alt Hacker News> That assumes that I am writing my resume for just your job posting. If I am just going to copy and paste the job requirement verbatim on my resume, doesn't that make your job screening applicants for actual experience much harder?
It doesn't make the hiring manager's job harder if you decline to customize your resume. They press reject and move to the next resume.
> Regardless, if my application is getting thrown out because my title is not quite right in a subtle way, or I reference Javascript but not Python, and no one is telling me - that's unfair on everybody.
If a job listing asks for Python and someone submits a resume that does not list Python, it's fair to reject that candidate.
If there was a hidden requirement to know Python but the job listing didn't ask for it, you get a lot of applicants that don't fit. Smart hiring managers will update the job listing as they review candidates. There are some lazy companies that will have secret requirements that they don't put in the job listing, but that only creates more work for everyone involved. It's not a secret trick they're pulling to be mean. They're just bad at their jobs.
> The company is going to skip over the best candidates for superficial reasons, because nobody is telling them their resume isn't perfect.
Unpopular opinion around these parts, but there's a high correlation between the best candidates and people who take the time to review the job posting and customize their resume before submitting.
I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.
> But as a rule I don't customize my resume for every job posting anyway - if I have to apply to 70+ job listings to even hear back from even one of them,
Complaining about low response rates and refusing to tailor your resume are highly correlated, in my observation.
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Probably a dumb question, but when you say "tailor your resume", what kind of tailoring do you mean? I've seen this advice repeated a lot, but I've rarely taken it because I tend to apply to jobs with the same job title and roughly the same responsibilities; in general, I assumed that tailoring is mainly helpful if you have a diverse/generalist skillset.
Like, it's obvious to me why a true Jack of all trades would use different resumes for applying to a plumber role vs a carpenter role, but less clear why a career plumber would tailor resumes for applying to two plumber roles at slightly different companies.
>Unpopular opinion around these parts, but there's a high correlation between the best candidates and people who take the time to review the job posting and customize their resume before submitting.
There's also a high correlation between matching the job description perfectly and the resume being AI generated and/or dishonest. Doubly so if the requirements are overly specific or contain pure nonsense as some do (saw "Must have 5 years experience with Claude Code" recently). You can filter out people who blatantly don't match the job and those who obviously just copied the job description. Never seen much correlation between the quality of resumes in the middle (ok to great) and how well they do in interviews.
Not to mention at many places "requirements" are mere suggestions or a low-effort list of technologies taken from the resume of the person who quit. Everybody has their own filtering rules and hiring managers rarely agree with each other much less the HR people usually doing the first round of filtering. The true requirements come out only at the resume filtering or interview stage.
>I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.
The "best candidate" a lot of times doesn't mean the best able to do the job. It often means the ones who 1. makes the hiring manager feel good by being enthusiastic about their (statistically) average job for average pay and 2. minimizes their perceived risk of looking bad for their hiring choice.
>If a job listing asks for Python and someone submits a resume that does not list Python, it's fair to reject that candidate.
If you're not a FAANGMULA type place then sure. But also if your job posting lists something like "Python 3.14" or "7+ years Python" I know the hiring manager probably doesn't know the first thing about python. In that case I think it's fair for any decent programmer to lie because they will likely surpass the hiring managers knowledge by studying python a bit before the interview.
>I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.
Do you really think the best candidates are ones who are bothering to cold apply through hiring portals to begin with? The best interviewers, sure.
For people who are actively searching, 10 minutes for 100 applications is 15 hours of work. Reply rates can be as bad as 1 in 500. In this kind of market you want to get that application rate down to 2-3 minutes. There's no time nor point to tailoring towards dream jobs; oods are you dreams were crushed 200 applications ago.
There's no particular reason your time is more valuable. We're all just trying to survive in these tumultuous times.
> If a job listing asks for Python and someone submits a resume that does not list Python, it's fair to reject that candidate.
The thing though is it's a bad requirement. There are any number of great candidates who could be proficient in Python - the skills are very transferrable. (It's like trying to find a painter and filtering out people who have never painted a brown houses)
The thing you're screening for by being so specific is not finding the most qualified person, you're going to end up with the person with the most time and patience to fib or lie on their resume.
> I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.
That's exactly wrong - the best candidates are going to be busy people who are great at their job - the people jumping through HR hoops to get hired are by nature going to be worse candidates.