Reply to post: Re: It's an advantage, stupid.

Ladies in tech, have you considered not letting us know you're female?

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: It's an advantage, stupid.

>"@AC "The only way to be truly fair, is to not give your unconscious brain a chance to activate its prejudices - a blind audition."

I don't necessarily disagree - but then you have to mandate that all CVs are purged of anything which gives away the authors sex (regardless of what sex, religion, nationality, sexuality the author is). Little things like Name, Educational History, Hobbies could be a giveaway, and perhaps even the Address might provide a hint. It's not a bad idea, per se, but I don't think that its workable - at least, not without rendering the CV (an important first step before interview) essentially useless."

I've worked at somewhere that actually done this. The agency we used submitted the CV without the name or address, and a candidate number instead.

Reading through a hundred CV's made me appreciate how little effort a lot of people put in, we binned over half the CV's on painful spelling mistakes on the basis that if a person couldn't be assed to run spellchecker on their CV and (or) proof read it, then their level of effort when actually working for us would be worse.

Some CV's were incredibly good. I especially liked the ones which were so well written that when you read the hobbies and other interests section that it was clear what benefits and skills they got from their hobbies or interests and why those were important to the job role they were applying for.

Conversely some were incredibly bad. For instance one dedicated more space to explaining why that individuals religion was important to them than explaining their experiance or suitability for the job they were applying for. That particular CV would have benefitted from having all of the religion information eliminated, IMO. If i'm looking at hiring then I don't need (or want) to know anything about your religion, sex, sexual orientation, political beliefs or membership of political parties etc and I do wonder precisely why this is on a CV. If I don't know then I simply cannot discriminate one way or the other.

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