Hiring is a filtering game. With 100 candidates, first thing you do is filter out 80, I wish more candidates would understand this.

Using something like "professional-looking LinkedIn picture" as a filter is just throwing out candidates for the sake of getting the number lower. Any company that would be this lazy as to potentially throw away their best candidates in the first round of filtering on criteria that has such little actual signalling is not one that I would want to work for anyway.

>Using something like "professional-looking LinkedIn picture" as a filter is just throwing out candidates for the sake of getting the number lower.

Who said hiring is fair?

>Any company that would be this lazy as to potentially throw away their best candidates in the first round of filtering on criteria that has such little actual signalling is not one that I would want to work for anyway.

For most companies (not talking Facebook and Google level stuff) it doesn't really matter -- and they could care less if you would work for them or if they get top talent or not. Any decent-ish programmer can do the work they require, so they are OK with being lazy in hiring.

People looking for jobs are usually far more motivated than managers looking to hire (or worse, people who aren't going to work with directly with the employee).

Even the CEO, who has skin in the game, won't be entirely dependent on making the best possible hire (hopefully).

Most job seekers are terrible at job seeking. What does that say about how good managers are at hiring?

(Also, managers has to look at hundreds of different candidates.)

I doubt people get filtered out solely on their profile picture. Yet when you have two similar resumes, things like this might (and probably will) decide who'll be filtered out.

Pro-tip: no one wants to see a Nikon in your profile picture and no one cares about your photography hobby on your resume. I'm talking to you, half of the tech community on Linkedin!

People are filtered all the time for BS reasons, e.g. there's a fairly well-known "I only hire lucky people" filter where a random half of the application pile is tossed out without a glance.

That "I only hire lucky people" is clearly parody. Noone actually does that in real life.

I agree that many of the filters that people use are bullshit.

Fair enough. Though I still can't help but think there have been people out there who read the fable and then said, "That's a good idea, I'm going to try it."

(You've most likely also read https://web.archive.org/web/20120501193533/http://raganwald.... too, a point in which is that other BS filters act just like the toss-half one in that they aren't really useful when your qualified applicant proportion is small.)

>Noone actually does that in real life

You'd be surprised. Might not be so explicit, but randomness (ie luck) plays a huge role in filtering process.

You might be throwing out the lucky ones if your company is a bad place to work.

Come on, it's a fact that ugly people get longer prison sentences, it sucks but that is how our brains are wired. Deal with it.

Just out of curiosity, where do you work as a hiring manager that you get so many candidates to filter out? At the company I work at it's been somewhat difficult to find suitable candidates to even interview with us -- the few that do come in for interviews are usually so-so (and we do pay quite above average). Also, anecdotally, during my own job search I was the one filtering out companies to apply to (nearly all the ones I applied to accepted me in the end), so at least that's consistent with the developer shortage my company is currently facing.

I am very curious how the balance of power can be tipped so drastically in the other direction in some places.

Why not filter out those 80 with a dead-simple (fizzbuzz level) online quiz?

In my experience it was enormously difficult to find qualified candidates, especially if HR or recruiters were allowed to pre-filter candidates using relatively superficial judgments. A fizzbuzz test easily eliminated more than 80%.

I'm very aware, my point is being an endorsement collector will put you in the group filtered out, at least if I'm doing the filtering, but perhaps I'm the minority.

Off the cuff, I agree with you, but I also wonder if it isn't an approach only used by a minority of people involved in hiring, primarily those with a technical background. This is the sort if matter on which I would love to see an empirical study based on real data from the industry, not stimulated hiring experiments, unlikely as it may be to happen.

I agree on that one.

I imagine that e.g. the average Rails job listing gets maybe 1/10th that many candidates.

Certainly one wants an edge, what I find confounding is that none of the advice dealt with proving actual ability as much as being shinier and flashier than the next candidate. I guess I was naive in thinking that kind of superficiality had diminished relevance in this industry.

You can filter out the candidates who DO use LinkedIn.

I'm sorry, but if you're using shit like "LinkedIn photo" or "LinkedIn endorsements" for filtering, you deserve the crappy workforce you get.

As a hiring manager myself, I would say those kudos/recommendations are nice-to-have and I am not paying too much attention to the contents. However these testimonials tell me a candidate has basic social skill, talks to colleagues, and able to get along with others (yes, people won't write testimonials to someone they don't get along).

Endorsements don't mean much, but they do show that people know you and think you don't suck, which is still better than nothing, especially for someone with very limited work experience.