you're hired

February 1, 2005

I would love to tell someone right now that they are hired. For the past 6 months or possibly 7 I have been interviewing candidates and reviewing resumes as a weekly ritual. At this point I must have looked at a few hundred resume's, and met with 50+ candidates. The process is awful.

I should be excited to be a decision maker for hiring a candidate to work on our team, but the truth is after seeing the quality of the candidates so far...I'm anything but excited.

The resume's all look like carbon copies of each other:

  1. Big blob of skills on top
  2. Most recent company with list of projects and/or accomplishments
  3. Repeat
  4. Education

After the 30th resume or so, and meeting with a few candidates the resume's started to look like this:

  1. Every skill that the candidate can pronounce ( and sometimes that's a stretch ) in a big blob on top
  2. Most recent company with lists of meaningless project names, vague implementation details, and strong emphasis on demonstrating leadership skills such as the following:

    Lead team to develop web based application blindly using design methodologies from 1996 ensuring a mess of crap and job security

  3. Repeat as above with each successive company lacking more than the previous in any sort of content which might demonstrate what the candidate is capable of
  4. Education

I can honestly say of the few hundred resume's I have seen that I have seen two resume's, yes two resumes of which I wanted to see the candidate. I am of the opinion that if you don't impress me on a piece of paper, then how the hell are you going to do so in person.

It could be argued that maybe a person doesn't represent themselves well on a piece of paper. I will concede that I have thought the same way before I was in a position to hire. Now I don't think such silly thoughts. I used to think that if only I could get into that room in person, there is no way I couldn't get hired. I thought my personality, and energy would solidify the deal. What I wasn't thinking about was the fact that the people that didn't want to see me, didn't care about any of those qualities about me...because I didn't have the goods for the job in the first place. When you get to a certain point you can judge very quickly from a short conversation or a brief look at a resume whether a person is what you are looking for. The other qualities such as personality, energy, speaking skills are what you are evaluating once you have deemed that the candidate has the proper skills on paper to do the job. So if you can't represent yourself in the right way on paper to me then you just don't have the goods, or maybe even too much good stuff!

I don't understand why in this wonderful profession I am presented with so many third rate, awful candidates. Maybe I need to read a little more Joel. These are great jobs! There is creativity, freedom, no day is exactly the same! Why do I feel like I am interviewing people for a paper filing position! What's even worse than that is the candidates only know how to file 8.5 x 11 paper into special manila envelopes that were engineered specifically for their previous company, and when showing them a standard manila envelope the look on their face most likely resembles the same look they had on their face the moment they first opened their eyes.

I guess the good part about all of this is that I have gotten exceedingly efficient at pulling a person apart in record time during the interview so that I can end the pain for both of us as quickly as possible, and I can go back to work.

Which leads me to the initial point of writing this essay. Letting someone down. I guess I'm a little sensitive which my friend Jimmy points out to me constantly, but I can't help feel bad for people during the interview. As soon as I ask them the one back-breaker; they know it, and I know it...it's over. At this point of the interview I frantically look for something good on the resume so that I can ask them a question about it, and have them go on glowingly about their achievement right before I show them the door.

That is how it usually goes unless you are the fool who starts to try some lame attempt at reverse psychology by asking me questions about some long dead technology that hasn't been used since computers were the size of a NY apartment. Which leads me to one final point:

Don't piss off the person interviewing you...I'll walk out in the middle of one of your sentences and leave you sitting in some strange conference room until you realize that no one is coming to see you, and you show yourself the door.



Posted by christopher andersson at 10:35 PM