), but I'd be a bit
worried about the legalities involved.

A few years back there was a case where a group of companies (I think in the
construction sector) were prosecuted for operating a cartel because they co-
operated in developing a blacklist of "trouble-maker" employees (as a do-not-
hire list).

~~~
raganwald
I have also thought of lots of problems with this business that need to be
solved... But that's ok, that's why we always say the execution is more
important than the idea: "Execution" is often a blanket term for "Negotiating
all the hurdles and picking the right trade-offs and which problems to solve
to make it a reality."

One that would keep me up at night is an employer who 'tastes' their
employee's resume by sending it to a fake job ad. If it has a positive spray
score of any magnitude, they have just learned that the employee is job
seeking. Bad!

------
ismarc
The main problem with hiring/resumes isn't just volume. Volume has become a
problem with the ease of sending the resume. We removed a barrier(fax, mail,
drop off) and naturally the flood started. Businesses compensated by listing
arbitrary values for hard skills/experience, which in turn applicants sent
resumes to places they were even more unqualified for on paper.

The crux of the problem is that there isn't a way to directly quantify what is
absolutely needed for a job position, and in turn, there isn't a way for an
applicant to demonstrate they meet those qualifications, short of the person
doing the job. The need for human interpretation is too ingrained in the
current process, even with the filtering mechanisms in place

~~~
cabalamat
> _The crux of the problem is that there isn't a way to directly quantify what
> is absolutely needed for a job position, and in turn, there isn't a way for
> an applicant to demonstrate they meet those qualifications, short of the
> person doing the job._

This varies according to job. E.g. for a programming job, the employer could
ask applicants to solve a programming problem, such as FizzBuzz (or something
harder).

~~~
ismarc
But even that doesn't provide any quantitative judgement of what the job
requires or what the applicant can do. It says they can write code that does
X. I've never been a part of or seen a job where the only real skills needed
were syntax knowledge and basic familiarity with common algorithms. There's
things like interpreting requirements, time/task/priority management, bug
diagnosis, impact assessment, domain knowledge. How do you quantify "Can
figure out why we keep getting kernel panics after the kernel upgrade on only
some machines? Oh, the thing the machines have in common are they are the
multi-core/multi-processor boxes. Is it a bug in our code or the kernel? Are
they still acceptable for the position if they can't identify the problem, but
can identify that rolling the kernel back is a viable short-term alternative?"

The ideal scenario is the applicant mashes a button and gets a list of job
they're truly qualified and a good fit for (as in, highly likely to get a
phone screen on) and the hiring company can mash the same button. Everyone
keeps trying to find new ways to invent or improve the button. No filter or
screen is going to work until companies can definitively measure the quality
of applicants between two postings for the same job (e.g., A/B test job
position listings) and candidates determine if they are qualified based on
that.

There's a lot of problems to solve, but the biggest by far is the fact that
90% of the jobs out there have only "can breath, assistance to breath is ok"
and "can show up" as the hard skills that are required. I'm not kidding, go
spend a couple of hours on Monster, or Craigslist...at least programmer jobs
have <arbitrary number of years> in <technology X>...most jobs don't.

------
WillyF
I think that a much simpler solution is to charge people to apply for jobs.
That's what colleges do.

There are certainly some complications that would come along with this, but
there would be far fewer than with keeping a database of everyone who has ever
applied for any job.

I don't love the idea, and I know quite a few people have tried making it work
unsuccessfully, but I still think it's far more realistic.

~~~
cj
Colleges charge fees more to make money than to screen candidates. We don't
want to have the job market profiting from the unemployed.

Stanford University, for example: $90 fee X 20,000 applicants = $1,800,000

~~~
pwim
The first goal of universities charging to cover their costs. Stanford isn't
pocketing that 1.8 million.

~~~
cj
Maybe my opinions are a bit baised as a student who spent over $400 in fees
applying to colleges.

I would have assumed that my universities' costs would be offset by the
$40,000 I'm paying _every year_ for the next four years, rather than erroneous
fees that aren't tallied in the advertised total cost of attendance.

~~~
irrelative
The point of the fee isn't to make money. Imagine how many people would have
applied if it were free? They still need employees to read all of those
applications and they need to keep the quality of student up as high as
possible (so they can't just outsource it, or use a lottery).

Basically, your tuition could be even higher if they dropped the fee to apply.

------
colinprince
/This policy is, of course, roughly equivalent to only dating married people/

Doesn't make that much sense, since we're all prolly gnna change jobs 5 maybe
10 times. I hope I don't get married 5 or 10 times.

Maybe job applicants could put a note on their resumés saying what they want
to be doing in 3 to 5 years.

~~~
raganwald
Ok, this feels like we're quibbling. Would you accept a more liberal
definition of marriage such as common law?

 _This policy is, of course, roughly equivalent to only dating people who are
living with someone else._

Slightly more accurate but you know.... I'm going to claim poetic license. The
underlying sentiment seems to be correct even if there is some room to argue
the simile isn't 100% isomorphic to reality.

~~~
modoc
Great way to select people who can be lived with, aren't terrified of
commitment, etc... Although there may be fidelity issues... :)

~~~
Periodic
I've heard people say, when speaking of potential partners, that there's
nothing better than a widow/widower. They've already proven they aren't afraid
of commitment, that they can get along with someone, and they are single
through no fault of their own.

The equivalent in this case would be people who did good work, but at a
company that went under for reasons out of their control.

~~~
mkramlich
Therefore a two-time widow is even better. And a three-time widow. Wait, now
I'm getting suspicious...

------
riffer
First off, I want to congratulate you, reg, on coming up with such a fantastic
idea. With Joel's post, and the no-job-hoppers-wanted fracas from several
weeks ago, this is something that was in the air, and you were able to pick up
on that, and put it into words. Even better, you don't appear to be trying to
figure it all out on your own in a vacuum.

One approach to getting started would be to provide resume screening services
to employers. I'm sure there are a bunch of service businesses like that
today, but if you solve the problem like it is an NLP problem rather than an
HR problem, that could be a differentiator.

At a large enough enterprise, I'm sure there are people who are applying for a
bunch of different positions over an extended period of time, and just being
able to solve that problem intelligently for that one enterprise is something
that must be useful for some big firm out there. So I don't think you need to
have a bunch of employers on the system to get started.

But that doesn't address the real challenge, which seems to be that your
service provides clear benefits to the employer, but not for the employee. The
employer gets better candidates, more efficiently, and almost every business
that's hiring acknowledges that they have trouble finding enough good
candidates.

What about the potential employee? Why would they want to participate in this
sort of system vs. the status quo? That seems like the challenge to me, more
than legal issues, or the employer side of the equation.

There is definitely terrific potential here, exactly because hiring is
currently so inefficient: it'll be really interesting see how this idea
develops.

------
brc
Hiring and firing people means there are many laws implemented to protect the
guilt and the innocent. Where there are laws, there are lawyers. There's also
no clear place for monetisation.

Avoid ye, for here be dragons.

------
wglb
Perhaps I am too much of a simple country boy to be fully into the social
media online thing, but there is a whole aspect of job hunting/employee
finding scenario that is missing from our thinking here. Quite after the fact,
I realized that I had been an unconscious networker and that in my multi-
decade career that there had been a very low number of non-networked job
landings. The rest, including the consulting/contracting that I have done were
from the network I had grown into from previous professional relationships.

Being in a profession that automates things, we (self included) tend to try to
automate things that don't automate well, or do things by remote control that
should be done in person. One case in point was my son when he was in grade
school. There was a lot of difficulty for all involved for him to focus on his
homework. Finally, I hit on a pretty simple and essentially zero-technology
solution. I would sit in his room with him, not supervising him so much as
being there for him to ask whatever question he wanted. Many interesting
questions came up, and some were even related to his homework, but his grades
skyrocketed. This was about support and not about being the other room and
loudly saying "get back to your homework".

So if you have a mental bias towards automatability, this method sounds
"inefficient", but perhaps that is a false efficiency.

Similarly, successful hiring is forming a relationship. A relevant book is
"Confessions of a Headhunter" in which the author tells of tracking executives
for quite some time before an actual approach is made. Now that is
particularly expensive as executives are a smaller percentage of a population
than startup dudes and dudettes, but that seems to be a better direction to go
than trying to do this by remote control.

Incidentally, the introduction to that book tells of the author's sailing
experience in which he nearly won a race against severely better boats, and
failed to do so simply because he didn't happen to think that he could.

------
strlen
What exactly is wrong with Fizz-buzz as a 'spam reduction' technique?
Raganwald's method has several issues: it's unfair to people who are very
picky and are only looking for the best jobs themselves. Very often they're
the best people, for whom the search for a position that will fully use their
talent is much harder: they apply to companies that have a long hiring cycle
and high "false negative" rates, while they will reject offers they dislike.

Second, there's the obvious problem of privacy: it's a huge problem for
passive candidates (again, who are often -- but not always -- best of the
best) and a problem for candidates who apply for tough-to-get positions, have
a bad day (or the person interviewing them has a bad day) and now become
"damaged goods" by the virtue of a publicly known rejection (which could be no
indication of their lack of competence).

------
catch23
how would it solve the problem of recruiters sending the same resume to a few
hundred places? I know that there's a really old resume of mine that has been
forever circulating from a firm I used years ago.

~~~
raganwald
Most algorithms that work with real world data have a simple core but end up
covered with warts and exceptions because of stuff like this. No doubt a
company that does a good job with this has some special rule sor scoring
weights for resumes sent out by recruiters.

------
TeHCrAzY
Couldn't a large proportion of resume spam be filtered just by asking the
applicant for something specific, and ignoring anyone who doesn't comply? IE.
Add a specific phrase to the subject of the email. You could embed this in the
middle of the job spec; people whom don't read it carefully are likely not
worth interviewing anyway.

------
someone_here
This has a chicken and egg problem. You can only get companies to use this if
employees use it, and you can only get employees to use it if there are
employers. Employees would not want to limit themselves for no reason, either.

~~~
raganwald
One implementation would be a service where a job ads includes a submisison
mailbox like Gu1D@planForresumespam.com. The service company collects
statistics about who is spraying their email everywhere and provides employers
with a "spray score" for each resume collected.

No employee involvement would be required.

~~~
m_eiman
Don't use an external domain, just forward jobapplication@employer.com to
incoming@applicantfilter.com and have it forward only the approved
applications to hr@employer.com. Fully automated and transparent. Store the
rejected applicants and send them an automated "thanks for your time" when the
position is filled.

------
tjmaxal
Even though it's not perfect our current system has a lot of advantages over
previous systems like hiring only relatives, or making everyone contract
labor.

------
known
In IT field, latest technology is still considered as greatest.

