He who submits a resume has already lost
https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/he-who-submits-a-resume-has-already
Resume-first applications are poison
Imagine the following scene:
An applicant goes to an employer and asks for work. The employer explains that the only work he has requires a certain set of skills, and says:
“Listen - I’m a busy guy. I can’t listen to your entire life story; even if I could, I couldn’t listen to every life story of everyone who comes to me for work.
I know it’s a big ask, but could you write down everything you’ve ever done? I’m an expert on what it takes to survive in this job, and I will read it when I have time, then honestly tell you if you are in the ballpark of what I need. From there, we can both have a conversation with the assurance that you are a close fit - it makes sure neither you nor I waste our time, and benefits us both.”
This is a reasonable request, and as stated it’s the main reason we can’t get rid of resumes. Some significant percentage of applicants are delusional and nowhere near qualified; you have to weed them out somehow. And the actual honest-to-god boss of a company can honestly claim he doesn’t have the time to talk to everyone - he has to have some sort of filter or he drowns.
But the resume story above is the idealist teenager’s version of what’s actually happening. Here’s a more realistic picture:
An group of 50 applicants submit resumes for a job. 10 or so of them are delusional, and get cut. That leaves a field of 40 more-or-less qualified people who have at this point all committed a significant amount of time doing unpaid labor for a company to manage the company’s risk and hiring costs.
Of the remaining 40, 35 are rejected not because they are unqualified, but because the company wants to further reduce its costs. They are rejected by an HR person who has nothing to do with the role they are going to fill. Since the HR person is not familiar with the role beyond some bulletpoints they were sent, these rejection reasons are often unrelated to their ability to actually do the job. This group not only never sees an upside to their unpaid labor, but often weren’t even given fair consideration for the role.
This leaves five candidates - a hand-picked elite, a top 12.5% of qualified candidates. They will never demand the employer consider them elite, and will instead feel lucky to be allowed to do even more unpaid labor with uncertain rewards. The employer will never consider them a hand-picked elite, and will with every action and word indicate that the group of five completely qualified candidates should feel lucky to have gotten this far.
Four of those candidates will eventually be rejected, leaving a best-of-50 candidate who will be paid as if he’s barely qualified, with the expectation that he act overjoyed about this.
In the actual real-world model, all the obligations are on the applicant’s side, with no guaranteed benefit; they can’t even reliably count on a form rejection email. All the benefits are on the employer side - they save time, reduce costs, reduce company risks, and create an environment where they can reliably lowball candidates on salary.
Now that I’ve laid that out, I need to take a paragraph to be fair: First, I don’t think most employers think of this process like this - yes, they run it like this, and yes, the actual practical implications are like this. But they aren’t sitting around rubbing their hands together and gleefully cackling about screwing the little guy - like most forms of evil, the vileness of the resume-based hiring process is banal and often unintentional.
Second, I don’t think there’s always an alternative. If I have a random position open and my only option for filling it is to post an ad somewhere that’s going to draw in 500 applications, I don’t necessarily have any options that both keep my time outlay at a reasonable level and treat every (or any) applicant fairly. It’s shitty, it’s exploitative, and it’s 100% a more powerful party bullying a smaller, weaker person. But until someone invents an alternative, what’s to be done?
Nobody hires based on a resume
...
In a resume-first hiring process, your resume is at best a raffle ticket that might pay off and grant you admission to the actual hiring process. That’s it. That’s all.
jensneuse
I keep giving this advice on how to significantly increase your chances of getting to the interview stage. Most candidates really only submit a resume. The chances of getting to the interview stage with this approach are almost zero.
Because everyone does this, you can easily stand out. Simply answer the following 2 questions briefly in plain English.
- Why do you want to take this role?
- Why are you a good fit for this role?
Example:
- I've read through your website and documentation and are truly inspired by your vision. Especially that you're working and X thing really got my attention as I know that Y and Z are super important for the customer segment you're working on.
- I have previous experience in this field and wrote an open source library to solve some of the issues you might be facing (link).
Simply out, show interest and explain why you're a good fit.
I've had too many candidates who never checked out our landing page (https://wundergraph.com). We're doing a lot of innovative stuff in the API segment. If you apply for a job with us and you don't have an opinion whether you like what we do or not, it's really hard to gauge interest.
The question I'm asking myself is. Why should I read your CV when you didn't bother skimming through my landing page, docs, or open source repository. What's the purpose of sending a CV when I have to do all the hard work?