Slashdot Mirror
Reasons You're Not Getting Interviews; Plus Some Crazy Real Resume Mistakes
Yvonne Lee, Community Manager at Dice.com writes,
"Not using standard job titles, not tying your work to real business results and not using the right keywords can mean never getting called for an interview, even if you have the right skills to do the job. I once heard advice to use the exact wording found in the ad when placing your keywords. I think you're even more unlikely to get a job if you do some of the things on this list."
Yvonne Lee, Toolbag Mouthpiece at Dice.com writes, "Using a thinly veiled facade to make yourself appear to be a PR authority figure, not tying your true intent to forced Slashdot stories and not letting the site continue on as it was can mean the systematic destruction of the very asset you paid good money for, even if you thought you have the right skills to do the job. I once heard advice to let the editors decide what is newsworthy and what is not. I think you're even more unlikely to get a return on your investment if you do exactly what I'm doing right now."
Yup...here we go again.
F U dice.com, F U.
Another link to dice.com? That must be a great site! No time to comment! I'm heading over there RIGHT NOW!!
CEO of Dice: How can we make ourselves appear to be an authority figure on hiring. ... would that work?
Yvonne Lee: Well, really all you need is eyeballs that people will automatically use to read whatever you put in front of them.
CEO of Dice: Yes, but how do we do that?
Yvonne Lee: Um, you could purchase a tech blog site like Slashdot.org.
CEO of Dice: "Slashdot"? Sounds violent
Yvonne Lee: Yes, everything that goes up on there is widely regarded as fact by millions of idiots every day.
CEO of Dice: Very well, one slash dot dot org, please! *holds up $137 in small bills and drops some change on the table*
After study a couple of of the weblog posts on your internet site now, and I genuinely like your way of blogging. I bookmarked it to my bookmark web site list and will probably be checking back soon. I certainly will be recommend dice.com to all friends and good family.
News for nerds, stuff that matters.
I need to know where /. moved to. I didn't realize this url was now the Dice.com blog.
"I once heard advice to use the exact wording found in the ad when placing your keywords."
Okay, an anecdote "I once heard" posted anonymously on /. is not exactly a scientific survey, but the intent is quite clear: candidates should be carefully tailoring their resumes to HR's total "I don't give a fuck" attitude.
But. If that's how a company is hiring, that company is going to be fucked before too long. If HR doesn't give a fuck and there's not enough leadership from the people who count to get HR to give a fuck, the company is fucked.
And, yeah, if you've been unemployed for a while, at some point a paycheck is a paycheck until you're stable. But you don't want to *start* your job search thinking that way.
HR drones not having the slightest clue
Is there a way to filter out 'stories' based on their tags? I.e. "ad" ?
From experience I know that one of the largest employers in the USA actually gives you a much better shot at a job if you do include the same key phrases in your resume. The mass crush of resumes that come in for any job opening requires that the HR drones put everything through an automated filter or three. If your resume doesn't pass those filters nothing else matters because no one is going to read it.
Not that I'm in the job market or even looking, but it didn't take long to figure out people hate these guys. Just wondering why.
Because we come here to read the news, not to have some parent-company advertisement misrepresented to us as if it were news.
CmdrTaco knew his audience; /.'s new masters at Dice.com don't seem to have figured it out quite yet.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Not that I'm in the job market or even looking, but it didn't take long to figure out people hate these guys. Just wondering why.
In short, Dice is currently the Slashdot corporate overlord. Hatred is obligatory.
They bought /. from Geeknet and drivel like this now shows up here.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
They (now) own Slashdot, so submissions like these are more ad than substance (see: slashvertisement). This is also a bullshit article, which is kind of indicative of the rest of the stuff coming from dice.com - it's specifically tailored to recruiter-based interviews only, something (in my experience) that are actually very rare. This is essentially SEO for recruiters, and isn't really that constructive.
LegendMUD
Prior to the recent rash of Dice.com slashvertisements, I held a very positive opinion of both Dice.com and Slashdot. With each new thinly veiled attempt to drive traffic to Dice, I lose a little bit of respect for each.
If Dice wants to put ads on slashdot, just put ads on slashdot. Stop running fake stories that just diminish a site that has spent a long time earning a loyal following.
How many roads must a man walk down? 42.
Don't be Florida on your resume. Next...
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
This is one of the reason I despise the industry and the lore that surrounds it: the ostensible "professionalism", the bullshitting, the going to the job interview in suit and tie (what the fuck for, nobody knows), the total lack of colour and creativity, the need to use boilerplate and keywords...
And the fact that "some of the things on the list" are considered outlandish and not conducive to getting a job. I found humorous every single item on that list, and would considered the candidate to have an advantage, exactly for having a sense of humor, rather than a disadvantage in getting a job.
In academia, where I work now, things are somewhat similar but not as bad as in the industry, and there's a measure of nuttiness and humor you can get away with.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
What the heck is a "standard job title" anyway? I've worked at 12 different companies in my nearly 30 years in software development, and never have I had the same "job title." I'm pretty sure my current job title is meaningless to anyone else looking to hire me, as would the dozen other job titles I've had be.
Get back to me when the "industry" publishes a list of "standard job titles" and makes every company comply with it.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Since you didn't read my post from yesterday, here it is again: Please go fuck yourself. Seriously. Everybody here means it. That's all. Thank you.
...on another forum:
Copy and paste the entire job description into a 1 pixel by 1 pixel box on your resume. Invisible to the naked eye, but parsers easily pick it up.
Just make sure to watch the sites that parse and reformat for you (Monster, eg) when uploading.
Karma: Can only be portioned out by the Cosmos.
As a software consultant and occasional contract employee, in all cases, the resume is what gets me hired, and the phone interview is just a safeguard to make sure I'm a real person. Often the interview turns into a technology bull session with the developers making sure that I have the correct industry understanding and not whether I have done the things I stated I could do. I clearly communicated that fact to them already. In my resume.
We're getting this every day? And Dice is apparently deleting comments? Fuck that. Slashdot is done. Nice work, Dice.
PS: I'm on my way over to delete my Dice profile too, since the company is clearly incompetent and unethical.
It's a bit worse than that, really. It's more like:
HR people are not intelligent enough to parse your resume. Try to guess the wrong way they'll use to parse it and modify your resume accordingly.
This effectively selects for candidates who are able to think like an idiot: a critical skill for dealing with customers and management after landing the job!
Every time I read one of these, it confirms that there's no purpose in Slashdot anymore, but my muscle memory for the last ~12 years or so keeps navigating me to slashdot subconciously. Then when I figure out what I'm doing, I get all sad. Anyone else in this situation? This is not intended to be modded Funny :/
My issue with finding employment mostly has to do with who I am competing with in my field. Computer science has become a field like doctors and lawyers where people get involved with it for the high salaries. People who are motivated by monetary gain for employment are more willing to make concessions just to have the job that pays $200,000.
In order to get that salary they will embellish their work experience, their skills or whatever it takes to get that position. Once employed, they generally don't mind 'doing it all', resulting in one employee handling the network, databases and systems administration, for one salary. This is appealing to businesses, because it means they have to hire fewer people, but it leads to mediocrity.
The crux of the problem seems to me to be that there are just too many unskilled people applying for skilled work. If 100 skilled employees apply to Google, there are probably 10,000 unskilled idiots sending in resumes, for the same position. The signal to noise ratio for HR and recruiting is ridiculous, and they have to resort to automating the filtering process down to some reasonable level. This means a LOT of good candidates get pushed into the trash. It's similar to the problem of spam; most people get lots of spam, occasionally an email gets mis-identified as spam, and you never see it.
I don't know what it is like in other regions and other fields, but Silicon Valley's hiring practices need a serious overhaul. I've long thought that a 'guild' type system for technical employees would be useful, where there is a clear path from apprentice to master, and people's professional reputations are paid closer attention to. Industry accepted certifications could also help, but that doesn't prevent 'paper tigers.' Having a guild or even an agent, like talent in Hollywood, would help a skilled employee break out from the background noise that all the unskilled idiots are making.
Finding work, networking with people and schmoozing requires social ability, and technical people are often not that social. Having an agent make connections for you, and get you in front of the right people would be incredibly beneficial, and smooth the hiring process for employers and candidates. That only works, however, if the people doing the networking are 'good' and they are representing their clients properly. Recruitment is a booming field full of talentless jerks that are only interested in making their commission and don't seem to care about their reputations.
Sites like LinkedIn are handy for connecting people, but I don't know about everyone else, but none of the recruiters that contact me seem to read ANYTHING in my profile. They just blast out email to whoever has particular keywords in their profile, and hope to hear back from a small percentage of them. Sounds kind of like spam, no? There's no investment from the recruiter and they're more than likely working under quotas, where they need to contact/call at least 20 people a day, or some bullshit like that. The recruiter doesn't care if you get the job, because they'll get someone the job, and make their money, regardless of the candidate's talent.
Job titles are also problematic. People don't understand what 'senior' means, especially in many small/new companies. Someone fresh out of college is NOT a Senior Linux Administrator, regardless of what theory you may know. Even after 5 years of solid work, I would disagree with someone being considered 'senior', but that isn't how job titles work here. There isn't some agreed upon or 'industry standard' for junior, mid-level, senior, etc.
Then you have the creative 'impressive' job titles, like Server Operations Engineer (Linux Admin), Site Reliability Engineer (Linux Admin), etc. I realize there are different skills needed for various areas of a company, and it is tempting to distinguish employees by title, rather than skillset, but that's what departments are for. You have Linux Admins working in the Site Reliability Department, or whatever.
This is why we keep seeing positions that are re-listed. HR people can't or won't do their jobs, and they get crap. Recruiters do even worse by telling the applicants what to say on resumes and in interviews, and they bring in crap.
To be fair, drivel like this has been showing up for Slashdot for years. I didn't notice it was a paid piece until I read the comments complaining about it. The problem is two--fold. First is a matter of principal--rather than get their drivel on Slashdot through users submissions, like all the other drivel, they're using their position as parent company to do so.
Second is the very real possibility that paid Dice.com drivel will increase in volume until there is nothing left but Dice.com drivel pieces. Then the few genuinely good stories will be gone.
It's been fun, it really has. Over the years as a lurker, as AC and then eventually as a lowly 6-digiter I have seen tons of insight, reasoned debate and out-and-out flame wars. There's been +5 Funny and -1 Troll and everything in between. And despite all of the bitching, there really was quite a bit of news for nerds and stuff that mattered.
Up until the last couple of months, when it all seems to have gone down the pan at warp factor nine. On this wonderful internet of ours things come and things go. Now is clearly the time for the venerable /. to go and I will help it on its way, albeit with a heavy heart.
So long, slashdot!
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
This reminds me of an application bought here at MegaBigCompany years back that promised to automatically scan, sort, classify, grade and determine what resumes where good for what job openings. HR was thrilled at the work it would save. We lost a lot of faith in it when we noticed that it reported many of applicants whose resumes it had scanned had gone to the University of Nix....we wondered, did they all go to a strangely named college? Then it occurred to me that the app was parsing UNIX on the resumes of people looking for IT jobs, as the University of Nix....
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Check her out on LinkedIn. Her resume is rambling, confused, filled with recommendations from junior-level staff, and uses a lot of buzz words without describing what she actually does. Plus, check out her picture. Who beat her with the ugly stick?
That's a bit unfair. There are occasional HR people who are quite intelligent. (They may be rare, but it's not an ansolute given that all HR are stupid.)
But, even the intelligent ones aren't going to do a bunch of extra work for no reason. Yes, you should always try to make it as easy as possible to hire you. HR people may have to hire candidates for 20 wildly different specialties by Thursday. They may have to hire an accountant, a DBA, a sales person, and a nurse all at the same time. If an HR person had a deep interest or understanding about IT, they would probably just be an IT person instead of HR. Somebody hands them a big list of topic-specific jargon. They try to get some sense of what sort of person they need, but the distinctions between writing SQL, Java, and ASM are almost certainly going to be mostly lost on the HR person.
Then, once the HR person gets some understanding of who they need to find, cheat sheet of keywords in hand, they get about 1500 resumes dumped on their desk. Half of them are from short order cooks who heard that "Computers" is a good business to get into. Half the remainder are from college grads and tech support weenies who have decided to fluff up their resume far beyond their abilities with huge, blatant lies. Then they still have a pile of things to sort through of people who probably could do the job. They may simply not have enough time to do more than give a cursory skimming of most of the resumes. So, if a resume has all the words they've been told to look for, it'll tend to get quickly to the top of the pile. If a resume has none of them, it'll tend to wind up at the bottom.
In bad cases, that's because the HR drone can't line up "Oracle and MS SQL Server Admin" on a resume with "Database Manager" on a request. It seems dumb, but to a person not in the specific field, the jargon can seem very opaque. So, you have to try to make it as easy as possible for somebody to hire you. I almost always tweak my resume to only mention relevant experiences whenever I apply for a job I'm actually interested in. It means I have a better signal:noise ratio for that position, and I'm more likely to sounds like what they've been told to find. It's a little more work. But, boo hoo. They probably want somebody who thinks working hard to make other people's lives easier is a good thing.
It's been a fun ride, slashdot, but slamming into the wall at the end ruined it for me. Dice Holdings, Inc. can apply big wet smoochies to that part of my anatomy that is reserved for evacuating the stuff that Dice does best.
Warning: This signature may offend some viewers.
Yvonne Lee, Community Manager at Dice.com writes,
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
...has now been excluded on my options. Hopefully that should take care of all the Dice stories for me.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
WWCTD
What
Would
Commander
Taco
Do?
Wonder how he feels about this. I mean, he got his pile of $$ and "is out" but still, I bet he cares.
-Styopa
CmdrTaco knew his audience; /.'s new masters at Dice.com don't seem to have figured it out quite yet.
Slashvertisements were certainly common at certain points during CmdrTaco's reign of terror.
Well, sure, but at least he knew to be shady about it.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese