Being on employers side, I give little-to-no attention to education. Seen MBAs with no critical thinking or skills whatsoever and dropouts with very diligent and knowledgeable approaches.
For me, resume is not just a boring list of what you did, but also the way it is written - lucidity, points emphasised, etc. It all speaks loudly of personality.
And yea, if there are grammar mistakes it most likely will go to bin. Not because I particularly value grammar (which I do not) but because resume is usually supposed to be diligently written/reread by the candidate. If he/she didn't bother to do that properly - the damn thing that potentially land him/her job - this negligence says for itself, further projects, had there been any, will not be cared properly.
That's my opinion which is in no way representative or absolute in it's truth. I'd like just to pinpoint that there may be few opinions on the matter.
Do share same sentiment wholeheartedly.
Do you require the candidates to have written the resume themselves? Otherwise it's risky to read so much personality into it.
Resumes are usually required to be truthful, sometimes this is even verified, but I've never seen a requirement that I can't just have an agent write it for me; like how students write essays.
Especially problematic when recruiters are known for rejigging resumes into their own format, etc., before passing it onto the client.
It's not a magic stick allowing to make a perfect choice, more like an assessment option. That's being said, sometimes it worth to give a shot to someone whose CV is sub par.
Do you want good writers? Maybe, but not everyone. I honestly do think the importance towards grammar and "writing" in resumes are overstated.
We have to define "good writing". Good doesn't necessarily means CV written in a way for Shakespeare to become jealous to lucidity. It has to meet bare minimum - as in have zero grammar mistakes.
To make an example, you probably won't go to a first date in your pyjamas with stains on it but will dress nicely. The date (and whatever follows) may not be up to your expectations, but if you do use pyjamas, it most certainly will. Not because your pyjama is not magnificent but just because having negligence in dressing properly shows arrogance and disrespect to someone who joins you.
Mostly, hiring has a biased risk matrix. You don’t get hurt by missing a good candidate so much as hiring a bad one. So that makes you conservative in choices. Obviously 1 typo can happen but think about 5 to 10. If you have a lot of CVs to wade through, awful documents going to the bin is not a bad first step in the process.
When I see sloppy resumes or feel the interviewee is not interested/engaged during the interview process, I can imagine how they will be once I hire them.
As to being non-native English speaker, you may not be able to create perfect wording - that's fine, but if knowing this you're too lazy or entitled not to speel check it at least -it has nothing to do with knowledge but just plain negligence or ignorance.
This has to be intentional.
I would imagine that most of us non-native speakers would rather not bring attention to what is easily perceived as a weakness. We try to blend in.
Why is it so extraordinary to ask people to pay attention to what they are doing. Specially when going for something that supposedly interest them?
Imagine you are on your first date with that boy/girl that you DIE for. Would you take care of every detail ? Would you groom yourself, comb yourself even though you are not a barber or a stylist? Now THAT is showing interest.
Would you _go to_ a barber or stylist, or at least have a friend give you a once-over to make sure you look your best?
That's what you should do with your resume. First, second or twentieth language doesn't matter, care and attention to detail does.
Speak for yourself. The biggest signal I have when deciding whether to call you for an interview is your resume.
I have never considered education so far. There’s 2 states: I know the school, and I don’t know the school. I’ve never known any school so far.
Anyway, your resume decides how enthusiastic I’m going to be when starting your interview. Which is going to make things easier when that time comes.
Either you're interviewing bottom-tier candidates or haven't paid any attention to schools that are out there. If you're in the US, you should be recognize the names of the top 25 CS schools. You might not know their rank, but there aren't any obscure names on that list, and they graduate a lot of students.
Thankfully my co-workers who graduated from MIT and Stanford didn't know that, or otherwise they would have thrown away my resume.
In the other extreme I've even heard people here in HN argue that MIT and Stanford graduates are often mediocre, which is very different from my experience.
Hiring is hard and we all do it differently. YMMV.
Unless you are in the top 3 the distinction is mostly academic.
> At that point I might as well memorize them all.
Read through the list. You'll probably recognize a lot of the names. Out of 50, if you pay much attention to colleges in the US, I bet you'll recognize 40 of them.
Surely though a B. Eng. Software with first class honors is better than a random science degree.. ?
IME if I had to guess how well someone would work out and was told only the degree, I would answer:
physics/math degree > EE/ME degree > CS degree > humanities degree.
This is because in my experience, CS degrees are incredibly popular and a lot of people get them even though they may not be particularly good at programming or even enjoy it. 20 years ago, I'd put the CS degree higher up, but today Universities have lowered standards significantly and are minting lots of CS graduates with dollar signs in their eyes.
But that's not how it works because those with only a college degree are (for the most part) not competing for the same set of jobs as those with work experience. They are competing for internships, and when it comes to internships, you are going to hire someone with a CS degree over someone with an EE degree. Therefore you are right, when it comes to internships.
When someone has only a degree and no work experience, that's a risky proposition -- those candidates should be routed to internships so both sides can get to know each other without a long term commitment. In all the companies I've ever worked with, we've never hired straight from college without it being an internship. More likely than not, an internship will result in a job offer if it goes well, and IME most do go well. That means that in practice, it's much easier for college graduates to enter the labor market. But they enter via internships that are converted to offers and generate work experience. Then the work experience is all that counts and the degree becomes a checkbox.
In other words, your college degree is important, but it's important to open the door to your first real job by getting you an internship. After that, it very rapidly decays in importance. This is because the work experience is so much more informative and relevant than the education. I've never looked at anyone's grades or honors, and it's not uncommon to have a lot of employees without a college degree if they have proven their skills in other ways. This disregard for grades or degree and focus on actual skills is what makes things like dev bootcamps work (for good or ill).
In contrast when you screen resumes you invariably come across people who apparently managed to get a CS degree without learning anything. They won’t be dissuaded from applying to technical positions but if one doesn’t have a CS or related technical degree they probably have some confidence in their own ability.
There’s also a factor where some employers simply pass on resumes if the candidate does not meet strict degree requirements. This also increases the average quality of the non-CS degree holder a bit.
Call me cynical, but if I were to see an art history major switch to programming, I wouldn't think "this is a person that decided he loves CS more than art history", I'd think "this is a person that loves art history and ran out of money."
Of course that's all from the resume. Once you actually meet someone and work with them, you can find out pretty quickly how passionate they are and where their interests are. But we are talking about making judgements off of resumes, which again is why work history trumps all. If someone succeeded at a place with similar requirements to yours, that is a much more important signal of qualification than education, so once you land that first job, whether you were an art history major or cs major isn't so important. Might as well study what you love and then figure out how you fit into the labor market later.
What I implied is that people tend to look for jobs related to their degree if they don't have a good idea what they want. There are those passionate CS degree holders and dispassionate CS degree holders applying for a (say) software dev job. There are probably very few dispassionate humanities degree holders applying to the same job. It's some signal, and I don't think one has to dismiss the importance of a CS degree to see that.
In addition I’ve heard of an seen a number of things in CS programs to make me question their quality. I can’t speak to the other degrees.
This is mostly in the Asia/Pacific region though, it might be different elsewhere.
Edit: it's also worth noting as an ex-hedgie that in technical roles most of the firms specifically filter for people with musical ability for this reason.
Computer science degree holders were mostly lacking ability in my experience.
But I wouldn't count anyone out by their degree.
But I agree with you.
I’ve also worked with some really smart people from a physics background.
Similar kinds of problems come up in physics, so for me this tracks.
People can be petty. I've seen no shortage of candidates get passed on because of spelling mistakes or something equally silly, and it happens a lot more than you'd like to think. Maybe the resume reviewer is having a bad day, or their dad told them "people that do X are dumb" and so anytime they see X they think someone is dumb. I've even worked at places that fast-tracked candidates from USC because the founders were from there.
People are biased, and those biases will come across.
I wouldn't use this as the only basis to pass on a candidate, but it'd certainly be a red flag[1]. If you can't take the time to even run spellcheck on your CV - a document you have specifically crafted for presumably serious people to read - what does that say about your attention to detail at work?
There's room for leniency, obviously, because even professional proofreaders miss stuff and not everyone is writing in their native language, but some baseline level of competence is expected.
1. I'm usually hiring people in design and product, not engineering, so ymmv.
It says absolutely nothing. You've inferred something from it, and then run with it to create your own narrative.
Evaluate a candidate based on their experience and qualifications, everything else is just to satisfy our own egos.
That's as much survivorship bias as it is to hire someone based on their attention to details.
Well, as I said I typically hire in design and product, so "proven ability to produce high-quality written content" is often an important qualification.
One reason that recruiters want to tinker with your resume is to remove contact information, so they can ensure that the company can't reach you without going through them.
I was livid when this happened to me, especially after I made clear that I did not want the recruiter to send any documents on my behalf.
Think of it as dimensionality reduction—many people claim to be detail-oriented, but mistakes on a resume are an easy way for reviewers to verify that claim.
Spelling issues are inexcusable given how easy they are to catch (I hear Microsoft Office has a spell check feature), but grammar issues beyond that should largely be overlooked.
It wasn't about skills or experience or culture fit, but about getting the hiring done in a sane amount of time.
But they're not easy ways. There's absolutely no correlation between resume quality and candidate performance, and they're just idiosyncrasies we develop over time. We trick ourselves into believing these signals are important, when they're not.
I don't think that's entirely true. The resume is a product of a potential hire, and it gives off the first impression of their organizational and writing skills. While it shouldn't be the _only_ deciding factor, that first impression is an important signal for a hiring manager who has to filter potentially hundreds of candidates.
That's like saying a first date is in indication of a couples future. It's a bit silly. Sure, if it's absolutely chock-full of errors that could be a sign, but one or two are the kind of things you're supposed to ignore.
> that first impression is an important signal for a hiring manager
Only because people have been trained to judge others based on petty things, so people have responded in kind. Not because it's actually a valuable effort, but to give people one less reason to throw it in the "No" pile.
This is the kind of silly leap I'm talking about. People infer WAY too much from something like a word in a digital document and extrapolate that into something they use to impact a persons life.
I had an employee that insisted on asking candidates what they're 5 year plan, and was insistent that long-term goals were serious indicators if a candidate should be hired. She would give candidates thumbs down if she didn't like the answer, even if they could do the work.
Yes, once you get in the door and get an interview the resume is worthless. Except it's not.
The interviewer may need to run you past someone else. Will he/she reach for their carefully curated interview notes and pass those on? No, because they haven't written them up, or they can't be emailed, or the recruitment system is rubbish or [some reason].
But the resume is still there, a nice Word doc or pdf that can be easily emailed around.
Source: too many years building recruitment systems.
Literally! I can count on one hand the number of interviewers who have asked me about my past work experience. The most important thing seems to be whether I can regurgitate various tree operations on a whiteboard. It's only a matter of time before they cut out the middle man and start hiring candidates by (university_ranking, hackerrank_ranking) in lexical order without as much as an interview.
I find they can very quickly uncover potential red flags. They can also lead to interesting discussions that leave both me and the candidate enthused about progressing to the next stage.
The recruiter was already open to saying hello just because you said you can code for other people.
okay. many organizations would not make that exception. and there are many stewards of key open source dependencies that have talked about how they couldn't pass interviews to places that heavily use their software.
I'm one of the jerks who does a coding interview; but for the people who do interviews on what you've done, having something on your resume that you can talk about is a good thing. Interviewers want to hear that you've got deep experience in something and can explain what you did at a high level and in detail. If you've got that from work experience, great; if not, something you did independently is nice too; otherwise it's got to be coming from classwork, which is ok, but kind of iffy. Ideally, two, maybe three projects you can talk about is good to touch on in the resume.
Isn't this what a resume is? Just the list of those things that Employers want to look at.
Plus, employers are anyways going to make you fill out all this info separately in their recruiting system.
Employers are looking at your education, companies you worked at, years of experience, and maybe a vague idea of what your work area was before this. Just this info is enough to make a decision for whether to call you for an interview, and after that the resume is useless.