> They’re often polished, curated, and tailored to tick boxes rather than showcase genuine skills.
I look at a lot of resumes and would say most aren't well polished or curated. They often don't showcase skills either, but it is surprising how bad resumes still are today.
Haha, exactly this! The resume is the first work sample you receive from an applicant, and it's absolutely baffling that even nowadays with all the tools available, a LOT of them still have glaring typos, poor grammar, confusing formatting, wrong length, you-name-it. It is absolutely correct that a perfect resume might not mean much in terms of skills, however, it's been very rare that someone with a poorly made resume even made it through the first screening interview.
I am one of those who made through the hoop of first and second rounds with the most horrid of CVs, still cant believe I got the job.
Extremely happy that I did, I was told later that the resume I submitted was the worst one by far, but the person (ie. Me) was the best applicant, which I still consider funny yet depressing.
If a company excludes bad resumes they are possibly just optimizing for good resume writers just by assuming that good resume writers are good workers.
As someone who gets a ton of resumes from academia, I see these very often. The problem here is that they all look the same because everyone is using the 'moderncv' package. If you want to stand out, invest some time to create your own template (but otherwise, it's perfectly fine, at least you'll have the basic structure correct).
Well, I am not using "moderncv" at all. I use three packages: "geometry", "inputenc", and "graphicx". That said, it does not look as appealing as these "creative" resumes (made using HTML & CSS or Adobe Illustrator, etc)
What are the things you generally look for? I've looked at a lot of resumes myself, but I still struggle with my own. I'd really love to see an example of one of the best resumes you've seen!
Resumes are not intended to be a proxy for (assessing) talent. They're intended to be a proxy for (assessing) experience. Portfolios, references, and interviews are intended to be a proxy for assessing talent.
IMO, resumes, while ideally intended as experience summaries, often function as gatekeeper proxies, filtering candidates based on arbitrary criteria rather than actual potential. Unfortunately, I too can't think of a good alternative solution that can scale well.
Hiring on potential isn’t a great strategy though. It’s important to compare candidates on something objectively displayed during in the hiring process, rather than some “potential” that’s a figment of one’s imagination.
It's not exactly potential. The way I've heard it phrased is: hire for slope, not y-intercept. The trouble is that slope is even harder to judge than y-intercept.
IMO, Resumes attempt to solve a problem that precedes what some consider the actual hiring process: the need to quickly screen thousands of candidates.
Unfortunately, this approach has flaws. The person doing the initial screening may not have a deep understanding of the role and is often working with secondary information. This can sometimes lead to them becoming gatekeepers, filtering based on superficial criteria (like career gaps, job switches, etc)
In my mind resumes are the trust part of "trust but verify". The resume is evidence the candidate meets the needs of the role description. The job interview verifies the resume is not a work of fiction.
It’s a pipeline. People are filtering the resume and you show up late in the process to interview. The resume is giving you material. You study it before the interview and based on what’s on it you look for opportunities to casually measure the candidate in a manner most favorable to the candidate himself. If the candidate can’t answer questions which probe the things his resume claims as expertise then it doesn’t bode well.
The root of the problem is that hiring doesn't scale. If you try to scale, it falls apart. It doesn't matter if you use resumes or some "objective" coding interview. Hiring is getting to know a lot of people and finding those that align greatly with what you are doing and who is doing it. You can't know that quickly. It sucks but it's the reality.
They're simple, easy to make, easy to read, and perfectly solve the problem of quickly communicating your background to someone in in less than a minute.
I look at a lot of resumes and would say most aren't well polished or curated. They often don't showcase skills either, but it is surprising how bad resumes still are today.