When do employers get to "how to properly write a job advertisement"? All these articles are only about what workers should do, not how companies fail again and again at writing a good description of the job.
E.g. "Describe your experience with software operations and running services in production" is a really bad question as it is too open ended and leads to name dropping. Asking for "engaging answers" judges the persons ability to write interesting novels instead of ability to solve (or avoid) problems.
Ditto with “How would you approach the design and implementation of new features for a production service?”. This question is way too generic and a proper answer could fill many books. There is so many different ways of doing this and depends a lot on what the software is used for. When benhoyt says "In short, don’t be generic" then at least he could take his own advice into account when writing questions.
An example response like "At Shopify [...] doubled click rate, from 15% to 27%" likely violate NDAs. I don't think companies like you to tell this to their competitor.
> When benhoyt says "In short, don’t be generic" then at least he could take his own advice into account when writing questions.
I actually agree with this: I think several of our questions could be improved and made more specific. On the other hand, we do want them to be somewhat open-ended so the writer has to think and can put their best foot forward (or not). I don't write these questions, but I'll try to provide some feedback to those who do.
"Don't be generic" applies to the employer with regards to renumeration. "Competitive" means nothing, give me a numerical range. This avoids a waste of time on both parties' behalf.
> When do employers get to "how to properly write a job advertisement"?
It is a very common topic. At work we get special training on it and tools to write better job advertisements.
> a really bad question as it is too open ended and leads to name dropping
It is definietly not a "job advertisement" or a description of a job. It is an interview question.
It is open ended, what is wrong with that? They are looking for someone who has experience in the domain, so they ask potential candidates what their experience is.
And how does it lead to "name dropping"? If all a candidate says is that they have worked at FamousPlace the right next question should be what specifically they have done there regarding running services in production. Same as if they say they have worked at NonamePlace.
We use Textio to help remove bias from job postings. It’s not great but helps with low hanging fruit. Just being aware of it helps avoid a lot of bias e.g. don’t write in tropes of crushing code.
This article is so frustrating. Get yourself on the market before spewing this shit. I recently been on the lookout for a new job and my first CV was personal. Full of my own words and description of what I did in the last 10+ years as a software engineer. I'm a bit biased but it was a really good CV.
That got me 0 fucking offers. ZERO
I rewrote my CV based on some google suggestions and with ChatGPT. I got through
next stage on every single job I applied ( 10+ ) and even received offers, finally landing a new role.
Stop talking shit.
Yea you 100% need a skills section that lists every technology you’ve ever worked with. I tried taking it off and got no interviews with that CV version.
Someone in HR or a recruiter will match up the technologies on the job post with your CV and only put you through if you list most of the ones they need.
It's very annoying -- I just concluded a job search recently after being made redundant, and what I found frustrating in some places that rejected me was weird stuff like not having enough experience with terraform/git/Github Actions etc.
But I've specifically called out the use of infrastructure as code, version control, and CI/CD at various points in my CV! I genuinely dislike the buzzword bingo CVs that I've vetted when hiring for roles but I try to keep an open mind about the actual experience that the candidate is portraying -- I guess it's too much to ask for the same open-mindedness in other hiring managers?
Humans love bullshit, and using ChatGPT to reorganize and embellish your CV undoubtedly brought you results.
One need look no further than the Google Docs LLM demo that generated a job advert from a one line description. No employer wants to say that they’d like to pay their employees low salaries or that they’re looking for unmotivated underachievers, and yet every company feels the need to state they’re looking for rockstars who’ll be paid competitively.
If everyone says the same thing, then, from an information theoretic perspective, it conveys no information, what we’d otherwise call “bullshit”.
I have the impression that for each recruiter with the same opinions as the OP, there's 10 that love bullshit and flowery prose and will discard anything that sounds like a simple developer writing about what he's been doing in a more realistic tone.
I find this advice kind of ironic. The most people I know don't use flowery prose in their cover letters because they consider themselves some kind of overachieving artists, but because it appears to be expected. Writing cover letters is bullshitting time, although this is probably country/culture dependent. Fortunately I didn't have to write an applciation for a long time, but reading my own old applications gives me the chills, even though I got invited to an interview almost every single time.
If you don't want flowery prose, you have to set the expectation when writing the job posting. If your job posting appears to be written by your PR department you get cover letters written by your applicants personal PR departments. Or in other words: bullshit me in the job description and I will bullshit you in my cover letter.
This behavior is reinforced if you don't make it clear who will gonna read my application first. If I get the impression that my application will land on a desk of a hiring manager who doesn't know much about the job I might turn the BS to 11. If you communicate clearly that the person reading the application first knows what you are really looking for, I'll dial down.
Maybe I'm in the minority but I enjoy writing flowery prose for industry, it's like wearing your LLM (bs generator) hat for a day and embelishing "pushed keyboard to generate outsized impact" into "devised novel lock-free distibuted supercompute fabric for 9485% YoY agile spaghetti reduction vs. k8s in multi cloud native value add"
I like to think HR starts sweating at how quickly they can get me in and the EM rolls their eyes a full 360.
A common phenomenon in the age of ChatGPT. Making the mistake of thinking you can spot AI writing because you can spot bad AI writing. You're only spotting the bad. The good you think is real. Some of the best cover letters and answers the author reads were probably written with the assistance of AI.
The key to using AI to write better is: 'with the assistance of'. You don't write a prompt, get a bunch of text and copy paste it. Instead, you use AI to help you, as basically a spellchecker on steroids that can accept commands to do anything.
One example is where the author mentions non-native English speakers. They can use AI to turn their broken English into exactly what they said but with perfect grammar, formatting, spelling and punctuation - and sprinkle in some thesaurus help and rewording here and there. They can even get some ideas for making the tone witty or serious or professional or funny. Key there is 'ideas'. Don't copy paste, use it to help.
Yeah I think this general hatred towards AI is weird. Should we also not use Google to solve problems because it sometimes returns bad results? Should we not use autocomplete in our IDE of choice because it sometimes selects the wrong method?
AI is a tool just like any other, and it is here to stay. Learn to embrace it.
I applied twice at Canonical. Got both times an automated mail where they proudly pronounced how superior and more human their interview process is and that i will definitely receive a follow-up. Both times i've been ghosted. So therefore let me give some advice to the blog author: Before (or instead of) giving out generic advice to job candidates, try to be a bit more humble about the (broken) reality at Canonical.
I've been through the hiring process at Canonical 6 months ago (wringer would be a more accurate term), all the way to 4 interviews with Mark Shuttleworth and an offer for a Director level position. I ended up passing because I didn't want to manage in a 100% remote distributed culture, and to be perfectly honest with myself a senior IC position was more suited to my personality than a managerial one.
I think their process is intense but fair, and I believe them when they say they try hard to rid themselves of bias. I'd ditch the psychometric tests, but will give them the benefit of doubt when they say it correlates with job performance (Google's also made that claim before).
Given how many people apply for jobs at Canonical, it's to be expected there is a high level of attrition, and quite possible small errors in the resume or application end up disqualifying your application, specially for more junior hobs. I can understand your disappointment, but they can only work based on what you've sent them.
My criticisms is directed at ghosting candidates for a company claiming they will do otherwise. That shouldn't depend on "quite possible small errors in the resume or application". Both were senior roles. They were also the only company doing this from all those i applied for.
I once applied for a job at Canonical. This was their process (roughly two years ago)...
Thank you for applying for Software Engineer. The application process has several stages:
- Initial screening (done)
- Personal essay (this stage)
- Culture interview
- Standardised aptitude and personality tests
- General interviews
- Recruitment screen
- Technical assessment
- Role-specific interviews
- Hiring manager interview
- Executive interview
The current stage is your personal essay. Please take some time to answer the questions below. We’re looking to get a sense of who you are, what’s important to you, and how you communicate. If you’ve already completed this when applying for another role, please feel free to copy/paste from your previous application.
- Beginning in your high school years, through university and into your career, what have you done that you consider exceptional?
- Why do you want to work for XYZ?
- How are you involved in open source software?
- What are your strengths as a software engineer?
- Describe your experience as a Go software engineer.
- Describe your experience with distributed systems.
I'm sorry, a 10-stage application with at least 5 different interviews? How many weeks is this going to take? This feels like FAANG-level recruitment.
Am I so out of touch to expect an application, one interview and maybe a technical assessment for most IT/CompSci jobs? Wouldn't the probationary period be way more effective to see if you fit into the team/company/culture/etc.?
I interviewed with both Canonical and Meta 6 months ago. The Canonical process is far more intense, and yes, it's a big time investment "on spec" for a candidate (I'd estimate it at 7 man-days, 4 for the written essay alone), along with 10 interviews.
They do read the essay carefully, which is what the OP's article is all about.
I'd rather a company take time to do a thorough assessment of a candidate rather than cavalierly hire one with a high likelihood of dismissal during the trial period, as they may have left an existing job to join.
> Am I so out of touch to expect an application, one interview and maybe a technical assessment for most IT/CompSci jobs?
My information is a decade+ out of date, but Google would perform a recruiter/CV screen, then a technical phone screen, then five technical interviews on one day. And this was all before your CV got in front of the person you'd be reporting to, and before they could say whether they were offering interesting work.
Many other tech companies, having seen Google's success, have decided to ape their interview process.
> I'm sorry, a 10-stage application with at least 5 different interviews? How many weeks is this going to take? This feels like FAANG-level recruitment.
At least one of the FANGs only has 3 or 4 steps, one being a HR contact and another a phone screening.
> Am I so out of touch to expect an application, one interview and maybe a technical assessment for most IT/CompSci jobs?
No, you're not out of touch. Most companies are more like this (although my experience is that most companies will do two interviews -- one that is more social and meant to measure "fit" and one more technical.)
If you're going to be leaving another job to work at a company, you want to find out if it's a cultural fit _before_ that happens, not during a probationary fit.
But that doesn't happen here - it's the hiring company evaluating that, you don't get a choice. Unless you mean that subjecting you to this horrendous process signals which kind of company they are, so that you can bail in time.
That's insane. But at least they tell you the process. I particularly appreciate them mentioning "personality tests" because that's a level of BS that I'm personally not willing to engage with. Telling me about it up front warns me that I would be a poor fit at the company, and so I can avoid wasting the time of both of us.
You're probably thinking of "Griggs v. Duke Power Co." which was about IQ testing.
The restriction only applies to tests which are not a reasonable measure of job performance.
So for example, a test of strength might be allowed for delivery drivers who have to safely handle heavy items, when it wouldn't be allowed for software developers.
Lots of companies have standardized and well documented interview processes.
canonical’s is indeed a disaster, it’s onerous for applicants (hey that simplified outline doesn’t say it but you can expect between five and fourteen interviews - seriously I know applicants who had fourteen interviews).
Another thing it doesn’t mention is the fact that there’s really no dedicated hiring and interviewing team at Canonical - all engineering teams “pitch in” (read: are forced to) with resume and written interview reviews, as well as in-person interviews.
This wastes a tremendous amount of expensive engineering time, and a lot of this is due to poorly screened resumes. It was very frequent for me to interview a candidate and wonder how they made it to that stage when it was clear from looking at the resume during interview prep that they were totally unsuited for the role.
Source: former Canonical who like everyone else, was forced to “participate” in the hiring process.
For most software companies no. For top software companies... I might do it. The problem is with NoName companies that think they are Google or in this case Canonical.
I actually just looked at their application form for a systems software developer position. They really want to know how good you were at maths and native language in high school for some reason, and not only do they ask what top percentage you were in (whatever that means, high schools in my country don't do that), but they also ask you to directly point to evidence for these scores.
Right before the application form they say "We are proud to foster a workplace free from discrimination." Not everybody had the luck to be able to perform at their best in high school, so that looks like a pretty big discriminant right away! And for most people applying to that kind of job that was more than 10 years ago, so I fail to see how it is relevant to a job application.
They have been derided for their interview process (though not, as far as I know, for their candidate selection), but that's not the point of the article. I'd love if it we stuck to discussing the content of the article: how to write when applying at any company.
If you could describe what superstition and nonsense you see in the article, that might be helpful.
There is something salient about the fact that Canonical’s culture is not one to mimic, though.
What if there is something about following this advice that unwittingly selects for candidates who will make a super long and off-putting interview loop?
Nitpick, not any company, only this company. If you have a company that writes fluffy job ads and you have a CV written like the article recomends, they are likely to pass you. That hiring manager doesn't want to know you, they want to be in awe with you. It's about matching with the company more than beeing direct, organized, smart and so on. Unfortunately.
I've applied several times, it's incredibly long. Each time I get railroaded into projects that I don't want to do and lose confidence that the process will deliver what I want.
Yes, I rejected them after they explained to me their interview process. I can only imagine how desperate one should be to proceed with them. Could be one of the reasons why Linux failed in the desktop market (the one that Ubuntu targets).
Software engineers using tools like ChatGPT isn't really about trying to game the system. It's more about how out-of-touch the old-school job application process feels. We really just want to make things easier on ourselves. We're in a time where we're all about automating the boring stuff. Why? Because we can. The whole idea of writing a cover letter feels ancient. Honestly, when I'm shooting out a ton of job applications, it's a total drag to whip up a special cover letter for each one. Most of us are just trying to find a gig that matches what we can do and what we want to do. But nope, we gotta jump through all these hoops and write these fancy stories, even if no one's really reading them.
The author is talking about a fairly “classic” approach. I was a hiring manager for a long time, and had a similar (but more flexible) worldview. It may not age well.
I personally think that being able to leverage AI tools will be an important skillset, in the future, and would not disqualify AI submissions, right off the bat (but maybe not consider them a “leg up,” either). They will just be part of the landscape, going forward. A lot of “classic” résumé advice isn’t really much better than what ChatGPT will provide, anyway. For example, he rails against “Buzzword Bingo.” I hate that, too, but it is also a “classic” CV technique, and many professional submissions will be absolutely packed with jargon.
I just think that there isn’t any way to avoid having to dedicate some real time and effort to screening applicants. In my case, it was something that I took very seriously. I had to fight like crazy to get headcount, and I was hiring pretty high-functioning people for a small, rather “elite” team. I really can’t relate to having to sort through hundreds of CVs of folks right out of school.
The problem is that there are two types of roles you need to fill. The first type is the role where you need the best you can get, it is worth passing on good candidates to try to get the great ones.
The second type are the roles where you just need someone that passes the minimum bar, good enough will do.
Problem is, everyone thinks that their role, their company, can only operate with the first type, where really most of them are the second type.
To me, a good cover letter is about being actually motivated to apply to a specific job and then simply explaining why.
AI doesn’t help because if you can articulate your genuine motivation as a prompt for an AI, you should just use the prompt as the cover letter which will be a lot more effective than using the AI-generated letter, as the AI will muddy your authentic motivation and diminish its impact.
> To me, a good cover letter is about being actually motivated to apply to a specific job and then simply explaining why.
Money. I want money. That's the reason I am applying to your job offer. I found a job offer that meets my skillset and I applied to it because I want an income.
But this isn't what you expect me to write, is it? You want something more, so I'm going to bullshit you so I can get the job that will allow me to get money
Ok. If you can explain in a little more detail how you get the job done and what qualifies your assessment of the relative efficiency, then you probably have the basis of a decent cover letter.
Did anyone ever get hired by answering the question of "Why do you want to work for us?" with "Because I need a pay check"?
Because that's realistically like 80% of the motivation for most job/candidate pairings. In my case the remainder is usually like 15% "and it doesn't require selling my immortal soul to the devil" and 5% "your tech/problem is vaguely interesting".
Given the above, I feel like a typical cover letter is really an exercise in spin.
A cover letter is also supposed to explain why the company should want you to work for them. But this question isn't usually posed explicitly, which I guess is confusing for some people.
Also, almost no-one is motivated so purely by money that they are equally interested in all jobs that pay the same. You can probably think of some reason why you would want to work at company X as opposed to any other number of other companies that may be offering similarly-paying roles.
I don’t think the reason of “I already applied to all the better sounding ones, but they all ghosted me” is gonna win too many points either.
It really depends on the market. Sometimes there are great looking companies that you really would like to support because they somehow seem awesome to you. But you don’t always have that luxury.
> A cover letter is also supposed to explain why the company should want you to work for them.
For the generic cover letter that’s a reasonable thing to focus on. I’ve seen plenty of application forms that specifically ask the “why do you want to work for us” question (or even worse: “why do you want to work for us rather than our competitors?” which is even harder to answer, especially if it’s a tiny startup you’ve first heard of by reading their job post on LinkedIn).
>I don’t think the reason of “I already applied to all the better sounding ones, but they all ghosted me” is gonna win too many points either.
Not if you word it like that.
>I’ve seen plenty of application forms that specifically ask the “why do you want to work for us” question
That's what I'm saying. That's the formal question posed, but you can easily answer it by explaining why you'd be good at the role. "I want to work at X because I believe that I could make a significant contribution to Y given my Z skills".
Absolutely. While in an ideal world, everyone would love to land a job that perfectly aligns with their personal values and interests, the reality is different. The current market conditions are dictating a lot of our job search and choices in companies. A vast number of talented engineers are out of work due to circumstances beyond their control and applying for multiple jobs becomes less about passion and more about survival. While a personalized cover letter sounds great in theory, when you're trying to send out dozens of applications to ensure you can keep the lights on the idealism takes a backseat to practicality.
> Honestly, when I'm shooting out a ton of job applications, it's a total drag to whip up a special cover letter for each one.
I've generally had more luck making a small number of applications with a short but carefully considered cover letter. It can just be a few sentences. Sometimes people think they need to spam applications because most of their applications are rejected; but in fact most of their applications are rejected because they're generic application spam.
A cover letter can be the least bullshitty part of an application (at least if you are applying to a small or medium sized company). You can truthfully explain why you are interested in the role and why you might be good at it.
That's so dumb. Dismissing applications based on the tools used rather than the content and qualifications is a missed opportunity. The goal should be to evaluate the substance and authenticity of an application, not to play "guess if it's AI-assisted or not." There's real talent out there looking for opportunities, and they might just be using AI to help navigate a convoluted application process.
You know job applications aren't checkboxes that need to be filled, but an opportunity to promote yourself? Sending in a cover letter that's obviously AI generated gives an employer so many negative signals about you. A good cover letter could be a single sentence, yet you choose to spam us with crap that says nothing about you? Are you struggling to say why we should hire you, or are you just stupid? Into the trash.
I had this happen with an applicant recently, where they fed our job description into ChatGPT to generate a cover letter which was very non-descript and flowery, quoting phrases from the job spec verbatim which made it sound rather insane.
Trying to give the candidate a chance, I asked them why they had a applied to the position in the hopes that they would write me a short answer about what piqued their interest. Alas they chose to use ChatGPT to generate that answer as well, hitting me with another wall of text of mindless bla bla bla.
> that they would write me a short answer about what piqued their interest
Honest question: do people actually apply to jobs because it piques their interest? I pretty much just... need a job. I'll assess whether I want to join based almost purely on the team - if the team doesn't feel right, I'll skip.
I don't apply for any jobs that require a cover letter. There's already enough information asymmetry and the effort required from the candidate is a lot higher than from the company as the company can distribute the work across multiple employees. A cover letter is a way to shift even more work to the candidate.
> Honest question: do people actually apply to jobs because it piques their interest?
Yes? I mean, I have to work somewhere, but I'd prefer to work on problems that I find interesting.
> I don't apply for any jobs that require a cover letter.
Where I work cover letters are optional, and give the candidate a bit of extra space to explain how their experience is relevant to the role.
I find this becomes less and less relevant with seniority: if you are an obvious fit with oodles of experience then the letter won't tell us much. But I find the letters pretty interesting for more junior candidates, or people coming in from different industries.
I also don’t apply for jobs where I have to write a cover-letter. Last time I was laid off (when I was forced to find a new job), I applied in 2 pools - jobs that piqued my interests and jobs that paid me money so I can live. In the first group, when asked I could easily drone on about the interesting work they publish or whatever. The second group… I could scrap together a smile and a thin lie about how they’re a really impactful place based on what I learned from their homepage.
When applying for jobs because I want a change, not because I need a salary, then yea it’s exclusively applications to interesting companies and teams.
I assumed cover letters were for non-programmers and that places that demand them are trying to hire programmers with an antiquated/non-programmer interview process, which I interpreted as a red flag.
If you have the luxury to choose and are not in the loop of "I need a job by MM/dd otherwise I'm screwed", this is more evident, be it because the business area is more interesting or more aligned to your own values, the product looks great and engaging, you're changing industries, etc.
I was only curious about _why_ the candidate had applied, given the ChatGPT generated cover letter. And a simple "because I am looking for a job and I think I match who you're looking for" would have sufficed in my opinion.
We actually don't require a cover letter in the first place. But if there is one, I'll read it of course.
Honestly can you blame the candidate? Cover letters are barely read and make no difference in the overall selection process, except as a measure of elimination. For a job seeker, a discerning reader like you isn't a priority when he has to apply for 30 other jobs each day with a custom cover letter for each one.
I remember back in recruitment for banking, we simply used to look at stacks of hundreds, maybe thousands, of resumes. Judging HR folks' calibre, I doubt any of them had the time to read and filter through hundreds of cover letters to send the candidates over to us.
The cover letter is a thing of the past and should be eliminated altogether, simply because they have been rendered useless by employers themselves.
This is a natural side-effect of both sides "cheating" to the point that genuine and legitimate efforts are punished and "gaming the system" is encouraged and rewarded. Come to think of it I think it's basically a variant of "tragedy of the commons". In the sense that some actors exploit the weaknesses of the market due to their self-interest and as a result disrupt the signal to noise ratio of the market and damage it for the other participants.
Once this exceeds a certain amount it will accelerate because more and more people reluctantly start gaming the system to avoid the penalty.
The more automation and AI and bulk/mass stuff is thrown into it the worse it will get (since you get to put a multiplier behind any bad behaviour). When it was slower and more expensive to participate in the job market it was better.
You can find parallels to this in other areas such as the dating market.
The OP seems to think we should approach cover letters with the same care as if we were writing the great American novel. I disagree. They are meant to be somewhat canned, but a good one will efficiently direct the reviewers attention to the parts of your resume which are most relevant to the job and give the impression that you are specifically interested in the role. This is a task generative AI can accomplish with appropriate direction.
Obviously a generic prompt is going to get a generic response, but if you put in the work to create a prompt with adequate context and descriptions of what you specifically want then I've seen it produce output that is a reasonably good starting place. If you don't want it using overly flowery, weirdly deferential language and copying specific phrases from the job description then you can address that by including those instructions in the prompt: "Be concise. Use a confident and conversational tone, and avoid using specific phrases from the job description."
The problem is most people aren't going to spend 20-30 minutes creating a really customized prompt. But people who can't write a good prompt probably also weren't going to handcraft a great letter either. Mainly because of the investment of time it requires to create a fully bespoke piece of writing by hand for each place you want to apply.
Another thing I want to mention is that it seems that many people don't realize yet that if you don't like the initial output you can give feedback and ask for revisions. E.g. "Can you make it shorter", "Eliminate flowery adjectives", etc or even just "Can you show me some different variations of this letter?"
If you're writing a lot of these, it's worth putting in 20 minutes or so to make a prompt that creates output that doesn't suck but which you can easily reuse for other companies and roles with minor tweaks.
Am I the only one who is not maintaining some kind of private Github repo? I am doing this job for the money and not the "coding fun". If I had the urge to code more, I would just do more hours in my regular job and get paid for that.
I think none of my coworkers in different jobs have had Github profiles with public code.
I have a Github profile with multiple public repos, but I don't think it helps with anything. I once had an interviewer say "it seems like you don't have much on your Github profile".
Many developers have taken to making junk pull requests with things like typo changes to make their GitHub contribution graph look more green, as that's all the HR drones doing screening will look at.
> I once had an interviewer say "it seems like you don't have much on your Github profile".
This sounds like a softball question to invite you to talk about your projects phrased in a slightly ignorant way, possibly on purpose. If you had quality projects on your GitHub this should be an extremely easy statement to answer with "I disagree because x and I'm particularly proud of y and its popularity with n users and feel that it demonstrates skills z". It's a perfectly fine way get a chance to state the value you demonstrate on your GitHub. I'd have no problem with getting this.
Sure, but if an interviewer phrases it in this way, they should also fully expect to be shut down. I don't see any reason to not just go "talk me through the projects on your Github profile". To me it signaled that they minimalized my work, especially because there's at least 3 projects on my profile that I'm more proud of than any non-public work I've done in my professional career. Maybe I'm sensitive, but I guess it just signals that there won't be a fit.
If an interviewer phrases a question this way, they're explicitly framing the conversation in such a way that the candidate is on the defensive and has to justify themselves in their response, and it highlights a power dynamic between the interviewer and the interviewee.
The interviewer could easily craft this question in any number of ways that creates space for the candidate based on what signals they're looking for. And it should be on the interviewer to get this right, not the candidate to interpret it as intended.
Of course, it could also be that the interviewer's looking for signals around how the candidate approaches being placed on the defensive and belittled; but hopefully the candidate will recognize that signal for what it is. Why would a candidate want to work in a place where they'll be expected to be on the defensive and belittled, to the point where it's highlighted in the interview process?
- you have submitted a significant amount of PRs (or interesting issues) to popular repos
Your toy programming language that hasn’t received a single star nor a commit for over 2 years, your “fix typo” PRs, nor your countless forks don’t matter at all because: interviewers rarely look at them, if they do, they won’t understand it, if they understand it they will judge the smallest mistake they can find, and chances are, you yourself don’t remember a thing about your most interesting project.
No, my GitHub is entirely private save for a couple of 6-8 year old archived school group projects, and the very occasional pull request.
I can understand why it may be useful if you are making a big switch in terms of the type of programming you do and can see myself putting together a "portfolio" in that case. Otherwise its probably worthless.
This isn't to say I don't have side projects or experiments I do for fun. They just don't go on GitHub (and why should they? It's not particularly more convenient than any other way to host your code. Mostly I use cgit these days since it's very platform portable and lightweight and I can host it internally with just a c compiler), and if they do, there's very little benefit to them being public unless you are doing what I mentioned above about needing to "prove yourself".
I'm not a web developer though, maybe it's more valuable the closer you get to frontend stuff? Just a thought, I don't actually know enough about that to say.
Yeah, I can't imagine only writing boring code at work and never getting to learn new, interesting things that could get me a role using those things that I actually enjoy using (now I am past that already, but I've done this all my career and would recommend unless you don't care at all about enjoying your job).
I've always wanted to ask for the github profile of the person asking me the question. I doubt they would get the irony of that however and probably get myself red-flagged.
Something that I really need to emphasize is tailor your CV to every job.
If you're apply to a job that's targeting C/C++/rust/low-level take any python (or similar) and either don't include them or, if what you were using them for was relevant to the job itself coalesce them.
If you're applying to a job that involves creative work, make sure to include creative projects, but if you're not then just have a sentence in your "about me" synopsis at most.
Your CV/resume should fit on a single page. Priority should be to things that are directly relevant to the job you're applying for.
If it's not your first job your uni grades don't matter, just the qualifications, and the more real experience you have the less relevant those are - unless you're an international hire and a work visa will be needed, in that case more or less all countries just have hard "you must have this degree or equivalent" requirements.
Include information about what you actual did, not what project/product you worked on.
I've read many CVs that make it actively hard to determine whether interviewing is worthwhile: lots of pages isn't impressive, all it means I'm more likely to miss info that would make you compelling. Similarly buzzwords aren't impressive they should only be present in significant amounts if you're think you're dealing with recruiter BS.
This article is so shit. I recently been on the lookout for a new job and my first CV was personal. Full of my own words and description of what I did in the last 10+ years as a software engineer. I'm a bit biased but it was a really good CV.
That got me 0 fucking offers. ZERO
I rewrote my CV based on some google suggestions and with ChatGPT. I got through for every single job I applied ( 10+ ) and even received offers, finally landing a new role.
Stop talking shit.
I think if your resume goes through HR or automated filters first, they will filter out any personalized CVs. It would need to land directly on the table of an engineer for it to be appreciated.
What objective methods do you use to determine that you're keeping the right people and rejecting the right people?
I'd love one of these companies to actually hire a control group some time instead of just assuming "well, I like the people I hired so they must be good" and then pontificating about it.
He forgot the part where the most important section of the “written interview” is about your high school years, because Mark Shuttleworth blindly and erroneously believes it’s a good predictor of what kind of person you are and how you will do at Canonical. Never mind that as has been said many times, this is about hiring the current “you” and not high-school “you” which may well have happened 30 years ago.
Another arbitrary set of tips for the perfect resume. It provides zero evidence that this selection process results in better candidates. None of the perfect resume guides does that. What they do instead is list a bunch of personal preferences and try to justify them because they are blinded by their position. Did you really make a better job than randomly eliminating 90% of the applications? Who knows.
I lead a small R&D team in Materialise's Kyiv office. Due to very demanding requirements (we need someone who can do math, write code, and communicate with other people reasonably well, often at the same time), I usually have to read somewhere between 50 to 100 resumes per hire. And one thing is absolutely certain - there is an inverse correlation between the quality of the resume and the quality of the candidate.
People in high demand don't have, nor should they have, the skill to write resumes. That's the skill that people who can't get a job naturally develop.
The other thing, a bad resume often protects you from bad employers. Take this passage from the post: "When candidates first started (obviously) using AI for their applications, I would rule them out for “cheating”" - that's... incredibly stupid. You don't want to work for or with stupid people so I think all the ruled-out people dodged a bullet here.
One reason I joined Materialise was that the recruiter used my LinkedIn profile at the interview instead of asking for a resume. Didn't waste their own time, didn't waste mine. That's smart. I want to work with smart people. I'm in.
>was that the recruiter used my LinkedIn profile at the interview instead of asking for a resume
I have never seen this. Most of the time, not only do they not look at your linkedin profile (because like it's usually a reflection of the CV), they want you to fill in a custom built 'Resume builder' on their 2000 era site. As you can imagine, this is as crap as can be and doesn't work correctly.
The author believes that rejecting candidates that fail in these ways will lead to hiring better employees, but I see nothing to say why that should be so.
It's funny because I've read that details scare people, so you should avoid them. May be include something the employer likes (saved the employer 200K per year using xyz solution) but technical details?
There is definitely a balance. When reviewing applications if I see that you used a bunch of technologies that I'm not familiar with, in my mind that counts for nothing. On the other hand, being too sparse also gives me few signals on whether you're a good candidate. IMO as a rule of thumb, adding details related to the job description is good. Otherwise, keep it broad enough that anyone in your field will know what you're talking about.
From time to time, I volunteer with friends and local grads to find positions out of simple annoyance with the ecosystem. I suspect the reason things look generic is staffing-agents (and data mining scammers) will often post/farm-lead a genetic description of nonexistent positions, than spam the inbox of HR people when a request for applicants is posted. There are many reasons this happens, few are related directly to building a team.
For example, the non-vite job posting some unions, faculties, and work-visa-sponsors must post on public lists by law. These are often so overly specific one could name the single applicant out of 200k CVs. The posters sometimes just want to document time/details with a few applicants to prove on paper they had no option other than hire a specific worker they wanted in the first place.
There are great companies out there that need help building interesting projects. You probably don’t want to work someplace where the process is deceptive, punitive and or humiliating... even with low-stakes conversations about project staffing.
Production programmers/engineers are busy people, and often don’t give a toss about making things aesthetically pleasing for laypersons. For example, they would ignore an article written by chatGPT criticizing chatGPT with 62% certainty.
Engineers prefer direct language and concrete examples. Unfortunately it's not always engineers looking at your resumé, and they love buzzwords and flowery language.
> There’s nothing interesting or personal, and it could describe almost any software engineer.
Do you not want a software engineer?
I’m applying for a job that I have to have to survive, not my life’s ultimate passion.
If you don’t want me to use automation to aid my workflow (which in this case is to apply to hundreds of jobs knowing that my chances at each individual one are slim) then you’ll get what you’re asking for: employees who are stupid enough to waste their time on menial, low-value tasks like cover letters for job applications that have a 99%+ reject rate.
For hiring managers lamenting the fact that our resumes don’t stand out, maybe you should be scolded for your jobs not standing out. What do special about working for canonical? Let me guess, you write software that transforms inputs to outputs on a deadline. My bad for my cover letter on that subject being “boring.”
It’s not the applicant’s job to be worried about the difficulty of your screening process. If you don’t want to sift through flowery cover letters, stop asking for them. Also, it’s your job to sift through applications, not our job to tailor our applications for your individual preferences. You’re just one fish in the sea.
I used the new AI assisted LinkedIn summary and it had all the usual buzzwords I can't stand either but, alongside things like company 'culture' (we're a family here) it looked to me to be the kind of vapid and saccharine paragraph that presents the corporate image we 'want' to present. I thought hey, at least I didn't have to write it.
"but the written interview part (the part people seem to protest the most) I actually find quite useful."
Yeah, not taking advice from this fellow. Good writing doesn't necessarily make you a good software engineer (and vice versa). Save this garbage for college applications.
This line of conversation has now become so nonsensical that I can only conclude you are arguing in bad faith.
The act of writing fictitious narrative prose is obviously quite far removed from communicating technical ideas clearly and concisely. I think you know that.
I mean, it's Canonical - they famously weigh high-school experience very heavily, so I guess them behaving like colleges is consistent (if slightly insane).
The author contradicts their own advice to avoid flowery prose, “show don’t tell”, and to use “nothing but words” — they frequently use italics and punctuation for added emphasis.
The criticisms seem pedantic, given that many job postings might fail the writing bar suggested by the post. How would applicants know that the writing style in a posting is unacceptable in their submission?
Re:business jargon — the example of “actionable insights” that was derided as meaningless merely lacks specificity. It provides more information about a candidate’s prior role. Are they building dashboards with summary stats, or expected to propose strategy based on research? Not knowing business jargon doesn't prove that the jargon itself has no meaning.
What do people think of the language in the job below, evaluated using the criteria in the post?
Fun how he advocates for not using AI on your resume when applying at Canonical, never mind the fact that Canonical’s Glassdoor page is full of astroturfed, blatantly AI-generated 5-star reviews.
How not to apply for a software job: applying at places where the interviewer is pedantic and evaluating you on things that are subjective and literally have nothing to do with your ability to perform the job. This article is worthless.
When you have a sub 1% chance of getting an interview, asking for a cover letter or some kind of non trivial time comitment is just wrong.
IMHO a better approach would be to select lets say 10% of the candidates and ask only them.
If an applicant can’t take the time to write a cover letter — and by “cover letter” I just mean an email that’s says here’s who I am and here’s what I like/do — why should the person hiring take the time to read what the applicant has copied and pasted to countless other employers?
> and by “cover letter” I just mean an email that’s says here’s who I am and here’s what I like/do
This makes it sound like it would be something that would be "copied and pasted to countless other employers", just like a resume often is.
But your last point made it sound like the applicant should invest more of their time than that.
Conventionally, a good cover letter will be, at least to a degree, bespoke for that job. But that is a non-trivial time investment on the part of the applicant. And it can be a significant waste of time in cases where something on their resume disqualifies them from consideration regardless of their cover letter.
Also, in the last several years, the impact of a good cover letter on getting an employment offer has diminished tremendously to the point that expect it of applicants isn't not respectful of their time.
There's a half-way between full-bespoke and ready-to-wear ChatGPT boilerplate, you can assemble a cover letter to order from reusable snippets, then add something specific to the company and job opportunity, assuming it's one worth the extra effort.
> Also, in the last several years, the impact of a good cover letter on getting an employment offer has diminished tremendously to the point that expect it of applicants isn't not respectful of their time.
Do you have anything to substantiate this claim?
I'm an employer and I read and respond to dozens of applications when I have an open position.
Usually when I receive an excellent application, the cover letter is roughly a paragraph in length. It isn't some lengthy, typeset file attachment with a mission statement or some other nonsense that would typically appear if you Googled "example cover letter".
My thoughts on ideal job applications closely mirror those described here[0].
> Do you have anything to substantiate this claim?
No, it's my personal experience.
It's an observation supported by people I know who have gotten a similar sense at their jobs. One director level friend, with insight into how they do hiring, explained that it has a lot to do with how HR filter things. (As someone else said in this thread.)
Some HR departments will sanitize information to reduce bias, like a photo of the candidate, but this can include a cover letter.
It's going to be different with different employers. So you could be an exception. But the likelihood that anybody reads my cover letters these days is so low that writing them is almost never worth the time. I've also found it to be more difficult these days because the quality of job postings themselves have diminished. A lot of the complaints that OPs article makes can be said about the job postings. There's just nothing to latch on to.
But yeah many/most places don't read cover letters. Some don't even read resumes. It's very clear from the start of the call you can see them start to skim through it or just ask you to just about read it for them. I even had a call where one of the interviewers had someone eles' resume up and referred to it by mistake and apologized and then did it again five minutes later.
So, no, I have nothing to substantiate the claim.
Edit: Okay here's something you might consider "substantial".
Apparently it's a thing now to not even send applicants rejection notices -- and just to ghost them instead -- on the basis that they might be a wacko and react poorly to rejection. So, as a policy, companies will inflict on all candidates, including nice people, the ill of ghosting them, to spare themselves the risk of receiving a shitty email from a shitty person. They are so thin-skinned/careless that they can't tolerate bad behavior in the form of an email that they don't even let you know they're not interested in hiring you. Even if you started the "hiring pipeline". Even if you apply with a cover letter.
People on this website who apparently work for companies that do this admit that's what their company does. So if companies do do this and admit it then maybe that's substance for you.
In my opinion, the kind of psycho who can't send a rejection email is totally consistent with everything I've experienced above the edit.
I can't really argue against that, and I certainly agree that it's going to be different with different employers.
Genuinely, I'm sorry you've had shitty experiences in the past. I've had a whole bunch too. I will say however that in the times in my career when I did apply for jobs, most of my successful applications [I believe] came as a result of a short, to-the-point, personalised cover letter.
I 100% agree. In the past, I've written good cover letters and they've been crucial to getting job offers. Hiring/tech culture has changed where cover letters are largely meaningless. And wish that weren't the case.
And I don't think writing a cover letter is going to harm your chances at a job. Or if it does, you might not want to work for a company that penalizes them anyway. But the attitude of "well I don't want to work for a company that doesn't read my cover letter" isn't really viable as an applicant as it rules out a lot of opportunities for work.
The whole situation is so silly too because a nice cover letter can make rejection emails nicer, like "we enjoyed your cover letter and your joke about the thing, but ...". I'd like to think that makes it easier for employers to send rejection emails because they can say something that sounds genuinely positive and personal instead of cookie cutter fake encouragement; "I'm sure you'll land on your feet!" So it makes their job better and probably would help avoid getting hate mail from people acting poorly. It's a win all around. But it's just a race to the bottom at this point.
Anyway sorry for the rant. Thanks for the replies. I agree with you 100% and wish cover letters were more meaningful but for every one of you that reads them there are nine who don't. So I'd just ask, don't be surprised if people don't write cover letters anymore.
I mean half these companies, especially the "always hiring" ones aren't even trying to fill positions, they're just signaling growth to investors. Sending anything to them is a waste of time.
As an anecdote (since we're in that territory here), we (major financial firm) were sent only resumes by the HR team to filter through and select candidates for interview. Going through my circle, it's the same for guys working in any company that's bigger than 50 employees.
It's not the grammar that's giving you penalties though, it's all the chaff that comes with using AI that you don't really want.
Another issue with using AI is that you didn't write it, you're going to struggle to clarify any grandiose claims during an interview. I've come accross only a couple of these CVs before and I have to question what these candidates are expecting to happen. If you're going to write your own bullshit in you CV at least you can (try) to bullshit your way through the interview as well. If you're getting an AI to bullshit for you, you're going to be clueless in an interview.
Need to improve the chatgpt prompt in canonical's case. "Include some personalised examples such as *paste author example". Don't have perfect grammar - allow the occasional mistake but not too prominently."
At my job I have to write a lot of internal documentation and teaching material for teams to learn from. Since ChatGPT I've changed my writing style slightly because it often could be perceived as written by AI. It is comical that I'm now thinking twice about using certain phrases because they might mirror ChatGPT's writing characteristics. I am now even including different paragraph lengths because everyone is familiar with the way ChatGPT divides content.
I suppose it's a bimodal distribution: very high effort and very low effort will both have near-perfect grammar, albeit for different reasons. Since the low effort applications dominate in volume, the discriminator learns perfect grammar to be a negative signal.
It's not the "perfect grammar" that gets penalized (though ChatGPT grammar isn't really stellar). It's the part where the writing contains "little or nothing from the candidate's experience".
E.g. "Describe your experience with software operations and running services in production" is a really bad question as it is too open ended and leads to name dropping. Asking for "engaging answers" judges the persons ability to write interesting novels instead of ability to solve (or avoid) problems.
Ditto with “How would you approach the design and implementation of new features for a production service?”. This question is way too generic and a proper answer could fill many books. There is so many different ways of doing this and depends a lot on what the software is used for. When benhoyt says "In short, don’t be generic" then at least he could take his own advice into account when writing questions.
An example response like "At Shopify [...] doubled click rate, from 15% to 27%" likely violate NDAs. I don't think companies like you to tell this to their competitor.