To be honest, this resume would likely pass my hiring screen. It's obviously a person with a hilarious sense of humor, who thinks out-of-the-box, and super-creative. If nothing else, they seem worth meeting.
Interview would tell if it's a crazy person, someone who would burn my team, or exactly the type of person I'd want to hire. I've seen all three.
I'll also mention: Humor isn't the same as fraud; a resume like this isn't taking itself very seriously, but isn't fraudulent. I've done things analogous to this before -- submitting things into highly-selective processes which obviously didn't take themselves seriously -- and I've had a pretty good hit rate too (they were impeccably honest; not the sort of thing which would slip through the cracks by accident).
I would like to think that the obvious comic bits like the Rick Rolling and the vodka shots makes it clear not to take the rest seriously. However we live in a world where disclosing a security hole gets a threatened prosecution from the Governor of Missouri.
Was Sokal fraudulent in his publishing Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity?
I would prefer to live in Sokal's world than in Parson's.
When I submit something which shows my personality, it's a very fast way to figure out whether a place fits my personality. I tend to lead with who I am.
Let's pretend this resume reflected my personality (it doesn't, but I've submitted things people would find equally inappropriate). There's a very quick screen on the other side. Let's say you submitted something like this.
- If they say "this is fraud," it's probably Parson's world. You won't fit.
- If they say "this is hilarious, let's talk to this guy," it probably is a fit.
I tend to lead with who I am, quirks, warts, and all. It saves everyone a lot of time. I can think of one or two times it's turned off people or organizations I later wanted to work with, but just one or two times. I can think of many more times it's opened doors.
Generically, yes. The types of crazy this resume signals? It's usually very obvious, very quickly.
> Also, if they are making stuff up, it's hard to know which parts of their background are legit, which matters.
No, it's really not. If it's hard to tell, they're the wrong type of "quirky."
On an interview like this, my expectation is that I'd have an idea of what the resume was commenting on within maybe 5 minutes, and have them figured out within 10 minutes. Either at that point:
- I understand in greater depth what their resume was a commentary on, have a better idea of their thoughts about hiring process, and know a lot more about them and how they think about these things.
- Have them try keep the joke going, or make continued inappropriate comments, or otherwise have some serious red flags.
Something in the middle is probably an interesting conversation, but a no-hire. If they can't communicate clearly, that's a yellow flag. In combination with a resume like this one, that's enough of a yellow flag that it's a no hire. With a resume like this one, they'd damn well better have a good game plan going in.
Good rule-of-thumb: I'm very glad to go out on a limb to interview someone with a nontraditional background. The cost is a day. I'm absolutely not willing to go out on a limb to do a high-risk hire. A bad hire costs a lot. A resume like this one signals someone is exceptional, and the goal of the interview is what kind of exception.
It depends. It is definitely humorous, but it looks like the humor was thrown in to not make it outright fraudulent. It still feels wrong to insert random company names into their resume to bypass AI screening tools (and in some cases, humans).
I don't see the real resume posted anywhere. Yes a resume lying about past experience working at Microsoft and other big tech companies with an almost 4.0 GPA from one of the top universities is more likely to get replies.
Let's see what we're comparing this to and then we can make a judgement about it.
That doesn't address the problem of these bots discarding many potentially good resumes because they don't include enough keywords.
If the position is only open to people who worked at a FAANG, then make that clear in the job posting instead of discarding the applications that doesn't have FAANG references. People spend a lot of time building resumes and applying. The least one can do is make the rules clear.
Also, the lying resume goes beyond a false experience. It includes pure nonsense such as AI-based GraphQL, React for AI on Blockchain, connecting with Reid Hoffman on Linkedin and spreading herpes to interns. And the follow-up emails included worse, and the replying bots that pretend to be HR people scheduled a call anyway.
We don't know what the position is open to because we have nothing to compare this resume to. Ignoring the fact that it turns out that the resume being paraded about on Twitter is NOT the resume that was sent out to all of the companies (the spreading herpes and other absurdities was not in the resume that got the 90% response rate), we don't know what this resume is being compared to in order to judge whether these companies are turning down potentially qualified candidates or not.
If you read the reddit post linked from twitter - that's their point https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/qhg5jo/this... - despite the resume being very very clearly bullshit (one of the bullet points is: gave herpes to 60% of the interns!), nobody cares if you have FANNG on it.
The link you provided clearly indicates how deceptive this whole thing is. The resume being posted is NOT the resume that got a 90% response rate. The resume that got a 90% response rate had some silly stuff on it, but nothing particularly egregious:
* Experienced software engineer with a background of building scalable systems in the fintech, health, and adult entertainment industries.
* Team coffee maker - ensured team of 6 was fully caffeinated with Antarctican coffee beans ground to 14 nm particles
* Connected with Reid Hoffman on LinkedIn
* Organized team bonding through company potato sack race resulting in increased team bonding and cohesity
Okay some of this is goofy but so what? I'm going to turn down a highly competent software engineer listing experience at Microsoft and Instagram because they organized a potato sack race or mention some obscure coffee brand?
Many developers are silly like that, yes. Many teams think that is fine since they aren't user facing, being silly there wont hurt the company image or anything at all really.
The point is that she gets called because of buzzwords such as Blockchain and AI and what have you.
If the education and job experience is made up, how do you know you're not getting calls because you sent a fake CV mentioning great education and relevant past jobs?
If the resume scanner is just doing naive keyword scanning, can't you easily insert things that ping the keywords without actually lying about anything?
Deployed software to Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac and Google Android. Configured firewall to block Facebook and Netflix.
It might be easier just include a list of the buzzwords formatted to use white font so that it's invisible to humans but visible to buzzword-detection bots?
Right, those parts are easy to check so you can assume them to be true and check them later. And then if those checks comes back false you just blacklist this person forever.
There are lots of human-in-the-loop systems with algorithms involved. People deeply care about those systems.
To be more precise, they “don’t care” that the system produces false positives. Did you consider they made this decision with full knowledge of the trade offs?
> Did you consider they made this decision with full knowledge of the trade offs?
Yes, that would be my general assumption. Why wouldn't i think that?
They are still not caring about a large part of the contents of the resume. Whether that's good or bad, whether they thought long and hard or made that decision on a whim, is totally irrelavent to whether they care about the info in question.
It’s not just a fake resume, it’s a nonsensical one that any human actually reading would clearly know. That’s the point. Nobody is screening these applications anymore and it’s now just a game of pleasing the ATS with enough FAANG buzzwords.
Yea, I was expecting to compare it to the actual resume where the only thing was different was the use of buzz words. But, at this point, we don't know if the person has 0 software experience and/or they went to school. The fake resume is hilarious, but the headline is just sensational.
I read the reddit post and it makes clear that the CV everyone is talking about is not the actual CV that was sent to companies and got the 90% response rate.
This is just encouraging resumes to contain the words "Instagram" and "Microsoft" even if you didn't work there-- and there's plenty of valid use cases for that (ex: Microsoft Word in a skills section wouldn't be completely out there for any office worker, including SWEs). I've found when my resume is optimized for ATS software rather than human readers it absolutely performs better (eg: getting a verbal offer).
Unfortunately a lot of places use the even worse version of ATS where you have to basically manually fill in your resume. Manually adding in work experience, education, certificates, etc... into their own little mini fields. I find these incredibly frustrating as I have a lot of certifications and a lot of side gigs. I often end up either half-assing job applications to places that require this or just completely skip applying to them. Unless it's a job I REALLLYYYY want, I don't want to spend multiple hours doing monotonous work unpaid.
The OP is totally right. It's 100% impractical that a first-level screen is going to do the investigation needed to uncover deliberate trolling and, if the pedigree is interesting enough, it's likely going to be passed on. I'm not sure why anyone thinks this would be an unreasonable approach unless the alternative is only hire referrals and people you personally know--which has tons of problems on its own.
In the recruiters defense, the resume was that of a Unicorn that shits gold bricks. You'd probably not read about their intern experience and/or overlook crude jokes too if you found one of those in the forest.
It's not surprising. But what it does is illustrate the absurdity of the current hiring system that some companies choose to employ.
Any company that works like this is not a company worth working for. Yes, I include FAANGs in that, too. If a company automates its hiring process to this degree, what makes you think any other part of the company is going to be fair to its employees?
We see this more and more as employees with actual real grievances at major tech firms come forward and tell their stories, which always seem to include "...and then HR blew me off." Sadly, no shit. If they don't know how to hire people, they certainly don't know what to do with them when something goes wrong.
I did resume reading and technical interviewing as part of the hiring process of a Haskell consultancy. Over 5 years, interviewed around 50 people, for both the consultancy and its customers.
I read the resumes carefully. They were generally informative and accurate.
When somebody mentions expertise in a specific tech stack or theory, I ask them in the interview to explain me a key part of that, how it works and what its intricacies are. React in the CV? Show me an example. Haskell-in-production expert? Write me some code that takes down a web server, then show me how to do it well. Expert in COQ, Agda or Idris? Prove it.
It becomes apparent quickly if somebody is bullshitting in a CV, if you care to notice.
This approach worked well and wasn't changed since.
You have such a different way of looking at resumes… I practically ignore schools and companies and just look at what they actually did there (wherever it was).
To be absolutely frank: it was under "startup"-like circumstances, so I was looking for people with good networks, that I could tap into when needed. Unfortunately, that didn't turn out to be meaningful, except to open a few doors (a wee-bit faster, than doing it my self), and having a pool of people (friends and former co-workers of employees) to hire from, that were more likely to work well together and "mesh" into the org, than someone "off the street."
I saw no discernible difference between people of pedigree and the "state school," "boring corp."s of the world -- except that the former's names and institutions they were associated with were good marketing.
If someone is motivated enough, they can pretty much handle whatever you throw at them. Having better domain experience (f.e. being a software lead vs. a mid-level programmer) accounted only for how quickly they were expected to become useful, and "figure it out."
And the "Plain Janes" of the working world were usually more motivated to make a name for themselves, than those who've already been established. Some of the latter were downright useless; coat-tail riders.
The ones who had been screwed over/discriminated against/temporarily demoralized by circumstance, but were otherwise high-performers were always a treat, though. Seemed to have chips on their shoulders and would go the extra mile at any opportunity that gave them simple respect and acknowledgement. However, such earnestness is liable to be taken advantage of by the short-sighted.
I don't think I've even ever read what's written underneath those "COMPANY - POSITION - DATE" headings. I always assumed they were either so general to be useless, puffed up and massaged statistics to sell one's importance, or unintelligible and lacking actionable substance.
The only thing I look for nowadays, with anyone I associate with, is whether or not they're motivated, and if I can work with them. Usually, that just means they can take direction if they're subordinate; or they lack ego, if we're equals/they're on a higher plane than I am.
> It's not surprising. But what it does is illustrate the absurdity of the current hiring system that some companies choose to employ.
That's a broad statement. It's only absurd if there is a better way to do it that they are not using. And frankly, almost no one knows a better way to hire, which is why almost everyone is doing this. (There are interesting ideas in how to hire better, e.g. `tptacek's and `patio11's old startup, but not sure if there is anything proven, or at scale).
> Any company that works like this is not a company worth working for. Yes, I include FAANGs in that, too. If a company automates its hiring process to this degree, what makes you think any other part of the company is going to be fair to its employees?
Once again a pretty broad statement. Also one that is kind of laughable. FAANGs, for all their other faults, are generally considered some of the best places to work for, in one of the industries that treat its employees best. You're literally talking about places that are better to their employees than 99% of the world experiences, and dismissing them completely. I think your standards are odd.
I think it is because of the Applicant Tracking Systems. They scan for keywords and if you have them your resume gets better ranking. The actual recruiter is working only from resumes that the ATS recommends.
I read that that's one of the reasons sites started making you fill out their online form, in addition to uploading your resume. I've also heard of students using that method when they have a teacher who is a stickler about wordcount for assignments, and they are maybe 1-2 sentences short of the cutoff.
I've worked for a few companies that develop Application Tracking Systems.
Sometimes they may have a huge database of people or an account somewhere that lets them search for people that may fit the role. But the candidates found through those searches are typically pretty low quality.
Someone who applies for a specific position is just going to be checked if they meet the requirements and look like a good candidate.
Did the author think that recruiters would carefully peruse every single inbound resume? That they would manually construct individualized emails? That people in tech companies don't optimize their workflows using automated tools? Gasp! What did they expect?
Also... let's say I'm a recruiter or a hiring manager, and I get trolled by you for no reason, while I'm already having a hard time picking the right inbound candidates, I'll somehow flag you so you don't waste my time later.
As someone who's been on the other side, it's difficult to be empathetic and patient when you're being hounded by hundreds of people who want something from you but don't have anything to offer.
If recruiters aren't getting value from resumes, than they should stop asking for them. Its kind of a dick move to ask the other party to do work if the recruiter has no intention of reading it.
That's not efficiency. That's cutting corners and letting the best qualified candidates get away. Hardly doing a service to the employer, or doing what you're paid for.
Playing the "it doesn't scale" card is just code for lazy and incompetent.
Voldemort was a real thing at LinkedIn, and it was an effort led by Jay Kreps, CEO/Founder of Confluent and lead of the original Kafka team at LinkedIn.
I've done between one and two hundred interviews at a FAANG company and have skimmed two or three resumes and read none. I can't recall hearing resumes mentioned in any interview debriefs other than for things like "This is an entry position and he has X years of experience so he probably isn't going to learn too much more in the next one or two years."
Maybe the hiring managers are reading the resumes. I'm pretty confident that the interviewers aren't spending a lot of time with them. (At least from my small slice of experience).
My general approach to interviewing is that I have an hour to figure out whether the person is smart, honest, and would be good to work with. I don't see how the resume has any relation to those things. It doesn't matter to me whether they have no prior experience, are a high school dropout, etc.
...and that isn't a problem? because folks decades of experience is irrelevant to their ability to memorize whatever it's required to be a widget in a widget factory? just because the process works for FAANG doesn't mean its good or right for other companies.
Not sure I understand your comment. I never had a problem with my interviewing technique. Nobody ever complained to me about it. I feel I was pretty consistent with how others interviewed.
My point was not to say that my technique was good - I have no data on whether it was good or not. My point was that you shouldn't assume that garbage resumes will be caught by the technical interviewers, because there is a good chance they aren't reading them either. I also meant to imply that it is probably a good idea to stuff your resume with buzzwords, probably a bit more subtly than this example, but if you have to choose between optimizing for the algorithm and optimizing for the human, I'd bet on the algorithm because I doubt the human is even going to read it.
I'm just pointing out that there is a vast difference between FAANG and the rest of the world. Especially in terms of interviewing. It's somewhat sad they discount experience when doing interviewing and only use it as a screening measure, but it does work for them, no denying. But many folks copy this approach, and it does not always work at small to medium sized companies. If you did 200 interviews at a 20 person startup and never read the resume, that would indeed be a problem.
I don't know what benefit "experience" has. I've worked with plenty of people who had long careers, worked at big name companies, and went to fancy schools, and turned out to be some variety of dumb or useless. If your experience benefits you in someway I should be able to detect that in our interview - you'll give good answers to questions because you're experienced enough to know good answers, that kind of thing.
If you seem smart in the interview because of your years of experience, your natural genius, or some combination of the two, what's the difference? What I care about is that you are a smart person, not how you came by your ability. If you learned to program video games at age 8 and now have fourty years of experience or if you finished a boot camp yesterday - who cares? If you can discuss and write the programs I ask about that seems like a good signal and if not, not. I feel like I can just skip finding out about your history and not lose anything.
This is also my experience. Resume is just a filter to starting the next round of a rather rigorous interview process. If I'm doing a technical interview, I just want to see how you think through the questions. If it's non-technical, your background will appear in your stories.
And how do people get to be at the stage of being interviewed by you? They submit a resume and it gets assessed by someone… Just because that person isn’t you doesn’t meant that resumes aren’t key.
I once wrote a fake resume because I got annoyed at recruiters only looking for keywords on a resume. One line item on the resume was a claim that I could solve NP complete problems. I was hoping a recruiter would tell a technical manager that I had this skill.
I can solve some NP complete problems. Actually I did solve a few, meaning I used tools or wrote code that found optimal solutions. Recently, I used SAT solvers.
NP-complete does not mean that any problem in this class is hard to solve, it's that the computational time of deterministic (non probabilistic) algorithms will grow fast (not polynomial).
Now we enter the analog of military defense speak, like ECM(Electronic Counter Measures), and ECCM,(Electronic Counter Counter Measures) and ECCCM.(Electronic Counter Counter Counter Measures) and more - do not laugh - it's true. Also called EC2M and EC3M https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_counter-countermeas...
These ways to defeat the bots will engender ways to defeat the ways to defeat the bots, and so it will go on.... like ECCCM...
Last time I went through a FAANG tier loop nobody that interviewed me had even looked at my résumé. And when I’ve been on the other side of the table I rarely gave them a glance either. Although I will say I’ve never once had a bad interview or work experience with a U of Waterloo graduate. They’re doing something wildly right up there.
I’m not sure this is a good thing or a bad thing. In any event it’s clear to me that the sole purpose of a résumé is getting past the talent acquisition filter. Which is interesting since evidently they don’t read them either.
> I’ve never once had a bad interview or work experience with a U of Waterloo graduate
Well, one of the things they are doing is requiring a 95%+ average from HS graduates (we don't generally do SATs up here), along with scores in competitions like Descartes (for math) that UW runs for HS students. They can take the cream of the cream of the crop.
Also a seasoned and fantastically well-regarded co-op program for most disciplines (all engineering programs are co-op).
There is a lot more (and probably much that has changed since I graduated 35 years ago), but there must be a reason that Microsoft hires -- or did hire -- more grads from UW than from any other university.
The lesson is that prestige works. 'They must be doing something right if X did not fire them for 4 years'.
In a sense, this is what we wanted--no buzzwords/technologies since it largely does not matter whether I have used your particular stack before. We asked them to hire on 'smarts' and the result is that whatever stack you worked with at MS is much less significant than the fact you worked at MS.
As usual, prestige begets prestige. The real question is: if you don't have prestige, how do you obtain it?
Many commenters are assuming this got interviews because of companies just looking for keywords. I'm not so sure. If I were hiring and this came across my desk there are really only three things I noticed that would probably make me unlikely to invite them for an interview.
The bullet points for what they say they did at each job fall into two categories.
1. Claims that sound like real things one might do at the company. E.g., "Improved LinkedIn search algorithm efficiency and accuracy through the usage of VoldemortDB, Charizard, and Hadoop".
Hadoop and VoldemortDB are real. I have never heard of Charizard other than as a Pokemon but it would not at all be surprising for someone to have used that name.
2. Things that are obviously jokes.
All the jobs listed except for Microsoft contain items from both categories. The jokey things in the first Microsoft bullet point are React in a big data pipeline and Edge on the blockchain...but both of those are things I can't be certain are actually jokes because people do in fact seriously propose things along those lines.
The three problematic things I noticed are:
1. In the skills section mentioned fintech, health, and adult entertainment industries, but in the experience section lists no companies that work in those areas.
2. Zillow job started 4 months before previous LinkedIn job ended.
3. One of the jokes was about giving herpes to interns. I like people with a sense of humor at work, but joking about sex with coworkers has too high a risk of being misunderstood and leading to problems.
This is cheeky tinderisation from the job hunter playing against pervasive crowdsourcing from employers, but employers still have the upper hand and will double down as soon as they find the job hunter trick out. Good for a laugh, albeit pretty sad and again proving bs is the quickest path to an interview with professional, hard-wired bs spouters.
In today's tech environment (in the US), are resumes actually getting rejected?
My LinkedIn profile contains no buzzwords, or really anything past title and company name, not even my current employers, and I still get a ton of recruiter messages. Never worked at a FAANG, lots of small companies that never went anywhere (never lived in the Bay Area either). i can probably get an interview without even having a resume ready.
I think it mostly means recruiters have a particularly limited attention span. Most likely they skim resumes in a few seconds scanning the headers/titles of each section, and they don't read the content. Not sure if reading it would make a significant difference, since they usually have very limited to no knowledge about the problem domain and stacks they are hiring for.
Which I don't know, that seems kinda silly, like, how are you going to be able to tell a good resume from a bad resume if you lack the domain specific knowledge to determine that in the first place?
I didn’t understand for too long that I had to customize my resume to the dozen or so things that a job was looking for. It didn’t matter that I’d been doing this for 15 years, or that a human reading through it would see the good match. You will never get past the computer to the recruiter without having a well crafted resume specifically for the role you’re applying to.
I think this just points out how most recruiters don't know what they are looking at in terms of resume. This resume is clearly bullshit. Terms like "React for AI on Blockchain" should already send off a red flag to any competent hiring manager.
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I think the name points to a female, and may be another reason of interest. I know many companies are looking to have females as part of the dev team to improve the ratio.
I highly doubt that. How do you know that Angelina Lee is a real person? They already said the resume is fake. Obviously, the name will be fake as well.
Getting caught for being incompetent is one thing. Getting caught and having that shared all over the internet and embarrassing not just yourself, but your team and your company is another.
When a company has a big outage, people on here will go on about not pointing fingers at any individual. We wouldn't say, "oh, must've been the new guy" or "the engineer who caused that sucks and should get fired." Well, I might argue that this is kind of like that for recruiters. If a recruiter failed to read a resume, is it because the recruiter is bad at their job, or their company has systems in place that are not fault tolerant?
I don't know. Maybe they do just suck. But surely they can improve. It's hard to grow when you've been publicly humiliated.
Let me get this straight, recruiters can't distinguish a resume filled with obvious bullshit keyword stuffing, but they are going to remember everyone who's embarrassed them on the internet so they can blacklist them?
I really question the quality of coworkers you'd end up with, if you joined a company with recruiters like that.
If these companies are hiring for "blockchain" skills, then ethical flexibility and an ability to write overhyped nonsense seem like they might be big selling points.
So? A lot of people who work with them call them distributed ledgers (and a fair number regret they got mixed in with crypto). I expect most of those people wouldn't have any objection to calling them a type of database with certain characteristics.
Why not "if they have the skills then it seems logical that they should get the job"? There are gender-neutral ways of using English, and I think we should try to use them.
Interview would tell if it's a crazy person, someone who would burn my team, or exactly the type of person I'd want to hire. I've seen all three.
I'll also mention: Humor isn't the same as fraud; a resume like this isn't taking itself very seriously, but isn't fraudulent. I've done things analogous to this before -- submitting things into highly-selective processes which obviously didn't take themselves seriously -- and I've had a pretty good hit rate too (they were impeccably honest; not the sort of thing which would slip through the cracks by accident).