

No More Résumés, Say Some Firms - bconway
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203750404577173031991814896.html

======
dpritchett
Three points of contention, and then a pointer to more valuable advice from a
fellow HNer:

1) Union Square Ventures is a leading name in this space - _everyone_ knows
Fred Wilson's blog. On top of that, they only have three "staff" listed on
their site. USV can ask would-be employees to fly up to NYC to deliver resumes
in person and they'll still get plenty of applicants.

2) The job openings in the article that focus on surveys and personality tests
- supposedly instead of resumes - are clearly unskilled labor (e.g. social
media intern). This is exactly as it was when I applied to work as a waiter at
Olive Garden in 2000.

3) IGN's coding challenges are similarly suspect as a representatitve example
because game dev is a glamor industry with a surfeit of naifs lining up for
these underpaid jobs. Prized developers aren't going to participate in many
coding-contest-as-hiring-lottery situations unless they're just really
interested in the problem. Ask a YC company who's ever posted a hiring puzzle:
what percentage of your correct submissions were from people who didn't even
want the job?

The tactics cited above wrongheadedly invert the recruiting plan tptacek uses
at Matasano: Start from the assumption that you want the best people possible
and that those people will have plenty of great alternatives to working for
you. Do your best to get your company's name in front of those people and to
convince them that they'd have a rewarding time if they joined your team.

I trust Thomas's experience in identifying and recruiting talent far more than
I do a career WSJ reporter's [1] trend spotting.

[1] <http://www.linkedin.com/pub/rachel-emma-silverman/31/331/507>

~~~
ben1040
_Prized developers aren't going to participate in many coding-contest-as-
hiring-lottery situations unless they're just really interested in the
problem._

For a competent developer, a "cover letter brainteaser" that takes an hour to
do is essentially equivalent to a $100+ application fee (in terms of
opportunity cost).

~~~
hessenwolf
I actually haven't applied to Google specifically because they require at
least 6 interviews. Maybe they wouldn't want me anyway, but we're certainly
not going to find out.

------
droithomme
It's funny how the answer to not getting enough interest from qualified
candidates is to make it more troublesome and time consuming to apply so that
only unemployed people will bother.

It's often heard that 3 page CVs are an abomination since no one has time to
trawl through all that. But now, doing a video interview just to apply is OK
to require, at least according to this article.

Where I work, CVs with cover letters are fine, links to web presences are
fine, if someone wants to send a DVD or link to a private youtube exhortation
that's also fine. Whatever works for the candidate we'll look at it.

It can be tedious to sort through all these CVs, assuming your company is able
to get any relevant applications at all. But that's the price of acquiring
talented people. Hiring someone for a creative job like development is as
tricky as selecting a spouse to get married. It's a long term commitment that
will affect both of you profoundly. It's not the same as buying a pound of
hamburger.

~~~
enjo
Not to mention that I don't hae a twitter account, linked in profile of note,
or really any meaningful web presence. I'm kind of busy actually _making_
things.

~~~
zecho
This. I think instead of spending your time online being a blowhard on twitter
or your blog or wherever, you should be making things. Github, twitter, a
blog, whatever should just be artifacts created as a by-product of making
things.

The ideal employer who doesn't want resumes should be able to tell the
difference between these two things.

~~~
dpritchett
Better still to spend _most_ of your time making amazing things and then _just
enough_ time promoting them so as to generate a bit of notoriety.

Jeremy Ashkenas, Yehuda Katz, and Zed Shaw each build great things and give
them away to the community. They also blog about these great things and they
show up here on Hacker News to encourage discussion of their work.

------
jtbigwoo
Am I the only one who sees tons of red flags the moment a job opening requires
a video? It feels to me like the ivy league tradition of the in-person
interview. Ivy league administrators tell themselves it's easier to judge an
applicant's character and suitability in person, but in practice it turns into
another way to ensure that the table tilts in favor correct ethnicity and
income level.

Am I wrong to see the same thing in a video application? The more cash and
connections you have, the better video you're able to create. Don't tell me
the hiring manager won't notice the applicant in the $1500 suit with the
professional (but not too professional) video.

~~~
tptacek
Pre-recorded videos seem like a supremely silly job interview requirement.
Recording a video is nothing like talking to a human being, and ability to
execute videos is a learnable skill, not a marker of innate ability, so it's
weird to optimize a process around it.

But USV can create any requirement they'd like, and they'll still get
candidates, because a role at USV is a prestige job. They might just as well
require candidates to compose a freestyle rap about their accomplishments; it
wouldn't cost them candidates.

~~~
jiggy2011
When I was unemployed and desperate for any job I could find I attended some
monumentally stupid job interviews.

Being asked questions about your favorite superhero power or simpsons
character or which of their list of offensive unlikable celebrities I would
rather date.

I think part of the process sometimes is figuring out how far you will go to
humiliate yourself for them.

------
zavulon
Personally, I love this trend - I last updated my resume 3 years ago and
haven't sent it anywhere since. I just direct people to my portfolio (link in
profile) which has all the stuff I built. Much easier that way.

But in my previous life, I was an enterprise Java developer in the financial
industry. None of the projects I built are online - they're all proprietary
B2B applications. It's some of the best work I've ever did, yet no one will
ever find out about it online. The only way for me to tell this story is
through the resume.

How do people like that supposed to present themselves, in this new hot social
media environment?

~~~
patio11
One option: Word of your skill travels at approximately the speed of beer.
(i.e. Try traditional networking.)

You can also have a web presence about the work which does not actually
include the work. Talk about an interesting sub-problem which is non-
proprietary. Talk about architecture choices. Talk about the tech you used and
the problems you overcame while using it. Write about how firms in the
financial industry are missing opportunities to throw Java at problems and
make heaps of money.

~~~
cube13
Why should I have to do that, outside of work, in order to get another job?
I'm happy with my current work, and that means that I'm not trying to go out
of my way to find additional projects on the side. I have hobbies I'd rather
be doing outside of work that don't involve computers. I don't feel that it
should be necessary to prove to any potential employer that I'm working
outside of work.

~~~
patio11
It's not necessary. Exercise isn't necessary, either. It's a good idea for
almost everybody, and even if you dislike the activity doing it probably
improves outcomes for things you actually do like, but no one will force you
to do it.

~~~
jiggy2011
The problem is I think that it puts some people at a much bigger advantage
over others.

A 20something who works at a funky startup and writes for their corporate blog
and gets paid to spend 20% of his time contributing to the rails codebase or
something.

vs somebody older (or maybe not) who works 60+ hours a week in a corporate
(possibly non IT) organization which has strict corporate blogging policies
(i.e don't blog about work) and has a family to look after.

I can see a lot of crap getting thrown up and github and mediocre blog entries
written prior to interviews.

I think this article sums it up fairly well:
[http://teddziuba.com/2009/10/i-dont-code-in-my-free-
time.htm...](http://teddziuba.com/2009/10/i-dont-code-in-my-free-time.html)

~~~
dpritchett
This is a sales problem. You can have the best product in the world and you
still won't get the customers you want without a solid pitch and some
networking.

Ted's post about not favoring github et al in applicant screening is one
thing, but an aspiring employee who chooses to forego some easy and visible
self-promotion has only himself to blame when he doesn't get the same
opportunities as someone willing to meet hiring companies at their point of
need.

To hire someone you have to find them, vet them, and entice them with the
right deal. People who make themselves easier to find and to vet are going to
get better deals on average.

------
bengl3rt
Hmm. I'm inclined to believe this is unfair to people who might be just as
competent and productive as those whose work is "out in the open", but can't
share or reveal anything for some valid reason.

This is common inside the Valley and outside it. Around here, a certain fruit-
based computer company advises its employees not to reveal specifically to
outsiders exactly what it is they work on. People who write code for big,
technical but non-software firms (defense contractors etc) similarly have
nothing to show (publicly) for their efforts.

It's nice to imagine that everyone works for some fun little startup that lets
you blog and contribute to open source and has everything up on github, but
the reality is that if you limit the search to those candidates, you will find
the talent pool pretty insular. Some highly competent and very desirable
people are locked away in big companies where they're not allowed to make a
big fuss about what they're doing. For them, the traditional resumé is still
very valuable.

~~~
dpritchett
Too-secret-to-blog-about work has a hefty opportunity cost and must be priced
accordingly by a would-be employee.

When faced with the choice between unverifiable secret work or highly visible
work (open source, name brand employer, etc.), be sure your compensation
expectations are weighted to match the future marketability of the experience
you stand to gain on the job.

It would be nice if prospective employers could _just know_ that you are out
there and that you are competent. Realistically they are going to prefer the
safe bet presented by a known-good contributor with an impressive public
portfolio.

Edit: rephrased to clarify my work sorting heuristic.

~~~
tptacek
That cuts both ways. If a track record of accomplishment in open source has
market value, then companies offering that benefit can provide lower salaries.
If on the whole open source software roles pay less, you can expect a
different demographic of developers to work in those roles.

I don't really believe that exposure to open source projects has that much
market value, though. I also think it's probably very hard to run a dev hiring
pipeline that expects to primarily recruit people from open source projects.
There are a _whole lot_ of very talented developers who have spent their
careers doing closed-source (i.e.: normal) software development.

~~~
cube13
I don't think that dpritchett was talking about open source vs closed source
work. He was talking more about NDA-covered work, which could be on open or
closed source code.

For most of the "normal" closed source work, it's easy to say that you worked
on X product or feature, and can talk about some of the challenges that you
encountered with it.

Contrast that with defense contract work that requires classified clearance.
If you're a developer on that, you will most likely never be able to talk
about it to most recruiters or interviewers before you retire. There is no way
to actually talk about what you've done with the general public. That can hurt
a career, especially if it puts a black hole in your experience on a resume.

~~~
tptacek
Ah, I didn't pick that up from the thread. Fair enough; I agree, if you can't
even talk about what you're working on in a future job interview, you should
price that into your comp.

------
ttt_
I really dislike this model. While it makes it extremely easy for companies to
covertly use a prejudice filter on applicants, it makes it really hard for a
person to have a social life on the web that's entirely different from their
work ethos.

~~~
jiggy2011
True, if you have a twitter account filled with links to pictures of yourself
drunk at titty bars your potential employer might be able to find it but I
don't see how it serves anybodies interests to explicitly point them to it.

Will be interesting (and scary) to see what happens as social media permeates
more of our lives and makes things public.

Will we end up with a situation where employers will enforce strict rules
about out of hours conduct of employees so as not to reflect badly on them,
Orwellian Society?

Or will everyone have so much dirt on everyone else that it just stops to
matter anymore, this could in fact lead to a more honest and liberal society.

~~~
paganel
> Or will everyone have so much dirt on everyone else that it just stops to
> matter anymore, this could in fact lead to a more honest and liberal
> society.

I think we already have that (well, at least at the medium-to-large-company
level), it's called company Christmas parties.

------
Hominem
I really used to value the internet as a "third space" like a bar, or a club.
I don't really want it to become an extension of my work persona. I will adapt
I suppose, I have started to make a conscious effort to build a presence under
my real name. But honestly, how much management of my online presence must
should I really be expected to do?

------
johanjessen
It's a very interesting topic. I've worked at a company where we would get a
stack of applications (about 1500) over night (right before the deadline of
course) and the crappy tracker system we used would crash. Even worse I
searched for a reasonable alternative, but simply couldn't find one that was
SIMPLE. Sure there're plenty of bloated CRMs out there, and even some honest
efforts like jobvite and interview street. But I couldn't find the right
balance of simple tracking and review/screening features. So, as PG once
suggested, I went and built my own.

It's still in dev mode but we've gotten pretty good responses from potential
customers so far. Some of the issues we've tried to tackle has been the resume
"problem" as discussed here. The thing is, resumes are much more than the
content they hold. The design of the page, the choosing of words and
descriptions, how to weight the important stuff etc. You can tell a lot about
a person by looking at their 'paper' resume. It's almost like judging a person
by their handwriting, though this metric is sort of skewed since everyone I
know, myself included, has developed crummy handwriting ever since spending
10+ hours/day communicating via a keyboard.

An interesting point-of-view I've seen a lot of places is the obvious, yet
under-prioritized factoring of values and soft skills. Personally, I think
it's naïve to think you can attract "the best, the top 1%" of coders,
managers, product devs and so on. What would be far more valuable in terms of
hiring would be to find those people that would actually fit the company
culture and team the best. Skills can be learned, but personal values and
interests can't. So a silly manager might ask for someone under 30 with 15
years of experience in C#, Java, Ruby, and some html/css for good measure.
Yet, this is the skewed metric to evaluate on. Instead, they should find the
person who finds the problem they're meant to solve interesting and someone
who would fit well into the company and the team. If the candidate 'only'
knows C++ and Python, it's far easier for them to get up-to-date on the
company program running on Ruby than trying to force the 'ideal hard skill
candidate' into a culture he/she's not comfortable in. Prioritizing candidates
in terms of soft skills and values are actually one of the pillars of the
program I'm working on. It's a tough nut to crack..

Another issue we've talked about is how to evaluate someone with a minimum of
screening bias? There's so much bias going into an evaluation of a person, and
it's a well-known issue that we tend to look for people similar to ourselves -
even though it might not be what the company is actually looking for. So, if
the application tracker could enable "blind" mode and switch off certain
information like pictures, names, tests scores etc. it could potentially
negate some of the bias involved in screening. Even letting multiple people
rate a candidate could negate some of it, yet the work flow used in most HR
departments simply don't allow for this kind of flexibility.

Long rant, interesting topic.

------
shawnee_
Probably the best reason to forsake the traditional resume is to keep
incompetent "headhunter" agencies away. I annihilated my linkedin profile a
couple years ago, and keep just a tar.gz of a HAML formatted resume on my
site.

------
radley
A resume is helpful, but reputation is paramount. Their decision reflects an
already existing pattern:

code -> git repository

design -> portfolio

investment analysis -> written opinion & prediction

~~~
tirrellp
Engineering Manager?

------
listrophy
As an owner of a software company, handing me or anyone else at the company a
resume is actually a (slight) negative. It means you're handing it out to
anyone who will take it, and you haven't done the research on our company.

One can certainly overcome such a tiny black mark, though, since we definitely
forgive ignorance in the strange ways we sometimes do things.

------
shareme
A large part of it is unrealistic expectations.

I just went through another useless gig interview,was in fact upfront about
that I ask for 50% advance on project dev costs and get miss-directed when I
ask directly if they understand that its not a suggestion.

~~~
radley
Depends on the scale of the project. Something small, sure. But if it's a
6-month project, it's unreasonable (should do deposit/retainer along with
regular payments).

------
dsolomon
Using Twitter, Tumblr, and Linkdin to determine suitability is like asking
Dick Chaney if he's a nice guy.

The results can and are easily stacked through bogus accounts.

If a company thinks that professionals use those sites for professional
reasons, then I question the professionalism of the company.

------
mjwalshe
But would you want to work for news corp some of us have standards and working
for known hackers and serious criminals like NI is probably going to be a
black mark.

Hacking a retired SIS officers pc is far more serious than VMB'ing some poor
murdered girls phone for example.

------
heyrhett
We are trying to solve this exact problem at GitHire. See
<http://www.githire.com/about> for more about our process.

There are a lot of problems with resumes that have been brought up again and
again. Many companies we are working with welcome the change.

For those of you who still want to play the resume game, and don't want to
spend your off-work hours contributing to open source, or building a web
presence, don't worry. There will be plenty of job openings for you at
companies who like to do things the old way.

~~~
dsolomon
So want people to blow off NDAs for your karma? Fail.

