by hansvm | 2026-01-07 18:17:00+00:00
On the one hand, that obviously filters out many qualified candidates.

On the other, you only have so much time in the day. It'd take me 3-6 months to give phone screens to every resume that comes in the door for any one engineering role, 8x that for a full 4-hour interview. I have to filter through them somehow if it's my job to hire several people in a month.

You'll obviously start with things that are less controversial: Half of resumes are bot-spam in obvious ways [0]. Half of the remainder can easily be tossed in the circular filing bin by not having anything at all in their resume even remotely related to the core job functions [1].

You're still left with a lot of resumes, more than you're able to phone screen. What do you choose to screen on?

- "Good" schools? I personally see far too much variance in performance to want to use this as a filter, not to mention that you'd be competing even more than normal on salary with FAANG.

- Good grades? This is a better indicator IME for early-career roles, but it's still a fairly weak signal, and you also punish people who had to take time off as a caretaker or who started before they were mature enough or whatever.

- Highest degree attained? I don't know what selection bias causes this since I know a ton of extremely capable PhDs, but if anything I'd just use this to filter out PhDs at the resume screening stage given how many perform poorly in the interviews and then at work if we choose to hire them.

- Gender? Age? ... I know this happens, but please stop.

If there's a strong GitHub profile or something then you can easily pass a person forward to a screen, but it's not fair to just toss the rest of the resumes. They have a list of jobs, skills, and accomplishments, and it's your job to use those as best as possible to figure out if they're likely to come out on top after a round of interviews.

I don't have any comment on rails in particular, but for a low-level ML role there are absolutely skills I don't want to see emphasized too heavily -- not because they're bad, but because there exists some large class of people who have learned those skills and nothing else, and they dominate the candidate pool. I used to give those resumes a chance, and I can't accept 100:1 odds anymore on the phone screen turning into a full interview and hopefully an offer. It's not fair to the candidates, and I don't have time for it either.

And that's ... bad, right? I have some things I do to make it better in some ways (worse in others, but on average trying to save people time and not reject too many qualified candidates) -- pass resumes on to a (brief) written screen instead of outright rejecting them if I think they might have a chance, always give people a phone screen if they write back that I've made a mistake, revisit those filtering rules I've built up from time to time and offer phone screens anwyay, etc -- hiring still sucks on both sides of the fence though.

[0] One of my favorites is when their "experience" includes things like how they've apparently done some hyper-specific task they copy-pasted from the job description (which exists not as a skills requirement but as a description of what their future day-to-day looks like), they did it before we pioneered whatever the tech in question was, they did it at several FAANG companies, and using languages and tools those companies don't use and which didn't exist during their FAANG tenure. Maybe they just used an LLM incorrectly to touch up their resume, but when the only evidence I should interview you is a pack of bold-faced lies I'm not going to give the benefit of the doubt.

[1] And I'm not even talking about requiring specific languages or frameworks, or even having interacted with a database for a database-adjacent role. Those sorts of restrictions can often be too overbearing. Just the basics of "I need you to do complicated math and program some things that won't wake me up at night" and resumes that come in without anything suggesting they've ever done either at any level of proficiency (or even a forward or a cover letter stating why their resume appears bare-bones and they deserve a shot anyway).