HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No

Posted by sambellll 22 hours ago

HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88(danunparsed.com)

941 points | 402 commentspage 6

bryanrasmussen 14 hours ago|

>If your company’s cutoff sits at 85, I fail 65% of the time. Same exact resume, different luck.

Your resume's reception is always affected by random factors, only now you are able to test, debug and technically critique the randomness.

xorcist 12 hours ago|

I think the question is why bother with an LLM if randomness is decisive?

Just roll the dice. I mean, it's not the worse you can do to narrow a subset.

bryanrasmussen 10 hours ago||

right, and it's cheaper, but people want the illusion of determinism. Some people say that they want determinism, but if they do nothing to assure themselves it is deterministic I think it is fair they really only want a good enough illusion.

neya 18 hours ago||

I wonder how is this even legal? The only useful job the HR departments are ever required to do - they decide to automate it? Aside from being a daycare for adults, what exactly does HR accomplish? It's clearly NOT on the side of employees, but this seems like they're clearly NOT on the side of employers, either.

While resume's are being filtered left and right, they just make TikTok's on company's dime [1]. What a sad state of affairs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wSug80Vg5JU

srdjanr 16 hours ago|

They could be using this just to throw out the obviously bad CVs, and then manually go over the rest. I'm not sure if they do this in practice, but the tech itself can be useful.

Also if HR was really useless (or actively hurting the company) they wouldn't still have a job (or they'll lose it eventually). No one likes burning money for no reason. So obviously they are doing something useful.

syockit 15 hours ago||

The last time I heard HR being completely let go was with a fintech company Bolt. Then again, that company was midsized, around 200-500 people or so. For larger companies, it's going to be difficult to even realize that HR is redundant in the first place.

jvanderbot 7 hours ago||

> I’d take the engineer with 30 years of experience who built S3 over someone with two internships and an open source project — but this tool wouldn’t.

Is it possible the senior/principle jobs are not being applied to at a rate that LLM tools like this are required? Maybe star devs are getting recruiter referrals and this kind of tool is mostly used for filtering new grads?

Either way, perfectly dystopian.

mavamaarten 5 hours ago|

That's what stood out to me as well, and it struck me as odd that nobody seemed to think it's odd? Almost half of the points to be made is related to contributions to open source projects. Guess my 10+ years of experience in a niche topic is worthless.

bhanu786 16 hours ago||

ATS resume usually check the keywords, and formatting your spacing and give score accordingly. As If someone is following some reference of the format. It can depend might he will be getting low scores.

speedgoose 15 hours ago||

Many em dashes and a "This is not, it is…" later, I think this article would have been a much better critic if it didn't use a LLM to (re)write some parts of it.

another-dave 15 hours ago|

I always find it funny when a technical crowd starts picking on em dashes as a sure sign of AI. I mean, are keyboard shortcuts really that difficult for developers? Some of us always knew how to use correct punctuation, even before LLMs existed.

Also, neither "this is not" or "it is" appear at all in the article?

speedgoose 15 hours ago||

It’s a lot of them. It’s a style. I know some people who used them before and use them less nowadays.

> This non-determinism isn’t a bug you can just fine-tune away, it’s a fundamental design flaw.

actionfromafar 13 hours ago||

Funny how something which was catchy at one point makes my skin crawl now.

0xpgm 17 hours ago||

With such kind of ATS systems, is it still a thing to optimize for a one page resume that is easy for a human reviewer to scan, or just include enough buzzwords and external links to try and please the LLM?

jorisw 16 hours ago|

I wouldn't assume based on this one thread/article that this is what you need to optimize your resume for. Nor that a majority or even significant group of reviewers is even using LLMs. I've been involved in hiring pipelines and never even thought of using LLMs to review incoming candidates.

However given the time constraints reviewers have, yes, the former (making a resume easy to consume quickly) is a huge help.

Tryk 7 hours ago||

What is an ATS?

Why is it so hard to write out an acronym once...

ChicagoDave 17 hours ago||

I was inspired by this. I made a Claude skill to take my resume and compare it to any job description to point out viability and gaps. Pretty cool skill. I'll post it somewhere.

steve_j_choi 18 hours ago||

This could be used as a good way to self-evaluate one's current position from the company's point of view. you would tweak prompts and guidelines that are expected from the company and see how you score

hahahaa 18 hours ago|

I sort of hope we land on 2 agents, one working for the candidate and one for the employee do a screen round. Salary compatiability could be negotiated by a 3rd party bot that knows both parties ranges and what would be needed each end of range, and figure out yes/no worth going ahead. Such a time saver.

dev_l1x_be 13 hours ago|

Did anyone try to prompt hack this setup?

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