Sorting Resumes

“To top programmers, the most maddening thing about recruiters is their almost morbid fascination with keywords and buzzwords. The entire industry of professional headhunters and recruiters is bizarrely fixated on the simple algorithm of matching candidates to positions by looking for candidates that have the complete list of technology acronyms that the employer happens to be looking for. It becomes especially infuriating to realize that most of these recruiters have no idea what any of these technologies are. ‘Oh, you don’t have MSMQ experience? Never mind.’ At least when real estate agents prattle on about Subzero refrigerators and Viking stoves, they at least know what these things are (although any stainless steel refrigerator counts as ‘Subzero’ these days). The easiest way to catch-out a technical recruiter is when they inevitably insist on 5 years of experience with Ruby on Rails, or refuse to consider someone for a ‘Windows API’ job when they only have ‘Win32’ on their resume.”

-- From today's third and final installment in The Guerrilla Guide to Hiring, Sorting Resumes.

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About the Author: I’m your host, Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. Since 2000, I've been writing about software development, management, business, and the Internet on this site. For my day job, I run Fog Creek Software, makers of FogBugz—the smart bug tracking software with the stupid name, and Fog Creek Copilot—the easiest way to provide remote tech support over the Internet, with nothing to install or configure.

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