[petard]

"White House HR once tried to reject a candidate whose previous employer was Github because he didn’t specifically list experience with version control on his resume."

This happens in the private sector too, had this with an internal recruiter that had no idea about the role and was only checking for keywords.

[ChuckNorris89]

Happens in European private sector a lot.

HR and internal recruiters are clueless about how software engineering knowledge and experience works and just filter based on keywords. Most have no idea what's the difference between C & C++, Java & JavaScript so you have to tailor your resume for each application to include all the buzzwords they want to hear if you want your resume to reach the technical staff.

An external recruitment company in Germany got me to fill in a spreadsheet rating my knowledge of several technologies including among other things, I quote: "Fox Pro, Windows 98/2000/XP/Vista, MacOS, Adobe Flash, OS/400, MS Office, Lotus Notes, WLAN, Outlook, Backup, Cisco, Alcatel".

I've never facepalmed myself so hard in my entire life.

Now I understand why lots of top companies here employ external recruitment agencies from the UK. At least there's some tech savvy people among them who can understand what the company needs and what potential the employee has to fit the requested position.

[jen20]

> Now I understand why lots of top companies here employ external recruitment agencies from the UK.

One of my favourite blog posts of all time is "Don't Feed The Beast - The Great Recruitment Agency Infestation" [1] which describes behaviour very familiar to those who have had to deal with external recruitment agencies in the UK.

Sadly the original post appears to have gone but there is a mirror.

[1]: https://hackerfall.com/story/dont-feed-the-beast--the-great-...

[twblalock]

This is why those stupid lists of skills are important to include on resumes.

[martius]

This is why I explicitly avoid these lists and highlight some core tech which should be meaningful for other engineers. I try to use terms specific enough to implicitly include several skills.

My intuition is that if my CV is ignored by a recruiter, it's because engineering is not involved enough in the sourcing process for the company, and that is a terrible signal.

[4ad]

Exactly my strateguly as well, seems to work perfectly.

Another trick I do is send my CV as a text file with Unix line endings. Engineers would be able to read it easily. Irrelevant recruiters or the HR department, not so much.

Sadly Windows notepad in recent versions of Windows 10 can read Unix line endings just fine, although quite a few businesses have not upgraded yet.

[FooHentai]

From the other side of the screen, I see a lot of people inside organisation's trying to hire and becoming annoyed when their recruiters send them CVs that aren't ideal matches.

So this cuts both ways. If you want engineering to have eyes-on early, that necessarily means they're gonna see some CVs that don't fit. Recruiters tend to avoid this because of the 'signals' they're getting back from their client.

[martius]

Relation between engineering and sourcing also works the other way: engineering can teach recruiters to read CVs better.

A minimum would be to have the recruiter explain why they thought the CV was worth a review and the engineer can then correct them.

Also, in the companies I worked for, recruiters where checking GitHub or LinkedIn when they needed more signal.

[brightball]

Agree with this 100%

[Florin_Andrei]

> This is why those stupid lists of skills are important to include on resumes.

Sure, but it looks like whoever acts as a parser for that stuff is not significantly more intelligent than the grep command with a few basic options.

[twblalock]

That's why they need to be included. Companies are using automated systems and/or non-technical HR people to filter resumes. The bigger the company, the worse it is because they get more applicants.

[fjp]

I always list it under my resume skills for this exact reason