I know several companies (particularly startups) who are hiring right now, and because of the state of the market, they get tons of job applications coming in. Their small teams simply can't handle the massive influx sometimes, so they have to filter on things that may seem trivial to applicants.
If you're going to apply to a company, big or small, I always tell people to actually write a cover letter, actually double-check your grammar, actually try to seem interested. I often get met with resistance, where folks say something like, "oh, but nobody actually reads a cover letter," and, "how can I put in that much effort for every single application, I've already filled out 50!" To that I say: you'd be surprised how many humans actually read your applications, and build a workflow that works for you so you can apply to several companies without taking too much time per application.
Recently, I helped a startup filter applications. They have a very small team and needed some extra hands to work through and review the large amount of them. There's some clear indicators (sentence structure, phrasing, etc, check out this study for some specifics) when someone is mass-applying with AI, or just throwing a resume in the pile. When I was reading through some of the answers people submitted to questions, I saw so many applications where someone thought that nobody would actually be reading them, or where they just threw in keywords but no actual responses, or they just didn't seem to care.
There was a rubric that this startup came up with to disqualify candidates to better focus on the high quality applicants. The guidelines seemed harsh at first, but ultimately necessary. If the application fell under one of these bullets, they were no longer reviewed:
- Left any questions blank or N/A
- Didn't include their full name
- Didn't capitalize their name
- Didn't respond to the location or time zone questions
- Portfolio/LinkedIn/etc links in application don't work
Now, once again, these might seem harsh or trivial, but when you think about the humans trying to hire for their small team, sifting through hundreds or thousands of applicants, this checklist is an easy way to flip through candidates quickly to see who actually put effort into the application for the role.
Some folks might say, "wow, if you reject me based on me capitalizing my name, I don't WANT to work there," and that's fair, sure. But you could also just... hit shift and capitalize your name. It takes less than a second. You could give it a quick once-over to make sure your application looks good. If you put in the effort to make your job application look professional, you'll almost always get further than someone who didn't, especially in startups.
And because I always get messages around advice like this: I'm not saying this "appearance" of professionalism is how it should be, but it just is, a lot of the time. Play the game, get the job!
Top comments (10)
I don't like to capitalize my name in English, and I wish I could avoid it.
The first two letters of my first name - Il - barely distinguishable in some fonts. Sometimes they both look like special characters, giving the weird "||ya" look instead of much more readable "ilya" or "ILYA".
We ask for cover letters in ad. No cover letter == incomplete application. And incomplete applications don't get reviewed at all (system flags as incomplete and we're not allowed to consider them).
Cover letters when written well can answer questions that resumes can't. Why interested in that position, etc?
They can also filter out people who cannot write cover letters well because, for example, they don't really have such "tradition" in their country. So it's a double-edged sword. Although I'm sure that in principle you are right, they primarily filter out people too lazy to complete the application.
Left any questions blank or N/A -> Why are they answering N/A? maybe the questions should be revised.
Didn't include their full name -> What is a full name? Are there any cultural barriers here? Privacy issues?
Didn't capitalize their name -> and? this one is dumb. They could be applying from a laggy phone.
Didn't respond to the location or time zone questions -> Maybe they don't know? Timezones have always been annoying and maybe for privacy concerns they don't want to put a location. Maybe they're applying from a phone, and I don't know WHY it happens, but browsers and apps now auto refresh when you switch tabs/apps. They could be losing all their information and would rather not re-do the application especially if it's lengthy.
Portfolio/LinkedIn/etc links in application don't work -> Why do they need LinkedIn if they have the resume and the application information? I don't have a portfolio due to most of my projects being client related (I'd prefer to show them on interviews), why should it even be a requisite for a 1st interview with a recruiter? I've given recruiters my blog and they've never read it.
I understand they're annoyed but, I don't think it was the correct way of approaching this problem. But well, I'm working under assumptions based on the information you provided and they might have valid justifications for this rubric, I just don't see them. They seem nitpicky, especially the capitalization one hahaha
I know multiple people who don't have a first name, don't have a last name, who don't necessarily have alphabetic names, who might not have ANY alphabet in their names, whose name might not be capitalized, etc.
I feel like I need to figure out if this is a company I applied for.
On the flipside, an applicant applying for 100 jobs where each job has its own idiotic list of questions that have to be entered using its bespoke webform that can't be auto-filled (despite the answers already being covered in detail by the applicant's resume) probably don't want to waste keystrokes doing things like capitalizing their name.
Wait, but what if my name isn't supposed to be capitalized? ily[redacted] is supposed to be lower case start.
See: falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names #17
Good reading here: blog.jgc.org/2010/06/your-last-nam...
(Also, after reading about more about application filters... Did the filter consider in if they marked their gender N/A because they don't identify as a specific gender?)
For what it's worth, this company in particular didn't ask about gender, and if it was a name that should not be capitalized, that was taken into consideration. It was human-checked, not an automated sweep.
What do you mean by capitalizing the name?
For you, not capitalising your name would look like “ahmed” or “ahmed atwa”.