Many years ago we were posting jobs on a local bulletin boards and received applicant resumes on an email. The composition of a resume acted as a primary filter from people who couldn't even organize a few lines of information about themselves.
Then, an internet company in our country took over the market and almost all jobs are searched through it. Of course,it features a very nice resume builder, so now everyone has a nice resume and we can't even filter out the worst candidates without an investigative effort.
Thus, this work is commendable, but might have harmful effects.
You are discriminating against the candidates who might have some disabilities (whether they know they have or not) like dyslexia, you are also discriminating against candidates whose English (or whatever that language in your country) isn’t their first, even though they might be the best suited candidates, best programmers/engineers/etc., I have seen this first hand in some interviews, where some candidates eliminated from the first round by hiring managers because of similar issues or even silly ones like having an accent, after I -as the technical interviewer- gave the green light thay they are qualified for the second one.
Yes, when hiring I do discriminate against candidates with bad skills.
Reading and writing, communication in written form is a critical skill for a software developer, more important than even coding skills (btw, I'm yet to see a person who can code and can't write, or even hear about such person). It is irrelevant, what is the reason for the lack of skill - innate disability or low intelligence - if you can't clearly and precisely communicate with your coworkers, you'll create more problems for the team than you will solve.
And speaking of discrimination, you wouldn't hire a paraplegic person as a nurse or firefighter, right?
As I mentioned in the comment below, this is the first excuse for such discrimination, as most of the times they do properly communicate and can effectively communicate the idea, but it’s the covert way of discriminating them. One of the examples I witnessed, someone was from Singapore -and in Singapore just like a lot of other countries, English IS native, i.e. taught early in life- but they do have a thick accents, and the candidate was eliminated because of that, and obviously the hiring manager made the same silly excuse like you so he can feel better about himself, that it will “hinder” the communications. As long as the communication can be conducted, anything else is pure linguistics bias, you don’t see such bias when an international team of scientists are working in a space station or similar projects for example, even though in a lot of cases they lack the vocabulary per se, and lacking such vocabulary did not indicate a lack of skill or intelligence either, let alone to be evaluated by an average IQ hiring manager.
Another case I witnessed was in Canada, where French is an official language, yet the hiring manager excluded one candidate because he had a thick French accent..
Technically speaking too, there’s nothing as “native English”, we all do have an accent to some degree, a lot of English vocabulary are taken from other languages, and even English speakers do have a lot of silly typos and mistakes in their writing all the time, including my writings in here, so it’s never an excuse.
>And speaking of discrimination, you wouldn't hire a paraplegic person as a nurse or firefighter, right?
That’s a poor analogy, you do have the tools to properly and easily compensate such linguistic disability, as easy as having someone double checking their writing or having one of these new AI spell check tools, etc., but we don’t have the proper technology and tools to compensate for a paraplegic to be a firefighter, yet, say in the future there are proven ex-skeletons that can help, then yes you are discriminating.
> That’s a poor analogy, you do have the tools to properly and easily compensate such linguistic disability, as easy as having someone double checking their writing or having one of these new AI spell check tools, etc.
If the hypothetical person in question had such tools, then we would not see their "handicap" right? So the discrimination would not have occurred...
If only there were a word for a level of language proficiency where the person's speech is perfectly intelligible, but where there are still audible clues about the person's linguistic background that could be used to discriminate against them, and if only this weren't a "hypothetical person" but OP said they were talking about strong engineers with mild accents in their very first post? To act like the candidates' english is too poor for them to be employable is being willfully obtuse at best and outright racist at worst. There's nothing particularly difficult about working with someone who has a bit of a lilt or a twang or what have you; in fact it is more fun than working at a workplace where everyone sounds the same.
I like this post. I too have sadly seen this many times in my career. The (supposedly non-discriminatory) "preferences" of the hiring managers are frequently... discriminatory! It's the worst when the hiring manager is mono-cultural and only speaks a single language (English). Most middle managers are looking to hire people that are a dumber version of themselves and easy to control -- "sheep", if you like. The rare middle managers try to hire people smarter than themselves.
The bit about:
hire a paraplegic person as a nurse or firefighter
I like how they picked a tiny sliver of jobs that might require full mobility. Thinking deeper: I am sure there are many nursing jobs that can be done from a wheelchair. And why not doctors? (See Dr. House, with a limb, a cane, and an on-again-off-again opioid addiction!) There are plenty of jobs that can done in a hospital and fire department that do not require all of your limbs. A lot of the work involves sitting in an office, typing on a PC.
Once, I had an office mate who had a single hand. Incredibly, he was a member of a "fast reaction" front-line support team. It was a small miracle watching him dash about the keyboard. It helped to open my mind about what was possible with modern technology.
I dont really disagree with your post over all, but you really should refrain from using fictionalized stories to support your real world public policy it never works out well. That is aside from the fact that that example is pretty poor as something that should be aspirational.
> and even English speakers do have a lot of silly typos and mistakes in their writing all the time
Interestingly, the mistakes non-native English speakers make are different from the ones native speakers make. Thus, excluding non-natives makes it more likely for certain kinds of mistakes to slip by. "There" vs "Their", etc.
In my field communicating with other English-speaking people is probably 80% of the job. Someone who cannot read and write clear English prose will not be successful. Serious question: if I eliminate someone from contention because they struggle to read, write, and speak English, is that “discrimination”?
No one said anything about the ability to communicate, but the discrimination against candidates with some disability like dyslexia, it is YOUR job as an employer to provide the proper tool -either during the interview process or even after hiring- to make sure the work isn’t affected, and having a proper process to address it. Same goes with accent, it isn’t about the ability to communicate but rather the accent or linguistics bias either by not hiring these candidates, or excluding them later from meetings, presentations, etc., or eliminating any future career growth.
Obviously those discriminations are illegal so it goes passive most of the times, by continuous interruption during meetings or intentionally asked to repeat or elaborate themselves, among other.
It’s not about communication abilities as this is usually the covert passive response for such discriminatory behaviors, a lot of these candidates can speak “better” in terms of clarity than people with Australian accent for example, it’s just another episode of “I’m better than you”, you can read more about that in here:
> it is YOUR job as an employer to provide the proper tool
I love it when people from internet forums are telling me what my job is.
You know, your way of thinking will eventually lead to understanding that interviewing is inherently discriminatory against everyone but the best candidate, and thus must be abolished. This will lead to a creation of some kind of government agency that you'll ask for a worker and it'll appoint someone who would be considered as acceptable by some clerk. You wouldn't have the freedom to refuse to hire the appointee and would be obliged to pay him.
> You know, your way of thinking will eventually lead to understanding that interviewing is inherently discriminatory against everyone but the best candidate
That's not discrimination. The problem is when you assume someone isn't the best candidate because of (pick (religion, origin, language, disability, ...)) but you don't know that.
A lot of people have used your way of thinking to justify discrimination. "Obviously foreign people are less educated. I'm just looking for the best candidate so I should not interview someone with a foreign name".
How can you be sure that _you_ are not discriminating ?
> I love it when people from internet forums are telling me what my job is.
So you don't agree that your job is to hire the best person without discrimination ? Or you don't agree that giving people the proper tools allow them to be the best version of themselves ?
> The problem is when you assume someone isn't the best candidate because of (pick (religion, origin, language, disability, ...)) but you don't know that.
I assume that someone who can't throw up a few lines of text about himself is not worth even considering for an interview for a job that ultimately requires producing text, in a form of computer code, documentation and communication with co-workers. Yes, I'm pretty sure I'm discriminating against mentally handicapped and illiterate people. That's the intent.
Communication is a lot more than just competency in a language. It is correlated (especially at the low end of competency) but has a lot more to do with empathy and making an effort. There are plenty of native English speakers I’ve worked with that I would score low on communication ability because they can’t explain themselves unambiguously and I end up having to ask a lot of follow up questions.
As long as it’s not a catastrophic mental disability, having a disability should not preclude someone from communicating clearly. As long as they slow down and actually take time to make themselves clear, it shouldn’t be a problem.
> I have seen this first hand in some interviews, where some candidates eliminated from the first round by hiring managers because of similar issues or even silly ones like having an accent
You have first-hand experience of hiring managers telling you they eliminated someone b/c they had a foreign accent?
Pretty firmly with you on this one and not with the detractors.
Ultimately, engineers are solving business problems, working with other departments and untangling technical ideas.
Often they need to explain those ideas to non-technical folks, and just as often, they need to justify their decisions to technical and non-technical colleagues.
In every area and task having solid writing skills including documentation, emails, and putting together reports, is extremely important.
Frankly if engineers lack the care and attention to detail to put together a decent resume that's a pretty strong signal their other writing is probably sloppy as well.
To the detractors: writing code is the easiest part of the job, figuring out what code to write to solve the right business problem in concert with other areas is what is important. I do not care if you are a wiz kid mega coder, if your writing is sloppy it casts doubt on everything you _are_ trying to say.
If not, the bias could hurt.
It's like a leet code interview - artificial bar from highly biased interviewers which kinda sorta works but is buggy and a bit discriminatory.
Most of my job as a software developer is communicating with other people (stakeholders, peers, management), including written (pr comments, emails to various people, Teams chats, design documents) and vocal. Even writing code is ultimately a form of communication (code structure, variable names, comments, etc...).
Even new developers who are primarily going to be mentored greatly benefit from being able to effectively communicate with their mentor and the rest of the team (plus being able to grow into more senior roles).
Someone doesn't need to be perfect at communicating or anywhere close, but just like I wouldn't hire someone who cannot show a baseline of programming skills and knowledge, I also wouldn't hire someone who cannot show a baseline of communication skills (and I have regretted getting swayed by other interviewers when a candidate did well in other aspects).
I agree. I'd assess a technical writing sample though. I'm actually shocked this doesn't occur. Some months I spend 75% of my time thinking, writing about designs, diagramming, then meeting, communicating, reviewing and iterating on the doc. Coding is the easy part.
Damn shame the recruiter world moved to ATS's, which force folks to use tools like this to ensure their resume can be gobbled up and understood by those systems.
Personally, I love my bespoke, beautifully typeset CV. But I also recognize it's useless if I ever want to get through the ATS screening process. I'm far better off using a tool like this so I have confidence the damn thing will get read properly.
Or: your profession is now reaping what they've sown. Force resumes through a machine and we'll start building them with machines.
If an intellectual worker can't take a text editor and produce a coherent text about his skills and job experience, it is unlikely he'll be good at any job that requires thinking.
> If an intellectual worker can't take a text editor and produce a coherent text about his skills and job experience, it is unlikely he'll be good at any job that requires thinking.
I'd argue that if a resume builder threatens your ability to filter out good and bad resumes, you're probably not a good hiring manager and also are unlikely to be fit for a job that requires thinking.
You could try to argue that, but I think you’d need more information about how successful this person’s career has been to present much of an argument.
A good looking and easy to read resume take more than coherent text. It requires good typography, font choice, spacing etc. These generators with template designs take care of this
problem so I can focus on the content not on designing my CV.
Actually, back in the day we specifically wrote in the job description to put CV text in the email body, not in an attached Word document. So, template design and typography were absolutely irrelevant.
Also, many people failed to notice this and attached files with their CVs anyway. I had a special tag 'dyslexic' for those in my email client.
Thanks for sharing this feedback. Very interesting to learn that the resume composition was a primary filter back then.
As you note, with the advancement of internet and proliferation of internet companies/tools, it is much easier to get a nice resume design than ever before, e.g. one can easily look it up on google and pay to use it. A problem I see and motivates me to create this tool is that this can create an unequal playing field, where students/folks with more resources can easily afford to pay for such tool and have their resume well formatted and ATS tested. I created this tool in hopes to eliminate this barrier and to allow anyone to have a good starting resume design with built-in best practices so they are in the level playing field.
Having a well formatted resume is only the first step, as it still requires a lot of works and thinking for someone to write down their experiences and descriptions, where it should yield more signals on the candidates. I can see how resume format might be used back then, but in current days, it might be helpful to consider ways to gain deeper insights into candidates, e.g. assessments, interviews
Of course, that ship has sailed long ago. The days of hand prepared resumes sent by an email were over a decade ago. Just wanted to share the value that was brought by not having such tools.
Then, an internet company in our country took over the market and almost all jobs are searched through it. Of course,it features a very nice resume builder, so now everyone has a nice resume and we can't even filter out the worst candidates without an investigative effort.
Thus, this work is commendable, but might have harmful effects.