"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence/stupidity"
Hanlon's Razor definitely applies to your theory!
For a little while I was basically convinced of deliberate obstruction - no sane person would use the arguments employed by the recruiter. But, on reading through from the top once more, the recruiter was actually initially helpful and I have settled on "incompetence, not malice". Almost settled, at least.
To be fair, I wouldn't expect this kind of 'recruiting by grep' to happen at Facebook of all places either.
Under the section Keyword Stuffing.
I feel like this is one of the most fundamental skills I learned in school. You don't answer the actual question, you provide the response that they are looking for, even if those are different. This is doubly true for machine graded multiple choice exams.
We had a biology teacher in high school who, in order to keep things fair, made the system very clear: when answering essay questions, he had a list of a dozen or so points he wanted you to mention, and you were graded by how many you hit. It didn't matter if you had a brilliant thesis or whatever, if you didn't recite the relevant parts of the book and lectures back, you lost credit.
The biology barely matters, but I couldn't have asked for better training in dealing with recruiter (and hard headed managers, beurocrats, etc).
From the desk of recruiters, most likely.
This is extremely condescending. The article displayed a supercilious tone towards the recruiter, clearly making it known that "I (the erudite developer) know more about how to filter candidates than you (the ignoramus recruiter). I am right, and I will only adjust my position under duress to the bare minimum which meets your requirements".
But, as a recruiter, I would be delighted to glean this insight into a candidate's mindset, and gladly put them into the "struggles with collaboration" reject pile.
Facebook employ canny recruiters. If this interaction seems odd to the "well actually" crowd, please be advised that it makes perfect sense to those involved in hiring decisions.
All I see is a human keyword grep that is clearly failing to do their job: find relevant candidates and forward them on. I say this having been in both ends of the recruiting process and have have struggled with recruiters who had no understanding of how to read a technical resume and rejected JavaScript experts on this basis that they didn't list html in their keywords.
No. I said what I meant; which part didn't make sense?
edit: downvoters, if you disagree you'd better leave a comment telling me why im dum
Your statement is a mismatch between the comment about the lossy filter, and the actual email conversation, which clearly shows the lossy filter in all its glory.
The recruiter wanted to advance the candidate through the pipeline; they told them exactly what they needed to do to proceed; the candidate didn't think it was necessary to modify their position to conform with the requirements, in the face of someone asking nicely.
The recruiter wanted to put pegs in holes (which is essentially what selection is), but mistook the request for a red rond peg for 'only a specific type of red' peg. The peg in this situation might have been fire engine red, while the recruiter had poppy red in mind. In both cases, what they both should have in mind is not the color of the peg, but the shape. Swap peg with 'POSIX' and color with Unix, Linux, Unix-alike and you're back in context.
In this specific context, the one setting up the list of requirements should have specified "any posix, unix, linux or similar knowledge" as one single item, and then the recruiter should have matched any response that contains either posix, unix, linux or bsd, or a combination of those. This same problem could have happened if someone wanted a lathe operator that does threads, but the respondent lists NPT, TPI and M, but the recruiter doesn't know the area of expertise to filter for that and thus loses the input completely.
Aside from that, there is emotion and intonation and tone and appearances, but that doesn't have anything to do with the concept of 'lossy filters' and it totally irrelevant regarding that.
I didn't write this as an indictment of the recruiter.
How could I when I have no knowledge of their constraints, their past experiences or the incentives that guide their behavior? In all likelihood, they're behaving in a way that's perfectly consistent with their environment.
What I can do is form a reasonable guess of what the desired outcome is - the recruiter wants to move a qualified candidate into the applicant pool, the applicant wants a shot at interviewing, and Facebook wants someone who has experience in working with UNIX or UNIX-like systems.
Structuring the response so that everyone gets the outcome they want, as an acknowledgment of the constraints, and not as a criticism of the recruiter makes everybody win.
Have you heard? Authorial intent is dead. If you write something crappy, it doesn't matter if you meant to or not.
Calling someone a 'lossy filter' dehumanise them; these are people doing an incredibly difficult job & whose work has a huge impact on the productivity and success of companies.
> Structuring the response so that everyone gets the outcome they want, as an acknowledgment of the constraints, and not as a criticism of the recruiter makes everybody win.
I find this a disingenuous excuse: the behaviour you think should change was the recruiter's insistence on specifically 'Linux'. It is a criticism, whether you intended it or not. Your recommendations are to recognise and work around this behaviour, not to understand and accept it.
As a thought exercise, have you considered how a candidate without Linux experience would have acted in this situation? What evidence would the recruiter use to determine if this was a genuine candidate, or a dead lead that wouldn't proceed + waste their time + cause them to miss their quota?
Here's what happened - the recruiter had a list of keywords, received a large volume of inbound resumes and filtered for == 'UNIX' and dumped everything else.
They (and the company they represent) could have done a better job if they'd taken the information given, created an actual human mental model and filtered accordingly but chose to behave like a computer program instead. Their loss - move on and don't feel bad about this.
But I want to point out that like the recruiter you too got stuck in the literal filter. You assumed, I'm guessing correctly, that the hiring team is probably looking for someone with experience working on UNIX-like operating systems.
A bit of advice: When you encounter imperfect systems like this in the future a good practice is to ask yourself if you know what the actual desired outcome is, and give the lossy filter the input it needs to get you to the next round.
Here it would have been simply updating your resume to list UNIX instead offering an explainer. This would get you through the recruiter filter, and during your actual phone screen with someone on the hiring team, you could discuss your UNIX-like experience if asked. If they did want literal UNIX experience, you could apologize for misinterpreting the requirement and move on. No harm done.