from Hacker News

Are recruiters better than a coin flip at judging resumes? Here's the data

by taco-hands on 5/4/24, 8:49 AM with 28 comments

• by hyperhello on 5/4/24, 11:50 AM

  “When recruiters predicted the lowest probability of passing (0-5%), those candidates actually passed the technical interview with a 47% probability.”

  Well, that’s disturbing.

• by taco-hands on 5/4/24, 11:57 PM

  OP here. I posted this as I'm continually troubled by tech recruitment - I think it's fundamentally broken and has been for years now.

  I'm verging on writing a long post on it, but came across this article as it included some simplified data/research on the topic (there isn't much around!).

  A lot of (or the vast majority) of recruiters have little concept of the true value that sits behind a resume/CV - they don't even have the capacity to understand/interpret the content at times, but there are a few that aren't as bad as the rest. A hat-tip to them!

  I've had to work with a lot of recruiters at times in tech leadership roles and not by choice. I dislike working with them and generally because most of time, they don't really care about fit - they're simply looking to hit their monthly, quarterly or annual target numbers. I've also seen actions by recruiters that verge on slander/defamation and horrors I don't want to see ever again.

  Where CV's are concerned, it's a crap shoot and I'll happily admit that I hate writing my own...

  In the comments, someone mentioned "hiring direct". Now there's a method that truly does work. I've hired more than 150 devs personally and the vast majority have been through direct hires via network and events.

  Whilst it's super important to hire for skills, hire for attitude first. Skills can be improved (and taught if needed). Attitude is everything!

• by nunez on 5/4/24, 2:02 PM

  > We strongly encourage anyone looking for work in this market, especially if you come from a non-traditional background, to stop spending energy on applying online, full stop. Instead, reach out to hiring managers

  Absolutely true, at least for now. The techniques presented afterwards are straight-up inside sales prospecting 101 I predict that HMs will build up thick firewalls as desperation increases and these techniques become more widely known.

• by itsdrewmiller on 5/4/24, 4:04 PM

  In my experience (and Lazlo Bock's in "Work Rules!") most recruiters are bad, and the good ones are good enough that you should stick with them across their career. Thus in aggregate them performing poorly doesn't surprise me; I'd be curious to see a study on whether the good ones are consistently good or if it varies from test to test. That said I don't think ANYONE is going to be amazing at parsing only resumes - part of the point of having recruiters whether internal or external is to be able to have a screening call with a much larger number of candidates.

• by smallstepforman on 5/4/24, 12:02 PM

  The software engineering world is fortunate to have the concept of open source, which allows filtering of candidates based on previous published work. Since today we have many open source active candidates, it makes selection much easier compared to unknown candidates. My advice to job seekers - you’re reducing your employment chances if you dont have example projects published.

• by kwertyoowiyop on 5/4/24, 1:18 PM

  A good article. And then below it? Links to the usual leetcode-style questions that have little to do with job performance: invert a left-handed negative tree, etc. How about: figure out why that critical cloud function silently fails 0.1% of the time?

• by rurban on 5/4/24, 12:09 PM

  I got the impression that recruiters miss the ability to read. But he says that recruiters actually do try to parse the CV for 31s. There's probably the explanation: parsing VS reading.

• by mouzogu on 5/4/24, 11:57 AM

  we (developers) used to gatekeep recruiters, and now recruiters gatekeep us.

  where did we go wrong...

• by cqqxo4zV46cp on 5/4/24, 12:00 PM

  HN would be up in arms if “developers” were painted with the same brush to the degree that HN stereotypes basically every other profession.

• by andy99 on 5/4/24, 11:59 AM

  Are there any other business constructs that are similarly as universally bad as recruitment? Like which stakeholder actually thinks they're any good? Maybe certain kinds of outsourcing would be comparable, where someone sees a cost savings but otherwise doesn't care at all about the outcome?

• by littlestymaar on 5/4/24, 12:00 PM

  > If this was predicting student performance, recruiters would be off by two full letter grades.

  Well, that's not that uncommon in humanities when you're above a certain threshold…

• by esskay on 5/4/24, 12:05 PM

  Speaking from personal experience, dev jobs that use recruiters are often some of the worst places I've worked vs the ones that hire direct.

• by acheong08 on 5/4/24, 12:06 PM

  Pretty interesting read as someone looking for an internship and getting rejected by just about everyone. My experience line up pretty well with their observations, though a bit more explicit. They state the fact that they’re competitive and very specifically that they want “Cambridge-level” students. I doubt they even looked at the rest of my portfolio.

  > would AI do better

  Oh please don’t. I would rather be rejected by a fallible human than some paper clip maximizing algorithm that holds no responsibility

• by bell-cot on 5/4/24, 9:04 AM

  [I start a quick skim of the article...and run into a wall of all-italics text, with plenty of hype-happy words & phrases.]

  [I stop caring. The authors seem so wired on hype, caffeine, or something that I wouldn't trust their assertion that 14^2 = 196.]

• by sharpshadow on 5/4/24, 10:04 AM

  Coin flip stands for 50/50 that would indicate good and bad resume. A random rating of 1 to 10 would already unlikely deliver any useful results.

  Didn’t read the article.