Ask HN: With AI written resumes, what are the new hiring signals?
AI tools are getting incredibly good at generating perfectly polished, keyword optimized resumes. As the traditional signals get diluted, it's becoming harder to see the real person behind the document.
I'm curious what hiring managers are now looking for to cut through the noise. What are the genuine, harder-to-fake signs of a great engineer? Is it the quality of their GitHub READMEs, the questions they ask in an interview, a personal blog, or something else entirely?
Mistakes are new signal.
If it is too polished, then chances are its AI :)
But what if AI screens the resume for candidates?
Bounty-to-hire is becoming more popular.
I started working in 1996 and I am on my 10th job. While my resumes have always been pretty good - I still have electronic copies of every version of my resume except the first one I used out of college in 1996 - they have only been the deciding factor of my getting my first job out of college and my third job after being out of the loop too long in 2008.
1. Outreach to local external recruiters in Atlanta where I lived until 2022 and talking to them either in person in their office, meeting them for lunch or on the phone - found jobs in 1999, 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018. I’ve never had a local reliable recruiter submit my resume and it not lead to at least an interview and very very few rejections (I’ve kept spreadsheets since 2012).
2. Mindlessly submitting my resume on job boards - once in 2008 after staying at one job for 9 years.
3. Internal recruiters reaching out to me on LinkedIn - 2020 (my one, only and hopefully last job at BigTech) and 2024
4. Targeted outreach to companies where I had a non commodity set of skills and experience they were looking for - 2023.
If you are blindly submitting your resume to an ATS, you’ve already lost.
In 2023, I was Amazoned after 3.5 years. The first time I actively looked for a remote job (that one fell into my lap). I had a great resume, credentialed, keyword matched to all of the top cloud skills and experience, over a decade (on my resume) of development and experience and leading projects.
I submitted my resume to hundreds of jobs and my application was rarely opened (LinkedIn shows you) and every job had hundreds of applications. I heard crickets.
Using my network I had two offers for full time jobs within two weeks and one short term contracts.
Targeted outreach based on some niches where at the time I was considered an industry expert (see time at AWS) led to two other interviews within two weeks and one offer.
Hiring managers barely read your resume, they definitely aren’t going to take the time to go out and read your blog posts or a random GitHub profile. Open source opened doors for me in 2023. But that was only because at the time I was the second highest contributor to a popular official “AWS solution” in its niche. No one cared about the other open source work I did, published to AWS’s official GitHub repository and had on my profile and a linked to.
The other work wasn’t some one off. I’ve used it personally at 2 other companies since I left.
> I'm curious what hiring managers are now looking for to cut through the noise.
A referral.
At least, in my experience a year or two ago. It was impossible to get past initial screenings for jobs I was perfect for on paper.
None of my skills, experience, etc. even mattered. In the end what mattered was getting a nepo referral for a job I wasn’t even qualified for on paper.