Are the resumes my company receives procedurally generated? [closed]

Question

I'm a software engineer at a startup. When people apply to the company to work here, their resumes get passed around the engineering room, where we give them a simple yes/no to a phone interview. My company posts all over the standard job sites.

I've noticed a pattern with the resumes. Every batch of resumes has a few from either Indian or Chinese students. They all have these characteristics:

• Name is so common that google doesn't say anything about it
• Bachelor's from a university presumably in the applicant's home country
• About to attain a Masters in (usually) electrical engineering from a local popular university
• No work experience or work experience where the company is not named
• Coursework projects usually contain some sort of multithreaded library, database project, software related to automated/solar/concept vehicle, etc
• Most of our engineers say yes to an interview but they don't end up interviewing with us

Now, most of these could be coincidences explained by cultural patterns, prejudice against unexperienced foreign engineers, the way that these universities advise their students, etc. But they just feel like they're procedurally generated.

Is there an explanation for these similarities beyond the cultural reasons listed? What reason would someone have to make fake resumes, and is there any documented case of this happening?

EDIT: This company is based in the US

Answer 1

It totally depends on the country's dynamics to be honest. China and India are the two most populated countries in the world. So its obvious a lot of people from these countries have migrated to another countries. Countries like United States, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, etc are full of Chinese and Indians who have migrated at some point.

As a matter of fact, I am an immigrant from India currently working in Canada with a degree from my home country and have attained a masters degree in Canada. My work experience was in a small company which has no web existence. (You can look up my careers profile). Also you can try googling my name and see if you can find the real me. (Its easy but there are a lot of people with my name). And I assure you I am not a bot. :)

---

Panoptical suggested an important point in his answer that universities have the same format for their resumes which they give to their students. With the lack of outside exposure, it is possible that those students just ended up using those formats.

Chances are that they already got something or are not interested (Maybe they applied blindly and then realized the requirements are not what they want). But chances are less about them being bots. However to make sure, you have only few options like reach them out personally or email them according to your company procedures.

Answer 2

Disclaimer: While I personally don't have experience with this, I have heard of this occurring with other companies that I've worked with.

One possibility is just what you mentioned above: these are in fact real resumes that were created with poor guidance from their university. You may want to try to reach out to that university's career center (if one exists) to see if you can provide better guidance to resume writing, given of course that you're interested in seeing more resumes from this university.

Another reason for this can be data mining. Some companies actually try to see specifically if any keywords, specific types of job experience, or other buzzwords on a resume help to get a fake applicant past the initial screening to a phone interview. They could then advise real applicants (who would pay them) to create a similar resume and send that off for your review, under the (hopefully) misguided recommendation that that kind of resume would get them a "guaranteed" interview. This is a scam that usually doesn't end well, but can be an annoyance to your HR team when receiving poorly written resumes.

Edit: To sum up (and because of the title change to the question), the best way to tell if the resume is real or fake is really to try to reach out to the person, given that their resume matches what you're looking for.

Answer 3

Have you tried calling them? I noticed this as well and typically what it is are recruiters. They'll say, "Oh Bob Common got a job elsewhere but I can help you!" They typically have common email domains like yahoo or gmail accounts. Try calling any number or putting them into a search engine to see if you get back anything. If you call or email them and you get forward to a different domain or number, then you know you got spammed.

If you posted the job listing on popular sites like Dice, or CareerBuilders, then that is the source of it. Chances are you posted the job somewhere where this recruiters are posting jobs to you.

Another possibility is that they are actual students. At my university, they have a very high population of students from India coming over for a masters in computer science. It could be that the person is trying to stay in the US and one of the requirements is that they have a job. So in that respect it might make sense but it entirely depends on the school and whether that is true.

Edit: Also, try searching their name along with their university. For example, Bob Common Harvard might return something. Most big colleges/universities have recent alumni for their department page. Or they may have published a paper, which would be especially true for Master level students who might have submitted a project or paper. So searching for name plus university/college/school might be a better search string for common names.

Answer 4

Quick tip on screening applicants - you don't have to spend a lot of time on it.

I typically get 100 or so resumes each time I advertise for one opening. If I did what you did - it would waste a lot of people's time. I wouldn't even pass a resume like the one you described around.

---

Hopefully, in your advert you will have listed minimum requirements, along with bonus attributes.

Step one - if an applicant doesn't meet those minimums and doesn't gave anything else that it is stellar, bin them. You don't need anyone else's input on this. This will take a couple of hours.

Step two - you've probably removed about 75% of applicants. This is where you get one or two others to help filter down to about a dozen candidates. This will take up to an hour.

Step three - phone screen. 5 minutes of basic questions can easily identify overstatement. Another hour.

Step four - you probably now only have about 6 interviews to conduct, which can be conducted in one day.

Remember to keep the same bar set throughout - it's cheaper to readvertise than deal with a bad hire.