Frustrations with interviewing in this wild job market

So the interview may have superficially appeared to go well but I think it actually didn't because my skills aren't a great match in the areas they really want...they seemed happy with my level of driving skill and one of the company founders said my level of technical skill for the job blew his mind, but I get the feeling that they really want someone who's at least bilingual or ideally pentalingual and that the technical skills aren't that important to what they're doing as it currently is, and with only some rusty high school Spanish and French to offer, that's not me.

On the previous page, people talked about holding your resume to the last 10-15 years.  I've heard that all last year.  The issue is my career curve started in engineering and testing, then went through cost reduction, program and business management, before swinging back toward chassis engineering again.  My career path gives me a great deal of relevant experience.  Several items from early in my career have caught people's eye, and or been a key point in interviews.  Despite this, everyone involved in hiring keeps telling me to cut it short.  So after a year of no luck in 24, I've revised my resume to 'only' go back to 2004, where there was a convenient position change.  Guess, what.  The first person I talked to this year, after they saw my new resume, in a phone conversation he was asking about relevant experience, and I quickly went to experience and programs from the 90s, that are very relevant and led to the (verbal) 'promise' of a proper interview later.  For now, I'm going to continue using the shorter 04 up one, but I have a full one ready to forward to people if needed.

The first thing I'm going to do when I become the benevolent dictator of the universe, will be to ban any form of so called 'AI' screening from hiring, and make it law that  supervisor/manager connected with the job must receive all resumes for review, not HR.  Having hired many people myself over the years, I almost never agreed with HR on who I considered the best applicants from a stack of resumes. 

Adrian_Thompson (Forum Supporter) said:

The first thing I'm going to do when I become the benevolent dictator of the universe, will be to ban any form of so called 'AI' screening from hiring, and make it law that  supervisor/manager connected with the job must receive all resumes for review, not HR.  Having hired many people myself over the years, I almost never agreed with HR on who I considered the best applicants from a stack of resumes. 

Reposting this so I can give it a thumbs up again. HR is clueless most of the time.

In reply to Adrian_Thompson (Forum Supporter) :

You might reconsider that thought when the 1000's of resumes hit your in-box.

With the whole internet thing, blasting out resumes to jobs you have almost zero chance of getting is very much a thing.

aircooled said:

In reply to Adrian_Thompson (Forum Supporter) :

You might reconsider that thought when the 1000's of resumes hit your in-box.

With the whole internet thing, blasting out resumes to jobs you have almost zero chance of getting is very much a thing.

This is what I was about to say. You either have to dramatically increase HR departments, outsource the resume reviews, or significantly increase the amount of time it takes to review resumes. So they'd just find other random ways to dismiss things, "Don't like the name" "Don't like the font they chose" "Don't care for the layout" etc. 

In reply to z31maniac :

I realize those little things like font and layout seem stupid. I respect that.  But I also know I've used some of those little things to weed through resumes. 
 

Here's how I view it... the resume is your chance to show excellence in every way possible. You have all the preparation time you need, can ask for help or collaboration, can have professionals review it, and can edit it. It's your chance to show your best with every resource you have at your disposal.

The interview is the opposite. You get no prep, no help, and you can't take back anything you say. It shows how well you think and act on the fly.

When I have had to review resumes, I may have several hundred applicants for a single position. I have many choices, and I really don't need to put up with weak efforts. 
 

I've seen resumes that mis-spelled the name of the position they were applying for.  Grammar errors. Spelling errors. Resumes for professional positions done on construction paper with cute little animal cutouts.  Resumes with big ink splotches and coffee stains.

It may sound bad, but every one of those resumes never got a chance to interview. Their job was to show their best, and they failed.

Little things matter, even when they don't. 

The whole job application process is beyond broken. One suggestion I've seen is that workers should have a finite number of "application tokens" so they can only apply to x jobs per week. People wouldn't wantonly chuck half-assed applications at jobs, never mind letting AI do it for them, if they could quickly blow through their chances to apply to jobs they could actually want and have a real chance at.

An idea I've had is to take a lot of the humanity but also subjectivity and hacky filtering out of the process by replacing resumes with standardized job experience manifest files. Imagine if instead of having a resume you had an XML file, and instead of writing that you had 5 years of experience in Javascript you'd have a Javascript skill element with an experience length sub-element containing 5. It would then be possible to objectively and programmatically filter resumes without using dumb keyword searches or AI. It could be a lot of work to create the spec but it would be a small price to pay for ending the ruinous clusterberkeley of the status quo.

maybe I'll populate my resume with little cartoons or pictograms of the jobs I've had.

j_tso said:

maybe I'll populate my resume with little cartoons or pictograms of the jobs I've had.

I actually made this and posted it on a local classifieds board one time, I think around 2019/2020:

SV reX said:

In reply to z31maniac :

I realize those little things like font and layout seem stupid. I respect that.  But I also know I've used some of those little things to weed through resumes. 
 

Here's how I view it... the resume is your chance to show excellence in every way possible. You have all the preparation time you need, can ask for help or collaboration, can have professionals review it, and can edit it. It's your chance to show your best with every resource you have at your disposal.

The interview is the opposite. You get no prep, no help, and you can't take back anything you say. It shows how well you think and act on the fly.

When I have had to review resumes, I may have several hundred applicants for a single position. I have many choices, and I really don't need to put up with weak efforts. 
 

I've seen resumes that mis-spelled the name of the position they were applying for.  Grammar errors. Spelling errors. Resumes for professional positions done on construction paper with cute little animal cutouts.  Resumes with big ink splotches and coffee stains.

It may sound bad, but every one of those resumes never got a chance to interview. Their job was to show their best, and they failed.

Little things matter, even when they don't. 

Something like font is completely arbitrary.......assuming you aren't using comic sans, for that you should be sent to Siberia never to be seen again. So I'm going to disagree that someone should be dismissed because they used Calibri vs Lato.

Spelling and grammar errors, absolutely. 

Construction paper (I realize this is hyperbolic)? Stains? What year is it? I graduated college in 2005. I've literally never turned in a paper resume or application for any professional job. All electronically submitted PDFs. Any testing done after being brought in for an interview, also done on a computer. 

In reply to z31maniac :

I didn't say they should be dismissed. I said they could be. I strongly disagree that they should be dismissed. 
 

Font?  Yeah I've actually seen cartoon fonts. 
 

Construction paper wasn't hyperbole. I've honestly seen it in a resume applying for a position at a chemical company. It didn't earn them an interview but it did get hung on the wall in the company break room. 
 

People do weird stuff to try and have their resumes stand out.

In reply to SV reX :

"It's pink"

   "And scented too"

"hmmm, kind of nice"

Many of the jobs I applied over the years had questionnaires. Simply make applicants physically check the box for their relevant level of experience on each of the most critical requirements, and automatically feed all responses into a single spreadsheet. Simply let somebody who actually understands the technical job needs filter the data accordingly. No misinterpretations from AI or HR necessary to weed out any number of (intentional or not) misapplications.

In reply to z31maniac :

I think the specific font is up to the author, but be consistent with style and size. This may vary for heading, body, etc but not vary between similar sections. Although I would recommend against using company owned fonts for a resume since it's a clear indicator you used company resources to create your resume.

The use of indents, bold, italics, underline, spacing, and bullets needs to match throughout the document, and not look like it was pieced together from multiple sources. 
 

SV reX said:

In reply to z31maniac :

I didn't say they should be dismissed. I said they could be. I strongly disagree that they should be dismissed. 
 

Font?  Yeah I've actually seen cartoon fonts. 
 

Construction paper wasn't hyperbole. I've honestly seen it in a resume applying for a position at a chemical company. It didn't earn them an interview but it did get hung on the wall in the company break room. 
 

People do weird stuff to try and have their resumes stand out.

That's literally what I put in my initial response. If everything was reviewed by a human, then you may end up with resumes being dismissed because of arbitrary reasons like font. Or you used squares for your bullet points instead of circles. Discrimination against "ethnic sound names" is also a very real and well-researched issue. 

"This is what I was about to say. You either have to dramatically increase HR departments, outsource the resume reviews, or significantly increase the amount of time it takes to review resumes. So they'd just find other random ways to dismiss things, "Don't like the name" "Don't like the font they chose" "Don't care for the layout" etc. "

https://gizmodo.com/1-in-5-online-job-postings-are-either-fake-or-never-filled-study-finds-2000549706

z31maniac said:

You either have to dramatically increase HR departments, outsource the resume reviews, or significantly increase the amount of time it takes to review resumes.

...Or they simply have to use objective screening questions created and filtered by people who actually understand that particular job at that particular company. A simple auto generated spreadsheet, that includes no discriminable information, enables a quick and efficient data driven method of narrowing down the pool to only the most applicable candidates before even starting in on the resumes.

GameboyRMH said:

j_tso said:

maybe I'll populate my resume with little cartoons or pictograms of the jobs I've had.

I actually made this and posted it on a local classifieds board one time, I think around 2019/2020:

If someone had sent me a resume with that image looking for a developer position, I'd have at least read the resume and probably interviewed them.

I remember filling out three resumes a day for nearly a year in 2009. I'm glad I'll likely never have to go through that again.

90BuickCentury said:

Adrian_Thompson (Forum Supporter) said:

The first thing I'm going to do when I become the benevolent dictator of the universe, will be to ban any form of so called 'AI' screening from hiring, and make it law that  supervisor/manager connected with the job must receive all resumes for review, not HR.  Having hired many people myself over the years, I almost never agreed with HR on who I considered the best applicants from a stack of resumes. 

Reposting this so I can give it a thumbs up again. HR is clueless most of the time.

 

I'm trying to fight fire with fire on that by using some AI-powered resume/coverletter service.  We'll see how it goes, but so far I'm a little irritated with it.  I gave it a resume and a job description and asked it to write a cover letter for me.  It churned for a minute and then prompted me to open the document in the AI-based editor, which I did.  The AI editor then proceeded to run it's little song and dance about ways that the cover letter should be modified to be better.  The cover letter that the same AI had just written.  Sigh.

z31maniac said:

That's literally what I put in my initial response. If everything was reviewed by a human, then you may end up with resumes being dismissed because of arbitrary reasons like font. Or you used squares for your bullet points instead of circles. Discrimination against "ethnic sound names" is also a very real and well-researched issue.

Also laundering racist tendencies picked up from training data using proxy factors is something that AI is astonishingly good at, maybe better at than anything else.

wae said:

90BuickCentury said:

Adrian_Thompson (Forum Supporter) said:

The first thing I'm going to do when I become the benevolent dictator of the universe, will be to ban any form of so called 'AI' screening from hiring, and make it law that  supervisor/manager connected with the job must receive all resumes for review, not HR.  Having hired many people myself over the years, I almost never agreed with HR on who I considered the best applicants from a stack of resumes. 

Reposting this so I can give it a thumbs up again. HR is clueless most of the time.

 

I'm trying to fight fire with fire on that by using some AI-powered resume/coverletter service.  We'll see how it goes, but so far I'm a little irritated with it.  I gave it a resume and a job description and asked it to write a cover letter for me.  It churned for a minute and then prompted me to open the document in the AI-based editor, which I did.  The AI editor then proceeded to run it's little song and dance about ways that the cover letter should be modified to be better.  The cover letter that the same AI had just written.  Sigh.

Let me know how it goes.  I think I'm going to have to at least try one of the paid resume services.  I've used a couple of free cover letter writers previously, and within 3-4 uses I could predict exactly what it was going to spit out, including the phrasing, and things it would repeatedly get wrong.

For a fresh start to the new year I"ve revamped my resume to make it more AI friendly, and done what everyone has been telling me for a year now, to get rid off old history.  I cut off at 2004 even though that's more than 15 years ago for specific info.  Since then I've received zero responses.  The couple of positions I had interest from around Christmas are still in the 'we'll get back to you ' stage, although I feel hope is dying after 4-5 weeks.  One position I'm really interested in I got a rejection in less than 48 hours even though I have all the needed experience and more, with proven results.  I'm working with two people I know at that compay to try and find the hiring manager so I can at least talk to them.

In reply to Adrian_Thompson (Forum Supporter) :

Employers know (or assume) that old experiences and skills wear thin after a long period of non-use.  You can still reference the experience without tying it to a date. 
 

Mine could say "Non-profit management experience" without giving a specific date that made it known that was in the '90's.

In reply to SV reX :

Good point, but I'm an Engineer, and the basics of physics hasn't changed too much in my life time, even though I'm older than average on here!

In reply to Adrian_Thompson (Forum Supporter) :

The basics of physics haven't changed, but the tools certainly have. I'll bet no one cares any more if you can use a slide rule! 😂

Like me, a lot of your experiences predate the use of computers. Physics may not have changed, but the job requirements most definitely have!

... and worse than that, the ATTITUDES about work have changed. There is a strong belief that older people's experience is no longer relevant.

In reply to Adrian_Thompson (Forum Supporter) :

I'm not an engineer, but I used to work for a chemical company. The owner (who was younger than me) told me to build a distillation tower. The tower would be 40' tall, and subject to 100 mph winds.  The processes in it would be highly volatile.

I told him no problem, but we would need to get engineering for the tower before building it. His response was "Google it".

I was shocked.  I'm sure I could find an online calculator, but that doesn't mean I had the knowledge or experience to properly apply the information or use the tool. I couldn't believe that he believed that since the information was available that anyone could do the calculations (regardless of whether they were trained to do them or not).

That was a long time ago. Things are a LOT worse.

Bias against you because of your age is illegal, but it still happens.