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New Web App Uses Machine Learning To Analyze, Repair Your Technical Resume (techcrunch.com)
CV Compiler is a new web app that uses machine learning to analyze and repair your technical resume, "allowing you to shine to recruiters at Google, Yahoo and Facebook," reports TechCrunch. "The app essentially checks your resume and tells you what to fix and where to submit it," reports TechCrunch. "It's been completely bootstrapped thus far and they're working on new and improved machine learning algorithms while maintaining a library of common CV fixes." From the report: "There are lots of online resume analysis tools, but these services are too generic, meaning they can be used by multiple professionals and the results are poor and very general. After the feedback is received, users are often forced to buy some extra services," said Andrew Stetsenko. "In contrast, the CV Compiler is designed exclusively for tech professionals. The online review technology scans for keywords from the world of programming and how they are used in the resume, relative to the best practices in the industry."
The product was born out of Stetsenko's work at GlossaryTech, a Chrome extension that helps users understand tech terms. He used a great deal of natural language processing and keyword taxonomy in that product and, in turn, moved some of that to his CV service. "We found that many job applications were being rejected without even an interview, because of the resumes. Apparently, 10 seconds is long enough for a recruiter to eliminate many candidates," he said.
The product was born out of Stetsenko's work at GlossaryTech, a Chrome extension that helps users understand tech terms. He used a great deal of natural language processing and keyword taxonomy in that product and, in turn, moved some of that to his CV service. "We found that many job applications were being rejected without even an interview, because of the resumes. Apparently, 10 seconds is long enough for a recruiter to eliminate many candidates," he said.
Apparently, 10 seconds is long enough for a recruiter to eliminate many candidates
And therein lies the heart of the problem. In my experience, most HR depts are not that good at shortlisting candidates for tech positions, and some are downright terrible. Here's a tip: if you are hiring techies but you are not happy with the level of candidates HR sent you, ask them for all of the resumes that were submitted. You may be surprised at what you'll find there.
Maybe we ought to install this software at HR to clean resumes before they are read. Or perhaps replace the selection process entire with a machine learning system. (Although that comes with its own dangers, like hidden bias and spurious correlation).
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
We shuffle the CVs, split the pile on two, and throw away half - they were the unlucky ones!
It is a technique I learned in MBA school!
Guys, before you go crazy fixing your CVs, do make sure you look at what permissions the app wants.
You need to register either by your Github - or your LinkedIn account. And it wants access to your private data, like e-mails, contacts, etc. Oh and it has your entire CV to boot - all that for a rather dubious benefit that any HR agency will do for you for free.
Don't be the product here.
Put the details into a search engine and look back in time.
Who did the person graduate with?
Party with?
What public debate was the person attracted to?
What politics did the person try to spread?
A good person who can study and who passed their exams? Who presents well?
A person surrounded by activists?
Someone who needed help to learn how to study?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
if you know your thing, you can do it yourself therefore you don't need this privacy invasive service.
The problem with HR for tech companies, is that there is a LOT of money involved in the employment of tech people. So the industry, at all levels, from HR to recruiters, attracts shiny sales people who want to leech off the money fountain. It is exactly the same reason why there are no decent restaurants in popular tourist spots. All the legitimate restauranteurs get forced out by those with big promises and no moral integrity.
The whole tech HR landscape is a mess but I don't imagine it will get better until the bubble bursts and the money flows elsewhere.
This is a way for reducing the number of possible candidates that is unbiased. There are worse methods ... like HR criteria that are actually biased against competent candidates.
Agreed, but you'd be rejected for not speeling it right; it's 'restaurateurs'.
Speeling?? Goddamn hypocrite here :-)
Usually I like to call the HR contact after I've submitted my resume. Ask them a few questions about the job that are not answered in the ad or on the website. Good HR is able to answer my questions, a few put me through to the hiring manager. The problem with HR is that they look for the people that have polished their resume to reflect the position perfectly. It doesn't matter that you're a 24 year old with 8+ years of experience in - buzz word that exists for only 5 years -, they'll bite. But it is accepted to tailor your resume with your knowledge and skillset and how they best complement the position you're after.
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
I wonder if theyâ(TM)re going to run in the same embarrasing problem as Microsoftâ(TM)s racist twitter bot, where the AI learns hiring humans so well that it advises candidates that their college graduation date makes them look too old, that their name sounds too ethnic, that their Facebook profile it scraped that shows a picture of their kids will make employers feel they canâ(TM)t commit to 60 hours/week, etc.
You don't have to lie, but if you submit the same resume for all job applications then you are going to be coming up against people who have tailored their resume/covering letter to the job description and well at that point it sucks to be you.
As a boss at a firm once said to me, send junk mail expect it to be treated like junk mail. Sending the same resume's to every employer you apply for a job at are junk mail and most junk mail goes straight in the bin.
Log in with your LinkedIn account, because job-hunting is what it's for, right?
The result included 7 "cards", only one of which actually referenced my resume. Two cards were advertisements for their paid service, while four were general suggestions (here's some keywords, a resume shouldn't be hard to read, etc.)
Only one page actually looked at my resume, and that reports how other resume review software might see your resume. This is the most useful service, since that software is the thing we're trying to work around.
So I found that positioning page and the keyword list useful. The rest is just fluff.
Here are the keywords they're excited about:
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
Just tried it and got 7 pages of general comments with one exception:
- They counted number of buzz-words in my CV!
Spends a bunch of time slurping everything it can from your LinkedIn account, then counts how many words from their sacred list show up in your resume, and that you should include more of them (which are pretty tightly focussed on the hell-dimension of lower-level burnout-inducing IT, I might add).
That's the sum total of useful stuff. .... until you page-next and see the $7.99 for a "deeper analysis".
WASTE. OF. TIME.
Be a man. No, seriously. Anybody remember the secret AI project from Amazon that trained on tens of thousands of resumes? It incorporated how the hired candidates performed inside Amazon and started making recommendations. Except... whenever it saw a woman it immediately rejected the application wholesale. That was an 'oh shit' moment that caused the resume AI project to be cancelled. It proved that male tech candidates contribute more for Amazon. https://www.reuters.com/articl... Do you think that this bot will be any better? How can you trust it? I doubt it could even come close to Amazon's bot in effectiveness as it doesn't have tens of thousands of applications measured against actual hires and internal performance reviews and employee data. This bot is just the resume equivalent of automated SEO.
If a company can afford it, here's how to help find good software engineers:
1) Put good software engineers in the HR department. Hire them, if you have to. Call them "software evaluators".
2) State that every software engineer who applies for at job at the company must send in some code that they've written (or state the URL of where to find the source code).
3) The "software evaluators" in HR read the code that was submitted by the job candidates. For each candidate, the software evaluator tells their opinion of how hard the code was to write, how well the code was written, and how well the candidate's skills match up with what the company needs.
This is a better way of evaluating job candidates, than checking whether the right keywords were included in the resume.
Being a software evaluator like this would be a good job for someone who wants to work at home, or who wants to work part-time.
You know those "personalized" snail-mail letters you get in the mail, that are really advertisements? You might be tricked into opening the envelope, but the instant you see it, you know it's fake.
The same goes for resumes. I go through a lot of them. It takes me about 5 seconds to spot a fake. Your "machine learning" Web site isn't going to fix that.
Good resumes take time and effort. There are no shortcuts. The main points:
1. Keep them short, no more than 2 pages
2. BULLET POINTS
3. Not too many bullet points
4. Good English
5. Neat formatting
You follow those five points, you'll be ahead of 90% of the resumes out there.