Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rhelz 827 days ago
> lots of assumptions

Well, I'm not a mindreader, so perhaps you are right. Can you at least help me clear up the bad assumptions, and tell me, if resume's are not giving you the information you need, why are you using resumes?

> we don't use keyword filtering.

If your policy is to reject anybody without nodejs experience, you are using keyword filtering. It is what it is man.

> filter out more good ones.

I have sympathy here; its not clear exactly how to improve the filter, but if you reviewed 1,000 applications and found nobody, its impossible to filter out more good ones :-) There's no change you could make which would filter out more good people.

> You have to prioritize time

I have sympathy here too :-( Honestly, I can give you guesses as to how to improve, but I have no clue. Its one of the reasons I didn't go into management: I didn't see any way of doing it any better than it was already being done. You wonder if I've ever hired for an engineering position: no, I haven't, because I didn't think I'd be able to do a good job of it.

But one thing I do know, is that if a system isn't working, it needs to change, whether you know exactly how it should be changed or not.

1 comments

Resumes still filter out "bad" candidates. "Good" resumes just doesn't actually mean someone is good. Like I said, plenty of people with 20 years of experience who can't do something a junior developer can do easily.

I agree the system needs change but I don't have the answers for how to change it, hence why I said it's the million dollar question. Best we can do is try to make improvements.

I hate to only complain if I don't have any ideas on how to fix it, but just think of the absurdity of the situation we currently have: thousand of employers are frustrated because they can't find any programmers, and thousands of programers are frustrated because they can't find a job.

Getting a job is a core skill requirement for programmers, and finding programmers is a core skill requirement for companies. Its really hard to believe that this is the best we can do.

> Resumes still filter out "bad" candidates.

I really hate to try your patience, you've been a great conversation partner here. But I put it to you, all those thousand resumes did you absolutely no good. I mean, there's probably something I'm missing, because I don't know the particulars of your situation.

But from what you've said, all the effort and expense you put into screening those thousand resumes, and all the effort and expense put into interviewing them, did you no good. Expensive, time consuming...and ultimately yielding no value at all. I really hate to put it into such stark terms, but man, things gotta change. Even if you don't know how to do it, you've got to find somebody who does who can give you some good advice.