There's a huge difference between objective measures and skill sets, and how effective someone is in performing work. This is why leet code tests often fail to truly identify the best talent. Working in teams, problem solving, etc are harder to suss out with leet code test or checkboxes. This is why person to person interviews are so effective (caveat: when performed by trained interviewers who are held accountable by a good process)
I've built tech around this. Spent a ton of time here. It's shockingly good, provided your process of using the LLMs is sound. I had built demo tech to solve the problem of helping candidates improve their answers. Turns out that's a narrow and difficult market to reach.
That said, the workflow and analysis is still live with a demo site:
Have a look at two interview analysis reports. The interviews were actual Q&A from a free coaching call I did. I have a very large video library of mock interviews that I have been using to fine tune and test.
I have long said with my customers that the #1 job of the interview loop is to answer the following question: can this candidate do this job at this company and likely exceed expectations?
It's surprising how many companies are bad at the interviewing process. How bad they are at the eval process (resume and interviews). It's still giving vitamin and not painkiller vibes though.
I have been working in this space for the last few years as an indie hacker solopreneur. I'm currently working through customer discovery on this exact problem (eval candidates more effectively) and if you (or a delegate) could make time, I would really appreciate it.
> It's surprising how many companies are bad at the interviewing process.
Some companies have such unrealistic expectations too. Here's one from a company that I bailed out of. Would have been an interesting company, I think, but not world-changing.
This is literally how they described their process:
Phase 1: Initial conversations
- 30 minute recruiter screen
- 60 minute resume deep dive
Phase 2: Interviews
- 15 minute hiring manager screen
- 2 x 45 minute engineering
- 60 minute overview of your past projects, including presentation
Phase 3: Further interviews
- 30 minute second interview with hiring manager
- 30 minute values interview
- 30 minute leadership interview
- "additional interviews as required for position"
- 4-6x 45 minute group interviews covering l33tcode and system design as well as my presentation
By the time I would have been done with this it would have taken basically a day of real time not to mention prep work for the presentation and every other interview.
I have a tool that I "shipped" as demo-ward (loopalla.com) but pivoted to HiredUpon to focus higher in the funnel.
I want to rejigger the tech I built for Loopalla. I would love to do a customer discovery call with you if you would be willing. I am an ex-AMZN director. I have a AMZN style working backward FAQ doc ready to go to drive the call. I want to humanize hiring, ironically by using tech. :)
I have already built HiredUpon and InterviewAt. I have been focused on this space as ex-AMZN, ex-MSFT, ex-startup, etc for the last 3 years.
My experience with ATS systems shows that there is room for improvement.
If there are any decision makers on this thread with whom I could do a customer discovery call, I would appreciate it. Please raise your hand and I will schedule.
I have an AMZN style FAQ working backwards document already completed. I want to humanize hiring and change how candidates and companies meet in the marketplace.
Here's a fun fact: resumes are limited to 1 page (2 front and back) because of the staple. Candidate's didn't want to risk losing a page on submission, and HR departments hated removing the staple when they shredded docs.
So, because of the lowly staple, we still have the high information inefficient resume as a digital representation when applying to jobs.
We can do better. I want to build something to do better.
I disagree. Of the thousands of resumes I’ve read in the last few years, none have been on paper.
They’re limited to one page by default because in the majority of cases, you should be able to convey your relevant experience of the last 10-15 years concisely.
If you cannot, because of your amazing experience, use more pages. Nobody will care. If you could have, but can’t see it, others will and will think you’re too wordy and toss your resume.
It being 2 pages is a cultural vestige - that was my point.
When you think about the resume, it's a terrible representation of you and what you can do in a work place. If a human is to look for a summary, sure, 2 pages is great, but when developers have things like github repos, what do other workers have?
The sum total of work for a marketer or ops engineer etc is harder to contain in a resume, much less an easily shareable thing.
We can do better. This is a space I care about deeply.
I've worked with Dave before. He will in fact implement ask the things in a very short period of time. We used to talk about him as the master of spinning developer plates.
I for one would love to see a $$ breakdown of what is being proposed here. This is the one thing I find always catches people out. That, and some of the default aws options which aren't necessary but can really run up the $$ intentionally.
Internally developed, although we just started using an ATS and they had some of this included. Filled out post interview and then we have a person dedicated to running the follow-up meeting. Amazon style bar raiser.
Do you mind if I ask a follow up? Do you feel that the breakdown with recruiters is because there is not an easy way to present as "suitable" for a role?
At the risk of leading to an answer, do you think that this is related to the information density constraints of a resume and linkedin profile, and the additional risk that a recruiter cannot do much to parse a GitHub repo?
Also, when these recruiters are reaching out to you, what is your experience of split between external firm vs internal FTE at target company?
>Do you feel that the breakdown with recruiters is because there is not an easy way to present as "suitable" for a role?
Well, I think in a perfect world, every recruiter would be someone who had worked a little bit with the technologies for which they were hiring. Essentially, they'd be ex-engineers who could understand the relationships between different pieces of technology, just as programming languages, servers, and cloud systems.
>do you think that this is related to the information density constraints of a resume and linkedin profile, and the additional risk that a recruiter cannot do much to parse a GitHub repo?
Yes, I think that's related.
>when these recruiters are reaching out to you, what is your experience of split between external firm vs internal FTE at target company?
About 70% external vs 30% internal when I advertise as "looking for work" on LinkedIn. There's degrees of "external", of course.
It's the low "cost" of publishing a job post to various boards, and the low "cost" of applying to jobs that are posted.
The combinatorial math has exploded the number of applicants per position, but the talent pool has not expanded by that much.
The net result is companies are abdicating agency to ATS systems in an effort to filter the "best" resumes.
Candidates are responding by feeling disillusioned by the ghosting, non-responses, and 400 applications within 24 hours to any new job posting.