> 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.
I agree. As a hiring manager, I prefer to do resume reviews. It's an activity that can be done with a six pack (or bottle) in the evening, and still be 10x as accurate and efficient as an HR manager. One would think they would have the pattern recognition, but they don't know enough to read between the lines. ("She doesn't have any technologies listed on the resume, and didn't graduate college, but went straight to an engineering job at Apple after 2 years at U of I and has been there for 5 years" is something that a hiring manager would appreciate and an HR manager would miss.)
I've always thought the best resume format is "Action -> Result" rather than simply listing your responsibilities and/or technical knowledge. People get hired based not on what they did or know, but based on how what they did helped add value to their company.
Example:
WEAK
----
- Responsible for development and maintenance of the FooBar software suite
- Skills applied: Java, HTML, CSS, REST APIs
STRONG
----
- Added BarBuzz feature to FooBar software suite, which contributed to 25% increase in product sales and winning 2 industry awards.
I agree, action -> result always sounds more impressive.
But to a point it's always felt disingenuous to me as far as engineering goes. Sure, I implemented the BarBuzz feature. But a marketing person gave the idea, a product person specced it out, a UX person designed it, a UI person made it pretty, and all I did was the final implementation.
Did I really add the feature, or did I just implement it?
Everyone else who touched the feature is going to also say they added it, on their resume. You have as much of a claim to it as they do. Your job title and the size of the company is clear, so the reader can infer the size of your contribution from that.
In a way this is a feature not a bug-- when an HR person whose job was created primarily to boost the number of females and minorities in the company to meet quotas is reviewing resumes and rejects me, she saves me a lot of time working for a terrible company.
I wish Amazon had done that to me.
Also, of course as you point out her definition of "Good" is based on whether or not the resume got past her arbitrary ill-informed ideas of whats "good". Self reinforcing.
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.