[rdiddly]

Arguably that (and I think it might be Columbia you're thinking of) represents a misuse of lists though, because in my mind all the things on a list are supposed to be of roughly the same importance or size or magnitude. I would say that's part of the "contract," as this author puts it, that a list represents. (Although he doesn't mention that specifically.) On the PowerPoint slide in question, there are a bunch of good-news points and then the bad news is at the bottom in a smaller font. It's either incompetent or deliberately deceptive to set it up that way, and actually come to think of it, under those circumstances I kind of doubt the incompetent or deceptive author would've done a good job with paragraphs either.

Anyway here's where this battle is really raging right now: on my resume. For years I've been distilling things down to action-oriented bullet points with dots, because I heard the Deputy likes dots.[0] Then I got an eyeful of someone else's resume that instead had articulate paragraphs intended to be read by, you know, a calm human being with some dignity and self-respect, and immediately felt like that was way better. But I dunno.....

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUYuGNpOk5U

[yodon]

The typical screener in the hiring process spends 8 seconds or less making a decision to discard or advance a resume to the next stage.

In the GP comment I advocated reading Tufte's critique of bulleted lists, but resumes are definitely a place where they significantly increase the odds the initial screeners can spot the things they want to see to advance your resume. A well structured list written using parallel construction (similar grammatical structure from one bullet to the next) is far far faster for a reader to parse. Once you've been told they want to interview you, you're generally free to submit an "updated" resume if you want to, which can be in prose format if you think that's best (but again not all interviewers will look at your resume more than a few seconds before they jump into the zoom session with you).

[EnKopVand]

> The typical screener in the hiring process spends 8 seconds or less making a decision to discard or advance a resume to the next stage.

I’ve been involved in hiring several people and this has never been the case. So I’m curious as to where you got those 8 seconds.

Hell, it usually takes the damn HR onboarding systems more than 8 seconds to load each page.

[yodon]

I've read that number many places and more importantly heard it from many folks who do front line resume screening. If you've ever had a stack of 50 new resumes hitting your inbox every day and the task of finding the 3-5 people people to interview for the role among the hundreds that are submitted, you'll realize what a radically different experience that is from being one of the folks tasked with interviewing the 3-5 who made it through that sieve (and yes the HR software for reading through large numbers of resumes is surprisingly horrible)

[maccard]

I've been in the unfortunate situation of sifting through those resumes before. That 10 second look isn't for me to determine whether or not you're in the interview category, it's literally "person has applied for programming job, have they degree/experience/projects" or do they just want a job and have no relevant experience.

Terrifyingly when I was doing this that filtered out about 75% of the candidates (applying for senior/lead roles with only office admin experience was _really_ common). Once you get past that point you're probably going to get 5 minutes to see what's what.

[a1445c8b]

I’m curious about how you do it. Could you share your process?

(I’m currently looking, so knowing about concrete examples might help me)

[EnKopVand]

I’m Danish so that may have an impact, but basically every company I’ve been with has had some sort of HR onboarding system where applicants submit their cv and letter of application to.

A typical process is that you or your manager sets down a group to hire. This group fills out a HR form of what sort of responsibilities, challenges and opportunities the applicant will meet as well as the requirements and wanted level of experience. Then HR puts up the position in various places and people apply online.

Once the period closes (sometimes while it’s running) the hiring group logs in and rates all applicants 1-5/7/10 (depending on the system) and then the system automatically moves the best x to the final group.

How people handle the first step variates and this is probably where the person I was replying to got the 8 seconds. But around here, people read the letter and look over the CV and often spend the most time on this step because it’s where you “grade” everyone.

The next step is group discussion about the top x where the people we want to talk to are selected. Then come the interviews and possible HR personality tests like DISC profiling and the occasional technical interview/test if there is doubt as to the applicants ability.

Here in Denmark the most important part of getting an interview is the letter you write. If it’s generic people will grade you lower. Your CV is sort of important, but only in the sense that “I know this skill, and these people recommend me” - LinkedIn style. In fact, people with good LinkedIn profiles might as well be submitting those as their CV as far as I am concerned (but still make a pretty one yourself because not everyone agrees with me).

Unless you’ve done some extraordinary work that actually sees real world use, nobody is going to look at your GitHub. Even if you have, write about it and how it makes you a good applicant instead of linking to it, because 99% or the time nobody is going to look at your stuff. This isn’t because hiring groups aren’t interested, it’s because it takes a lot of time and the process is already resource demanding.

Once people get to the interview, here in Denmark, it’s 95% about finding the person you think will fit into your team the best. Sometimes people will fall through because they’ve “hacked” their way and aren’t as capable technically as we thought, but that’s not often.

There are no rights and wrongs here, but I personally like applicants who seem to be “grading” us. As though they’re figuring out whether or not the job we’re selling is something, they, will want. Even if it’s a junior straight out of an education I like this, even when everyone knows they will kill for the opportunity it’s good to see people actually be curious.

It’s obviously a situation where the power dimension is insanely tipped to one side, but it’s important to remember that good teams are shopping as much as you are. We want the right match, because the most expensive mistake any manager or hiring group (at our level) will ever make is hiring the wrong person.

So be honest, be yourself and hope you’re seen as a good fit. And train your interviewing skills by applying for jobs that aren’t “as” important to you so that you’re not a completely nervous wreck when you apply to that one dream job. (This isn’t advice for new people), I recommend everyone doing a few interviews every 2-3 years.

[crdrost]

So if I'm reading your resume, I am personally trying to get a quick scan of you as a person before I meet you. Do you have an education? Or are you self-taught? Neither one is bad. Do you have an education in a completely different field, and is it interesting to me, could we bond over it? How long have you been in the industry for, was it at one place or a bunch of places, was that place dedicated to tech or was it a small tech team adjoined to a larger company doing other stuff. If I am diving into those it is because I want to know more about the level of responsibility you took on at that job. I wouldn't put it into bullet points because it shouldn't be long enough that you need bullet points, I need to know were you leading the team, mentoring others (more dev experience vs more leadership qualities--neither is bad), or were you a solid engineer, or were you transitioning from say security work to development. Just give me one or two sentences about who you were at that job.

Basically, reading is much faster than listening, so I would like to not waste your time in the interview getting to know things that you already told me through a faster, asynchronous medium.

BUT. But. A bunch of places that I have worked at also have a process by which a non-technical person pre-processes your resume before handing it to me. They are looking to see whether you have checked the boxes. IDK what boxes, it depends on what those folks are taking out of the posting. It probably helps if you have a section of buzzwords so that they can say “they say they have React experience, I can check the React box!” For me most of those criteria are fungible, but you have to put something for the HR folks to screen out half the applications.

Now, the interview is where it gets a bit trickier. I used to have a great approach to this, when I worked at smaller companies and had more say in the hiring process. That was just, “your resume is a claim that you are a certain sort of person, my interview just tests whether you are who you say you are, are you faking it or are you selling yourself short?” In other words if you say you managed your coworkers I want to devote 15 minutes to see what sort of manager you are, even for a non-management role.

But, now I work at a Big Tech company and I don't really have that freedom... Now when I am interviewing you, I have usually been asked to either assess culture fit or technical chops... If technical chops, I am usually not tailoring my questions too closely to your resume, but to the forms that I have to fill out after the interview. The actual programming exercise will usually be amorphous, the actual work will be simple but the scope will be unbounded relative to the interview length—and so I am not expecting you to complete it so much as to parcel it up into smaller workable chunks and execute on one or two of those. Based on how you do this I can usually give decent feedback on my forms without feeling like I have fed you a trick question.

[rdiddly]

Belated thanks for the thoughtful reply. I do have a "skills" section that was designed specifically to satisfy the box-checkers. So maybe that means I can get away with replacing bullets with paragraphs in the experience part? And yeah when I say paragraphs I'm not talking long ones, just 1-2 sentences that sum up the experience skillfully. I think "ability to write a sentence" is another thing that can set you apart as a candidate (sadly), so I'm still definitely considering this kind of rewrite. Cheers!