Yep, that old guideline I’ve always had an aversion towards for decades biw. Are we even paying attention? Who prints CV’s these days, and why are we stuck with constraints from the printing era?
During my career, I’ve had to review innumerable CV’s. For so many decades that I still remember when the department was Personnel Management, then People Management, and the latest iteration under Talent Management. It did help that I’ve worked with clients from the Recruitment industry as well as Organisational Design and HR Change Management consultants.
Back in 2009, I was tasked with helping one of my clients in scaling their in-house software development team from less than a handful to 60+. I designed a technical interview test— it was fun watching candidates having to code face-to-face with a paper and pencil— and then supported the hiring board for the second round of interviews. And for anybody who has not worked with hiring in the Public sector, we double-downed in making sure every step of the process was fair.
Eventually, I had to stop helping the client in the process because they wanted to poach me, and I wasn’t going to get away from running my technical interview, but that’s a story for another day.
Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to scale my own large team. I’ve worked out that during the 2020-2023 peak of remote working, I was responsible for hiring 86 into our team.
Thankfully, as you grow your team, you also level-up your own team with regard to interview techniques, guidelines, and even ethics.
Here are some insights and thoughts from quite literally 2.5 decades of interviewing, easily more than 250 engineers:
- Hire the aptitude, train the skills. Try to spot the aptitude and search for times when they have had to adapt and learn.
- Engineers are generally not great at selling themselves. This frequently translates to terrible CV’s.
- More of a reason I scan through EVERY CV. Ideally with the talent team to gain a two-way shared understanding. On one end, the idiosyncrasies of the technologies and how they relate to each other, but also the insight which the talent team brings to the table from their research. This is the least I could do to honour those who took their time to apply. Many CV’s terrible to scan, and that almost always has nothing to do with the number of pages but clarity and structure. I also read from past to future because I’m looking for potential to learn examples of progression. I see that many organisations are delegating this to AI, but this is an incredible opportunity to understand the competitive landscape of talent.
- While scanning, I use PDF highlighting to pick keywords I may want to dig into during the process or interviews. This includes anything that would help me remember the candidates.
- Watch out for biases. When you hire that many, chances are you hired several duds, and in my case, they tended to be due to confirmation bias. Engineers who had a similar trajectory to mine or who were better at either presenting or selling themselves and to whom I gave the benefit of the extra doubt. Make sure you’re buddying up and have sounding boards with your colleagues to counteract this.
Bonus - Interview etiquette:
- Be respectful of time. Punctual start and finish.
- Interviews are two-way. I respect giving a 10-minute window at the end to turn the tables around. If at any given time you’re running out of time, be respectful and do not assume you can either overrun to steal that time away from them. If the interview is going well, pre-empt for another slot or more time. 100% full attention. Turn DND on. We used Google Drive templates with a script as a guideline and a battery of questions, which in turn would become a real-time chat between interviewers and collaborative note-taking. Let the candidate know that we would be 100% attentive but would be taking notes as we went along. I prefer to take note of everything verbatim, with errors and all. Sometimes, by the time you realise something was note-worthy, it’s already too late, and I’ve used it frequently for post-interview deliberations with your co-interviewer.
- 1st Question: How do you know about us and what we do and the role? Start in their native language and use it as a baseline for their communication skills. Generally speaking, engineers are not the best communicators, but you need to rule out if it’s just their English. This question opens the opportunity to talk about referrals and gives you insight into what they perceive your company does. More importantly, it lets you know if they did some homework… it’s shocking how many do not, and sometimes the Talent team have not done their work on the role you’re hiring for.
- Post interview debrief. Mull over the notes post interview with your co-interviewer ASAP. Two are very much better than one and can pick-up on insights which may have been missed. With enough practice it becomes a dance where you’re supporting each other. Our summary notes included: Pros & Cons Notes - neither pro nor con but relevant or as a memory jog Hire - top of the list Consider - compare with others Avoid
- Hire slowly but also fire quickly. Need I say more? This is a long-term commitment to at least a year’s worth of salary and not to mention all the time and effort it takes to onboard a new team member.
At the peak of hiring, there was also a peak of resignations. During those days, it was rare for a week to go by without a resignation. We hired stars, duds, and even misjudged talent who performed amazingly within weeks, and within the next month, it became apparent we had undervalued them as they found a better offer elsewhere.
So back to the “2-page CV”. It’s not a hard and fast rule everywhere as it varies from country to country. But I had become accustomed to the importance of the CV, and yet in Colombia, I had to push back with the talent team who insisted that in Colombia, the CV was not that important. I would not accept interview slots without having reviewed a real CV, not just an anaemic LinkedIn export.
And at the end of the day, if you have made an effort to document your career in a legible CV format, I will honour your emotional labour with a read. And if you think you’re a rockstar who does not have the time to put that emotional labour together, then I don’t have to correspond on my end either.
Also, does the “2-page CV” limit apply to LinkedIn profiles where physical pages do not even exist? Or is the purpose of CV’s now changed to feed the AI data lords? I now see SEO keyword stuffing CV’s that certainly don’t read well, in particular given 40% of these words are in bold, crying for attention and ironically overwhelming the humans trying to make sense of it.
What I do know is that I’m grateful my parents enrolled me in a fast reading course as a teenager —which has stuck— so I can and have skimmed… probably thousands of CV’s by now.
Am I just too old-school? I’m open to being challenged!
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