[Mister_Snuggles]

As someone who occasionally hires technical people, I'm torn on this one.

The process at my employer is that resumes are submitted via the web site, they get stored in a shared folder (each application gets a folder with all of their attachments plus whatever they entered into the form on the web site), and once the competition closes the people doing the hiring (usually a manager and a team lead) review them.

When I review resumes, I spend about 30s per resume on my first pass through. This is where I just visually scan the document for keywords. For example, if I was hiring a Django developer (I'm not, this is contrived), I'd look for Django (obviously), but also for other Python web frameworks (e.g., Flask, Pylons, web2py), other big Python frameworks (e.g., SQLAlchemy), and other related technologies that we might use in conjunction with Django (e.g., PostgreSQL, Celery, etc).

Once I've completed the first pass, I take a deeper dive into the shortlisted resumes, decide who I want to interview, etc.

As a technical person, I'm intrigued by this resume. It's presented in an interesting way, and the presentation itself can even serve as a living showcase of this person's skills.

As someone doing hiring, I'm wondering how this will show up in that shared folder. Will it be a PDF with a link that leads me to this resume? Will there be no files attached and a link placed in the comment box? Will I pass on a potentially great hire because I didn't actually see a resume during my first pass?

I do think this resume would work really well as supplemental material to a traditional one. One of the best people we hired submitted a traditional cover letter/resume as a PDF, but had hyperlinks within the PDF to online supplemental material. This worked really well for my process because they passed the initial scan, and the hyperlinks let the applicant provide a lot of detail that would have overwhelmed a traditional resume format.

[quadrifoliate]

> When I review resumes, I spend about 30s per resume on my first pass through. This is where I just visually scan the document for keywords. For example, if I was hiring a Django developer, I'd look for Django...Once I've completed the first pass, I take a deeper dive into the shortlisted resumes, decide who I want to interview, etc.

The way I see it is that this kind of resume is explicitly reverse filtering against hiring processes like yours. Creative people don't want to be compared in the hiring process as part of a "shared folder" against 300 other people, because it becomes basically an SEO game. (Note that this is not saying your process is wrong, it's just not a good fit for more creative and freewheeling programmers).

[Mister_Snuggles]

This is a really good point! I'd say that the process is a reflection of the environment and the work.

My environment is focused on supporting/enhancing/fixing the commercial ERP system that we use to run our business. There's room for creativity, but at the end of the day it's still about supporting a relatively boring HR/Financial system. Technology is not our core business, but we do invest in it in order to better execute on our core business.

Some people thrive working on these systems and in this type of environment, but others would be bored to tears.

If it does work as a reverse filter like you suggest, I lose out on a really good developer, but the really good developer avoids taking a job that he'd find soul destroying. Overall, that's probably a win.

[filkatron]

Thanks for your input and sharing some useful info, I already read similar things here on HN and other sites where people describe similar hiring processes. To be honest with you I don't like them, but I understand the need of having one in a bigger company.

I understand your point, however this resume isn't intended to be the first contact with a future employer. It will be contained in my pdf resume once I update it, but I hope the employer will notice it. I'll probably mention it in a cover letter or similar.

But as quadrifoliate already stated, this resume is a reverse filtering against standard hiring processes. I'm actually looking for a smaller sized team which I hope will be full of hackers that like to fiddle on the low level side of technology etc.

[adrianmonk]

If I were doing this, I'd probably just have two versions of my resume: the creative one and a conventional one. If my application gets through the early screening stage, then maybe it's realistic to expect someone to devote a little more time to my resume.