The trouble with recruiting
in the resume-spam era

The reason I am experimenting with hiring people through my personal web page has much to do with a symptom I like to think of as Resume Spam.

Resume Spam

Thanks to the Internet, it is possible for applicants, at little or no cost, send their resumes to companies across the continent. This empowers the job seeker to reach a very large audience with his or her job application, and would appear to give the job seeker an advantage in finding a job.

A job seeker looking for a job may thus send out dozens of resumes daily for months on end, without even having to worry about as much as the cost of a postage stamp. This has resulted in a tremendous increase in the number of job applications companies review and must process. However, the number of eyeballs to look at the resumes has not increased proportionately. To deal with the massive influx of applications, human resources departments at mid to large sized companies are employing technology similar to the technology companies use to deal with spam: Automated filtering.

The problem with filters

So thanks to the Internet, you can send your resume around all you want, but the probability of a hiring manager actually considering any one application after all the screening has gone down tremendously. Worse yet, the difference between good resumes and bad resumes is very subtle, probably too subtle for a keyword searching computer algorithm to effectively distinguish. So having an impressive resume may not help you if the computer rejects it for lacking the right keywords before any human even looks at it.

It is somewhat ironic, that this tremendous communication tool, the Internet, has made getting your foot in the door through personal contacts and networking more important than ever. A personal contact on the inside can get your resume to hiring managers in a timely fashion, without it getting stuck in the HR process. Not surprisingly, at my employer, most of the really bright people came in not through HR, but through personal contacts or exposure to the company through the co-op student employment program. From what I know, this sort of thing is not unique to my employer.

But taking the regular HR route, your resume may or may not ever get eyeball time, based on criteria that can be somewhat arbitrary. Its a loss for the good applicant, and a loss for the employer who never eyeballs the applicant's resume. As it is, I have a position to fill, and I'm sufficiently uncertain of modern hiring methods to stick my neck out and try something else in addition to the usual methods.

Trying to turn back the clock

So this job posting on my personal web page is my experiment at turning back the clock. Its trying to deal with applicants the way it was done before the Internet came along. Applications sent to the email address on the page will arrive directly in a mailbox that I will monitor personally. There is no electronic filter. I will personally look at every resume that I receive, and will reply within 48 hours to candidates I want to follow up. I will not reply to candidates I consider unqualified. Given the influx of applicants, this is something that an HR department, even with the best intentions, would not be able to do.

However, traffic on my website only averages around 2500 page fetches per day for the whole site, and a fraction of that for any individual page on the site. I expect the volume of incoming applications to be something I can handle manually. Its also a non-obvious place to look for a job, so I hope that will act as a bit of a pre-screener. Once I fill the position in question, I will change this page to indicate that the position is filled. It typically takes me on the order of 3 months to fill a position.

But I am picky. I am looking for somebody who is in the top 5% of their profession - not by any academic measure, but by sheer technical ability. The kind of person people ask for technical advice.

I don't know if putting a job ad on my personal website will or will not work. The position is also under careers on RIM's website, position number J0104-0336. As such, this recruiting experiment should only provide an additional way for people to apply to the position.

Disclaimer

I am acting on my own with this job posting experiment. I have not obtained approval from my employer or the HR department, and may well be contradicting various policies of my employers by doing this. Any adverse consequences of this experiment are my responsibility and not the responsibility of Research In Motion.

I enjoy rocking the boat a little once in a while.

Links

Research In Motion

The Job ad

My personal website