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by Tyrannosaurs 4238 days ago
My hoops? Did you read what I wrote? I suggest 5 minutes of CV tailoring.

You think that's jumping through hoops?

2 comments

Yes, my last job search consisted of posting my resume on one and only one job board. I then received a deluge of phone calls and multiple job offers soon after that.

In the end if you’re depending on people reading a job posting you’re already missing out on a lot of highly qualified applicants. If you then want tailored resumes your mostly excluding the type of people you actually want working for you.

PS: And no I will not show up to an interview if you don't list a salary range.

CVs posted to job boards (in the UK at least) aren't looked at by companies but by agencies. Those agencies call you and do all the pre-screening (and CV tweaking) before they send the CVs to people like me.

When I've looked for a job I'll always say to the agent I'll tweak my CV myself because I'd rather I did it than them (I've seen some horribly butchered ones come through - in those cases I can normally tell it was the agency and don't hold it against the candidate but sometimes that may not be the case).

Essentially I suspect everything I asked for happened with you, it just may not have been done by you.

Salary I totally agree on - I post a salary range for the role (usually a range but also dependent on experience) and want to know candidate salary expectations before hand. If we're not happy with what the candidate is looking for based on what their rough level of experience I wouldn't interview.

Yes, actually.

I'd love to have my resume show that I have successfully automated work for other software developers, small business owners, photojournalists, hospital physicians and nurses, corporate attorneys, military pilots, and rocket scientists, and that all of it was done in a manner that is largely invisible to the beneficiaries. Throwing a bunch of keywords tailored to a specific job ad is completely pointless, from my perspective. I have successfully learned the work of several different skilled professionals and reduced large portions of that work to computer programs.

What you ask, and is mirrored at hundreds of other companies, is roughly analogous to someone in the construction trade building residential homes, commercial office space, retail buildings, and municipal buildings over the course of their career, and then having someone suggest that they ought to list "hammer" and "screwdriver" on their resume. Never mind if the person actually uses pneumatic nail guns and power drills for the nails and screws, the magic keywords are "hammer" and "screwdriver". Never mind if the person is actually smart enough to be a general contractor and halfway to being a civil engineer. If that resume doesn't say "hammer" on it, he doesn't get called back.

What you are asking is irrelevant, gratuitous, and counterproductive--thus, hoops to jump through. My skills are not Java and C#. My skill is making other skilled workers more productive, by any means necessary--though usually with the help of a computer. Part of that is recognizing that when thousands of people are each wasting their time on unnecessary steps every time they perform a task that may be repeated several times every day, the situation may be improved dramatically by eliminating that waste.

There are several potential solutions. One is to tell you, and everyone else in a similar position, that your expectations are ignorant and counterproductive, and show a cavalier lack of respect toward potential hires. You are asking that they invest five minutes of time specifically into your company, rather than into their own general job search, just so that you will not arbitrarily toss their application into the trash. This is in addition to the 20-60 minutes the typical HR gatekeeper already requires to re-type every single datum from that resume into a non-portable custom form in their candidate tracking system.

If I'm going to spend even more time on your company, I'd like the potential return to be worth the effort. Until you actually talk to me, I won't know that. And as long as we're talking, we can just skip the resume and spend that extra five minutes on the way to "yes", instead of just evading "no".