How we hire

Our current application tracking flow

I track applications manually. No ATS, just a Notion database with a form.

• fortrabbit careers

There is no hiring manager here. I look at a profile for a minute to make a quick decision on too little facts. It's manual labor thus and error prone. About 2% get invited for 1st interview. 33% of those will make it to the 2nd interview. Bad feeling when I have to reject candidates.

We currently advertise on Indeed, LinkedIn and Symfony Jobs. Smaller job boards are preferred, less applications, but much higher quality.

Cheating flaws everything

Most applications are missing personal touch. The candidates seem to be good at a variety of skills making them look like the perfect match for almost every job offer. I understand the thinking, it may help higher chances to get accepted for any kind of random job. Yet. Of course, my job as the hiring manager, is to smell that something isn't right. Human intuition tells me that people can not be that good at such a board range of skills.

Specifically I hate result driven driven language (quantify your impact on business outcomes). Phrases like this are almost certainly a cause of rejection:

• reduce release cycle times by 75%
• increasing monitoring efficiency by 30%
• increasing site traffic and sales by 25%
• leading to a 40% reduction in transaction processing time
• boosting operational knowledge by 10x
• expanded country support by 50%
• cut dashboard load time from 20 to 2 seconds
• achieving a 99% timely alert rate for critical updates
• boosting data accuracy by 40%
• significantly contribute to company revenue growth of over 300%
• resulted in a 10% rise in new user registrations
• increased release frequency by 50%
• increased platform inquiries by 15%
• the platform experienced a 25% increase in product views
• resulting in a 40% increase in user registrations

I found that this is not only bullshit language, but also very likely just SCAM. There are AI services (Teal JobScan) helping you to create such generic job applications. Basically, weaponize your CV. I guess those services are targeting application tracking systems that are using AI to scan and pre-filter CVs? Fine. What a great time to be alive.

Busted. Some people even go the lazy route and don't even care to create individual CVs and just copy example text into their own CV.

My reaction

I feel tempted to analyze how many applications we got are cheating, but I better don't waste my time with that.

It worries me. I like the internet as place to meet people and also to make business with strangers. Business requires trust in your business partner. All the applications using AI generated answers and fake CVs are creating a scene of mistrust.

At best, I'd like to be open about new applications. I don't want to judge people from where they come from. Yet. After looking at 100s of applications my brain automatically recognizes repeating figures. Pattern recognition is hardwired in humans and helps us to survive. As a result I resort to pre-justice and social profiling. Applications from certain channels and countries have higher SCAM and bullshit levels.

Tips to get an interview here

• Have nice profile picture
• Include links
  • StackOverflow link with relevant answers
  • GitHub profile with stuff to look at
  • Meaningful OSS contributions
• Keep it short
• Don't repeat yourself
• Be honest
• Be personal
• Show your individual strengths
• Don't be all over the place
• Be on point
• Avoid peak application time
  • Rejection is more likely if the manager has many application to scan

Tips to get rejected here

• Use AI with your introduction
  • I am a strong candidate because
• Applying on side channels
  • LinkedIn messages and connect requests
  • Application send by mail
• Devshop agencies calling my private phone number
  • Just where did you got my phone number from I have never published anywhere?
• CV
  • .docx attachment - won't open
  • Bad layout
• Have typos in your CV
  • Symphony
  • Kubernets
• Bullshit language like this
  • delivering high-quality software solutions across various industries
  • rock star, ninja, wizard
• I can do everything, too many acronyms, no focus
• Core competence in other skills when not required
  • Frontend / design for backend developer
  • Ruby On Rails for a PHP Symfony developer position
  • SEO for a DevOps position
  • IPTV for any position here
• Too much emphasis on dated tech
  • Twitter Bootstrap
  • jQuery
  • CodeIgniter
  • Angular
  • Ajax
  • XHTML
• Very long answers, Russian novel style
  • No time to read
• Missing required skills
  • When it says 5+ years experience, that is expected
  • When it says we are looking for a Symfony developer, that is expected
• Company culture mismatch
  • corporate background
• Hiring hacks
  • gaming the system

Conclusions

Hiring is hard. We are a small team. It's one of the things we also need to do, we are not very professional about it. Yet we like to do it on our own and mostly manually. It's fun connecting with interesting people. We have not even touched the interview part.