Here’s what I’ll do to screen job applicants to create a shortlist:
- Read up to one page of the resume
- Glance at the cover note
- Google the applicant
At that point the applicant has either made the first cut or failed at one of those points.
After that I’ll read the rest of the resume and go over the cover letter in more detail. That gives me a shortlist. If the shortlist is too long, I’ll make a judgement on who to keep in the shortlist for interviewing.
So how do I make that judgement? How do I decide who to keep and who to throw?
It might surprise some people (it surprised at least one of the guys on my team) but Google has a really strong influence. If the applicant is not Google-able but is applying for a job at a company that wouldn’t exist without the internet, they might as well not exist. In fact, they don’t exist.
What I’m looking for when I Google your name
1. You are active in a development community. I don’t mean you’re Jon Skeet on Stack Overflow, but you’re also not still asking newbie questions on a PHPbb somewhere (though if you are Jon Skeet, you’re hired!). Active means you post regularly and you’ve posted in the past month or two. I’m expecting to see community involvement: you answer questions rather than just asking them.
2. You are active on Twitter or Facebook; if you’re on LinkedIn that’s a plus, but not a deal-breaker. What I’m looking for here is someone that’s outgoing, not self-obsessed and interested in the industry. You probably ‘retweet’ on occasion and you have a fairly strong local community of friends (that you actually really know in The Real World). I’m also going to expect to see industry associations: maybe you follow Robert Scoble or Joel Spolsky or are a fan of the OSDConference. I also want to see some well-roundedness here. You might have links to sporting clubs, bands or political parties.
3. You have source code publicly available. I’m looking for code with your name on it, not just links to websites you claim to have been involved in. So I’m looking for a perl module on CPAN, or I’m looking for solutions posted to the Project Euler discussion groups. What I want to see is the code you produce when you’re not producing code in an interview situation.
4. You are professional when talking to people you don’t know. I’m not going to hire someone who belittles people or is rude without cause. While I’m expecting you to know a lot and to have a (hopefully strong) opinion, I want to see that opinion stated clearly and professionally.
Summary
So what I’m looking for is a knowledgeable, intellgent, well-rounded, nice person. If an applicant isn’t such a person, I’m unlikely to read their resume or cover letter in great detail.
Oh, unless I personally know someone in their referee list.
Is there anything else I should be looking for?
This is wrong on so many levels. Some of the best technical people I know are also very PRIVATE people who participate heavily in forums, communities and discussions but semi-anonymously with a “handle”. They also often choose not to waste their time on Facebook or Twitter or whatever the time waster du jour may be which to me is a huge plus. I’d think long and hard about this post because imho you are not suitable to make hiring decisions if you truly adhere to these views.
G’day Pete,
You’re not wrong, there are plenty of technical people who aren’t active in forums or other online communities. There’s plenty that participate anonymously. There’s plenty who don’t use any of the social networks.
But on the other hand, there are plenty that do participate.
We can apply a similar matrix to Pascal’s wager here:
So we have one potentially good hire, one definite no-hire, and two unknowns. If I advertise a single position and get 200 applicants, every one of them will fall into one of those boxes.
Given that it is far far better to lose a good candidate than it is to gain a bad employee, we have an effective filter for screening.
Ultimately you are trying to defend laziness and a poor filter or screening methodology.
1. Which part of “Social Networking Sites” are you struggling to understand? It’s very funny when someone gets busted for taking a sickie because their manager looks at their FB page, sure, but to suggest that you evaluate a candidate’s intellect, professionalism and suitability from their FB page or “tweets” is both unreasonable, unfair and intrusive. People have a right to have a professional AND a social life and your approach impinges on that right and makes the world a worse place. The likes of you are the reason why savvy people are reticent to use these sites because the potential pitfalls outweigh the scant benefits. Did you consider that when you were making your matrix? What if most or _all_ the best candidates, the savvy ones, don’t use FB?
2. Judging people by their forum posts is fraught too. One thing you definitely want in a candidate is the ability to communicate effectively with a range of different peoplr and appropriately for the context. If you had Wietse Venema apply for a job you’d probably not find him on FB or Twitter (I am guessing) and you would find him to be consistently terse, bordering on rude on the postfix-users list, usually for good reason. Using your methodology you’d rule him out and I don’t need to remind you of his skills as a developer…
“If I advertise a single position and get 200 applicants, every one of them will fall into one of those boxes.”
*cough*Bullshit*cough*. Even a cursory glance at that matrix reveals its incompleteness. Do you know anyone who is very smart but socially challenged or, dare I say it, slightly deficient, or at least prone to being slightly deficient, in “professionalism”?
I accept that it is better to miss out on a good employee than hire a bad one but I’d suggest to you that your methodology systematically excludes and discriminates against potentially good employees and is biased towards employing attention whores and the simple and naive.
Cheers Buddy!
Scratch my second last paragraph in my last post please, I misread the bottom left cell of the matrix. It is still incomplete though… What about people like me who are neither smart or professional? Which raises another issue. That of detecting irony and sarcasm from largely textual information penned by someone you don’t know… Not so easy to be confident about your judgements now, is it?
FastCompany have a similar article up: http://www.fastcompany.com/article/work-smart-claiming-your-name-on-the-web
And here’s NASA CIO Linda Cureton blogging on “Managing Your Online Reputation”: http://wiki.nasa.gov/cm/blog/NASA-CIO-Blog/posts/post_1267929973075.html