The hiring process from the other side
Recently, I was asked to help out with a hiring process. The candidate was to replace me, so I had a pretty good idea of what is required for the job. I wasn't the main hiring person, but I still had a view into the CVs that were received, and helped ask some questions on one of the interviews. Here are some observations.
It all starts looking the same
After looking at more than a dozen resumes, they all start looking the same, and I started picking out silly things to differentiate them. For context, we were looking to hire in India, and I was working in Australia.
These were the things that differentiated people:
- One person seemed to spend most of their prior career in the US, which was a big differentiator
- We had a "number of years experience" in mind already. I looked immediately to the number of years of experience.
- If the descriptions of previous roles was loaded with specific technilogies that were used, I immediately hooked on. This was a role where the skills with the software is the trump.
Percentage improvements look ridiculous
When I saw claims of people improving the efficiency of processes by 40% or something, it looks very forced and contrived. I myself have seen this type of advice before, to include this in CVs, but now looking at it from the other side, I don't care for it.
Perhaps it would convince me better if the time comparison given was something like "it used to take a week, but now it takes half an hour"? Maybe.
Empty Github accounts look ridiculous
We were hiring for an analytics job. Some of the candidates had but links to their Github accounts on their resumes, which is a fair thing to do.
However, all of them had barely anything of note. There was one person who had several repos, but the activity track only showed a few green days in a year, and all of the names of the repos were obviously classroom exercises or something. It was nothing at all to show off and a wonder that she bothered to include it in her resume to begin with.
This person in particular also listed several trendy things like "Python (numpy, pandas, Tensorflow)" in the skills section. What I saw in her Github account casts doubt on this entire section, because for all I know, she only knows the Python that she needed to complete a few classroom exercises and no more.