The importance of resumes has been overstated for many years now, and I look forward to the day they are phased out entirely. Minor grammar changes are not what is making the difference between getting an interview or not. Years' worth of work cannot be distilled down to 2 lines on a piece of paper, and recruiters/hiring managers already know this.
Employers are looking at your education, companies you worked at, years of experience, and maybe a vague idea of what your work area was before this. Just this info is enough to make a decision for whether to call you for an interview, and after that the resume is useless.
As others already pointing out, seems like you're making huge generalisation here, which appears to be incorrect.
Being on employers side, I give little-to-no attention to education. Seen MBAs with no critical thinking or skills whatsoever and dropouts with very diligent and knowledgeable approaches.
For me, resume is not just a boring list of what you did, but also the way it is written - lucidity, points emphasised, etc. It all speaks loudly of personality.
And yea, if there are grammar mistakes it most likely will go to bin. Not because I particularly value grammar (which I do not) but because resume is usually supposed to be diligently written/reread by the candidate. If he/she didn't bother to do that properly - the damn thing that potentially land him/her job - this negligence says for itself, further projects, had there been any, will not be cared properly.
That's my opinion which is in no way representative or absolute in it's truth. I'd like just to pinpoint that there may be few opinions on the matter.
I place quite a bit of importance on cover letters. Cover letters that are concise and clear and professional don't come up often, and are always highly appreciated. Well written cover letters and resumes also correlate highly with the professionalism and abilities of candidates, in my experience. I hire mostly for non-technical positions, and I am mindful that in highly technical positions, maybe past work speaks for itself, and there's less emphasis on cover letter and resume.
> For me, resume is not just a boring list of what you did, but also the way it is written - lucidity, points emphasised, etc. It all speaks loudly of personality.
Do you require the candidates to have written the resume themselves? Otherwise it's risky to read so much personality into it.
Resumes are usually required to be truthful, sometimes this is even verified, but I've never seen a requirement that I can't just have an agent write it for me; like how students write essays.
Agree with you here. No, there is no such requirement and it's probably not necessary because it's goal is just to get an interview (or not to get it).
It's not a magic stick allowing to make a perfect choice, more like an assessment option. That's being said, sometimes it worth to give a shot to someone whose CV is sub par.
Up to a point, all resumes are reasonably well written. Now if you are filtering the top 10% of these resumes based on writing.. you are likely to get people who at best are good writers and no different from other candidates' resumes you rejected.
Do you want good writers? Maybe, but not everyone. I honestly do think the importance towards grammar and "writing" in resumes are overstated.
Perhaps to my poor choice of words you have assumed that selection is being made based on good writing. it's not that simple.
We have to define "good writing". Good doesn't necessarily means CV written in a way for Shakespeare to become jealous to lucidity. It has to meet bare minimum - as in have zero grammar mistakes.
To make an example, you probably won't go to a first date in your pyjamas with stains on it but will dress nicely. The date (and whatever follows) may not be up to your expectations, but if you do use pyjamas, it most certainly will. Not because your pyjama is not magnificent but just because having negligence in dressing properly shows arrogance and disrespect to someone who joins you.
If you need a Windows admin that states proficiency in Wnidows in the CV, you can infer that not much attention has been put on the CV. If not much attention has been put in the much important first contact with your company, what’s the experience going to be n months down the line, with e.g. powershell scripts that don’t come with spellchecking?
Mostly, hiring has a biased risk matrix. You don’t get hurt by missing a good candidate so much as hiring a bad one. So that makes you conservative in choices. Obviously 1 typo can happen but think about 5 to 10. If you have a lot of CVs to wade through, awful documents going to the bin is not a bad first step in the process.
I've also been on the employer side for a couple of teams. I see the resume/interview process like dating: When you just meet someone that interests you, you go out of your way to look clean and nice on your date.
When I see sloppy resumes or feel the interviewee is not interested/engaged during the interview process, I can imagine how they will be once I hire them.
Thank you for throwing away my resume based on a minor grammatical mistake. I have no interest of working for a team whose supervisor is actively avoiding people whose first language is not English. I would rather work with skilled people regardless of their country of origin.
If you pardon the way I am going to put it - you seriously may have to work not just on reading, but also on comprehension skills. English may not be your native language (and it's not mine either), but if you demonstrate hostility with passive aggressive tone and rationalise it with made up arguments (looking at the part where non-english speakers are "discriminated"), being on hiring side probably I will give you a chance to apply your skills elsewhere.
As to being non-native English speaker, you may not be able to create perfect wording - that's fine, but if knowing this you're too lazy or entitled not to speel check it at least -it has nothing to do with knowledge but just plain negligence or ignorance.
If you say on your resume that english is not your first language, I'll pass the mistakes for sure. And I may even admire the quality of your non-mother-tongue english.
With this arrogant posture, I would think of you as a dodged bullet tbh. Btw even though I'm not the original commenter, I agree with her sentiment. And English is not my first language.
Why is it so extraordinary to ask people to pay attention to what they are doing. Specially when going for something that supposedly interest them?
Imagine you are on your first date with that boy/girl that you DIE for. Would you take care of every detail ? Would you groom yourself, comb yourself even though you are not a barber or a stylist? Now THAT is showing interest.
> Employers are looking at your education, companies you worked at, years of experience, and maybe a vague idea of what your work area was before this.
Speak for yourself. The biggest signal I have when deciding whether to call you for an interview is your resume.
I have never considered education so far. There’s 2 states: I know the school, and I don’t know the school. I’ve never known any school so far.
Anyway, your resume decides how enthusiastic I’m going to be when starting your interview. Which is going to make things easier when that time comes.
This is a reminder that a lot of this comes down to the whims of whoever is staffed at HR. I’ve often read contradictory advice about resumes in articles written by people in charge of hiring. It’s not a big surprise, a lot of these views are arbitrary (though they will insist otherwise!)
I agree. You apply to 20 identical places, only 2 call you. One called you because you worked at ACME, the other because they saw the word WIDGETS on your resume. It was the same damn resume and the perfect action word or format did not matter all that much. But I still spend hours on resume, even if it helps improve 1% of my chance it is a good exercise. I've seen people with terrible resumes, I don't want to be one of those.
Not only that, but if you re-apply again to the same 20 places, the 2 that call you will likely be different than the previous 2 because a different person looked at your resume this time.
> I know the school, and I don’t know the school. I’ve never known any school so far.
Either you're interviewing bottom-tier candidates or haven't paid any attention to schools that are out there. If you're in the US, you should be recognize the names of the top 25 CS schools. You might not know their rank, but there aren't any obscure names on that list, and they graduate a lot of students.
I was commenting that it's weird for someone screening resumes to not recognize many schools. Hypothetically, I could see you going to Harvey Mudd (great school) and a hiring manager not knowing about it. All the resumes aren't from those schools, though. You'd think a Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, CMU, Illinois resume would have passed by at some point.
When I was a hiring manager, most of the candidates I ran into came from international universities I had not heard about. Instead, I interviewed people based on the projects they had worked on.
In the other extreme I've even heard people here in HN argue that MIT and Stanford graduates are often mediocre, which is very different from my experience.
Hiring is hard and we all do it differently. YMMV.
> At that point I might as well memorize them all.
Read through the list. You'll probably recognize a lot of the names. Out of 50, if you pay much attention to colleges in the US, I bet you'll recognize 40 of them.
It becomes outright silly when US recruiters are charged with going through non-US resumes. We've had an Irish engineer being asked if this German university is "Ivy league equivalent". To which the only possible reply is "how the hell am I supposed to know?" There's 50-ish separate education systems, have fun making any sense out of it.
That’s amusing. The German university system was actively designed (or modified) after 1968 to get rid of all such prestige hierarchies. There are real universities and there are universities of the applied sciences and that’s really it. Every German university is a high quality university.
This is because in my experience, CS degrees are incredibly popular and a lot of people get them even though they may not be particularly good at programming or even enjoy it. 20 years ago, I'd put the CS degree higher up, but today Universities have lowered standards significantly and are minting lots of CS graduates with dollar signs in their eyes.
But that's not how it works because those with only a college degree are (for the most part) not competing for the same set of jobs as those with work experience. They are competing for internships, and when it comes to internships, you are going to hire someone with a CS degree over someone with an EE degree. Therefore you are right, when it comes to internships.
When someone has only a degree and no work experience, that's a risky proposition -- those candidates should be routed to internships so both sides can get to know each other without a long term commitment. In all the companies I've ever worked with, we've never hired straight from college without it being an internship. More likely than not, an internship will result in a job offer if it goes well, and IME most do go well. That means that in practice, it's much easier for college graduates to enter the labor market. But they enter via internships that are converted to offers and generate work experience. Then the work experience is all that counts and the degree becomes a checkbox.
In other words, your college degree is important, but it's important to open the door to your first real job by getting you an internship. After that, it very rapidly decays in importance. This is because the work experience is so much more informative and relevant than the education. I've never looked at anyone's grades or honors, and it's not uncommon to have a lot of employees without a college degree if they have proven their skills in other ways. This disregard for grades or degree and focus on actual skills is what makes things like dev bootcamps work (for good or ill).
I might be biased since I don’t have a CS degree, but I consider having a degree in the humanities a potentially more positive signal than a typical CS degree. It could indicate that the candidate is able to learn programming and software development on their own, and are interested in the field enough to “switch” careers despite being in an apparent disadvantage.
In contrast when you screen resumes you invariably come across people who apparently managed to get a CS degree without learning anything. They won’t be dissuaded from applying to technical positions but if one doesn’t have a CS or related technical degree they probably have some confidence in their own ability.
There’s also a factor where some employers simply pass on resumes if the candidate does not meet strict degree requirements. This also increases the average quality of the non-CS degree holder a bit.
> It could indicate that the candidate is able to learn programming and software development on their own, and are interested in the field enough to “switch” careers despite being in an apparent disadvantage.
Call me cynical, but if I were to see an art history major switch to programming, I wouldn't think "this is a person that decided he loves CS more than art history", I'd think "this is a person that loves art history and ran out of money."
Of course that's all from the resume. Once you actually meet someone and work with them, you can find out pretty quickly how passionate they are and where their interests are. But we are talking about making judgements off of resumes, which again is why work history trumps all. If someone succeeded at a place with similar requirements to yours, that is a much more important signal of qualification than education, so once you land that first job, whether you were an art history major or cs major isn't so important. Might as well study what you love and then figure out how you fit into the labor market later.
Why are you assuming all the CS candidates are not passionate about the degree. It doesn't make sense. Many are deeply passionate about CS and will learn on their own. This is compounded by the theory in uni and learning opportunities.
> Why are you assuming all the CS candidates are not passionate about the degree.
I don't think I said or suggested that?
What I implied is that people tend to look for jobs related to their degree if they don't have a good idea what they want. There are those passionate CS degree holders and dispassionate CS degree holders applying for a (say) software dev job. There are probably very few dispassionate humanities degree holders applying to the same job. It's some signal, and I don't think one has to dismiss the importance of a CS degree to see that.
> 20 years ago, I'd put the CS degree higher up, but today Universities have lowered standards significantly and are minting lots of CS graduates with dollar signs in their eyes.
In addition I’ve heard of an seen a number of things in CS programs to make me question their quality. I can’t speak to the other degrees.
I'm in a senior position with no degree and the absolute best engineers I have ever worked with almost all have music degrees.
Edit: it's also worth noting as an ex-hedgie that in technical roles most of the firms specifically filter for people with musical ability for this reason.
The best people in any field are the ones that passed the harshest filter, and pole vaulting from music to programming is about as demanding as it gets.
Some of the best developers I’ve worked (and work) with are from a music background with an interest in computer music also. I guess maybe part of it is that at a certain point in writing music software you really need to be using C++, and audio software in particular is quite unforgiving due to its real-time nature, so you have to learn some fundamentals to write performante code? But I’m sure there’s more to it than just that.
I’ve also worked with some really smart people from a physics background.
Yeah I think that's mostly accurate. I also think that learning signals processing/sampling teaches you an enormous amount of practical, transferrable skill.
Similar kinds of problems come up in physics, so for me this tracks.
People can be petty. I've seen no shortage of candidates get passed on because of spelling mistakes or something equally silly, and it happens a lot more than you'd like to think. Maybe the resume reviewer is having a bad day, or their dad told them "people that do X are dumb" and so anytime they see X they think someone is dumb. I've even worked at places that fast-tracked candidates from USC because the founders were from there.
People are biased, and those biases will come across.
> I've seen no shortage of candidates get passed on because of spelling mistakes or something equally silly
I wouldn't use this as the only basis to pass on a candidate, but it'd certainly be a red flag[1]. If you can't take the time to even run spellcheck on your CV - a document you have specifically crafted for presumably serious people to read - what does that say about your attention to detail at work?
There's room for leniency, obviously, because even professional proofreaders miss stuff and not everyone is writing in their native language, but some baseline level of competence is expected.
1. I'm usually hiring people in design and product, not engineering, so ymmv.
It says a lot. Just because it is a bias, doesn't make it wrong. I've meet enough people in my career that would prove the rule about attention to details.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point (or maybe this is your point), but doesn't this take effectively invalidate the entire human interviewing process? The whole thing is just a series of actions (portfolio review, phone screen, whatever) that give the reviwer(s) a set of mostly subjective data points from which they infer a candidate's fit for a particular role.
I've had plenty of recruiters that could ignore silly resume mistakes and find gem candidates. I've also hired candidates with horrible resumes, and it's never been a problem.
Evaluate a candidate based on their experience and qualifications, everything else is just to satisfy our own egos.
> Evaluate a candidate based on their experience and qualifications
Well, as I said I typically hire in design and product, so "proven ability to produce high-quality written content" is often an important qualification.
I'm a stickler for typos, but I would note that sometimes resumes are sent by recruiters who have reached out to the candidate and are trying to get them hired (so they can get a commission). These recruiters will sometimes edit resumes — even PDFs, in my experience — and can sometimes accidentally inject typos or formatting oddities.
One reason that recruiters want to tinker with your resume is to remove contact information, so they can ensure that the company can't reach you without going through them.
I was livid when this happened to me, especially after I made clear that I did not want the recruiter to send any documents on my behalf.
It could also be because they're looking for easy ways to filter out candidates if the applicant pool is particularly large.
Think of it as dimensionality reduction—many people claim to be detail-oriented, but mistakes on a resume are an easy way for reviewers to verify that claim.
I fear this would filter out a lot of perfectly competent engineers whose native language is not English.
Spelling issues are inexcusable given how easy they are to catch (I hear Microsoft Office has a spell check feature), but grammar issues beyond that should largely be overlooked.
I used to work with someone who had been a manager in 80s Britain (high unemployment) and he said they threw any applicable in a brown envelope in the bin.
It wasn't about skills or experience or culture fit, but about getting the hiring done in a sane amount of time.
But they're not easy ways. There's absolutely no correlation between resume quality and candidate performance, and they're just idiosyncrasies we develop over time. We trick ourselves into believing these signals are important, when they're not.
> There's absolutely no correlation between resume quality and candidate performance
I don't think that's entirely true. The resume is a product of a potential hire, and it gives off the first impression of their organizational and writing skills. While it shouldn't be the _only_ deciding factor, that first impression is an important signal for a hiring manager who has to filter potentially hundreds of candidates.
That's like saying a first date is in indication of a couples future. It's a bit silly. Sure, if it's absolutely chock-full of errors that could be a sign, but one or two are the kind of things you're supposed to ignore.
> that first impression is an important signal for a hiring manager
Only because people have been trained to judge others based on petty things, so people have responded in kind. Not because it's actually a valuable effort, but to give people one less reason to throw it in the "No" pile.
It sometimes can be indicative. We recently had a resume with an error in the birthday (would have been only 1y old by that) and a couple of other errors. Candidate didn’t even know who he was applying for and should clearly have been filtered out by HR. If you list technologies with spelling errors, like “Sql” you clearly don’t know what you’re talking about.
> like “Sql” you clearly don’t know what you’re talking about
This is the kind of silly leap I'm talking about. People infer WAY too much from something like a word in a digital document and extrapolate that into something they use to impact a persons life.
I had an employee that insisted on asking candidates what they're 5 year plan, and was insistent that long-term goals were serious indicators if a candidate should be hired. She would give candidates thumbs down if she didn't like the answer, even if they could do the work.
You're taking it out of context. I'm not saying that taken along it's a strong enough negative signal to filter, but it makes me being alert and I'll drill more into these items. But there are a lot of resumes that are clearly low effort and have a bunch of these mistakes - those are in my experience always indicative of the candidates' quality.
Resumes have been on the verge of death for decades now, yet they are still with us.
Yes, once you get in the door and get an interview the resume is worthless. Except it's not.
The interviewer may need to run you past someone else. Will he/she reach for their carefully curated interview notes and pass those on? No, because they haven't written them up, or they can't be emailed, or the recruitment system is rubbish or [some reason].
But the resume is still there, a nice Word doc or pdf that can be easily emailed around.
Source: too many years building recruitment systems.
Literally! I can count on one hand the number of interviewers who have asked me about my past work experience. The most important thing seems to be whether I can regurgitate various tree operations on a whiteboard. It's only a matter of time before they cut out the middle man and start hiring candidates by (university_ranking, hackerrank_ranking) in lexical order without as much as an interview.
That seems crazy to me! Whenever I conduct interviews questions about specific situations from their past experience are most of what I ask. "Tell me about a time when..."
I find they can very quickly uncover potential red flags. They can also lead to interesting discussions that leave both me and the candidate enthused about progressing to the next stage.
For software engineers, even all the extracurricular software activities is useless! Its like sure maybe have a public github, but the only endgame from actually contributing to a project is just an imagination that you'll stand out for a recruiter to actually say hello. It doesn't give you a leg up on any hiring manager decision, you have to solve the silly algorithm problems, system design and behavior interview just like everyone else!
The recruiter was already open to saying hello just because you said you can code for other people.
Not sure I agree with this one. Over the last few years, I've had tons of consulting work purely from my activity in the OSS ecosystem. I also got my last two jobs because of my activity in the OSS ecosystem. "... I saw your GH profile and noticed you have significant contributions to XXX, we'd love to have you join the team". I didn't have to do any algorithm questions for those organizations.
> I didn't have to do any algorithm questions for those organizations.
okay. many organizations would not make that exception. and there are many stewards of key open source dependencies that have talked about how they couldn't pass interviews to places that heavily use their software.
> even all the extracurricular software activities is useless!
I'm one of the jerks who does a coding interview; but for the people who do interviews on what you've done, having something on your resume that you can talk about is a good thing. Interviewers want to hear that you've got deep experience in something and can explain what you did at a high level and in detail. If you've got that from work experience, great; if not, something you did independently is nice too; otherwise it's got to be coming from classwork, which is ok, but kind of iffy. Ideally, two, maybe three projects you can talk about is good to touch on in the resume.
> Employers are looking at your education, companies you worked at, years of experience, and maybe a vague idea of what your work area was before this.
Isn't this what a resume is? Just the list of those things that Employers want to look at.
It isn't what most people think a resume should be, looking at the very article we are discussing as well all the "resume consulting/polishing" services out there.
Plus, employers are anyways going to make you fill out all this info separately in their recruiting system.
When I look at a CV I want to see someone's achievements, ideally quantified. What are they proud of, how have they helped their previous teams/products/companies to succeed, are they passionate about what they do.
Resumes are still needed to get you to interviews so they are never going to disappear... Plus you seem to forget that HR uses resumes to filter candidates even before the hiring manager ever sees anything.
This isn't bad advice, it just glosses over the reality for most people applying to jobs where their role isn't in massive demand (i.e. not a SV dev/prod mgr). I routinely screen dozens of resumes a month for a wide variety of semi-technical roles and have been through the ringer on the other side more times than I care to think about.
The #1 thing* that will get you to a phone screen is keywords that match what the hiring manager (and usually the screening software) is looking for. Those keywords are usually a combination of technologies, skills, responsibilities, and companies. Yes, where you worked previously is important, and yes that makes it a vicious cycle for a lot of people.
The #2 thing that most hiring managers look for is directly relevant experience matching the responsibilities of the role in question. Yes, that sucks because it means if you haven't yet gotten to the level of doing the work in the new role then you're at a disadvantage. The way around this is to ask for responsibilities at your current job that you want to do at your next job.
The advice in this article tends to come into play after those two factors are met.
> Best advice for cv writing: if you're not modifying your cv and cover letter for every job ad, you're doing it wrong.
This is an eternal debate. The last time I discussed this on HN, I got people on both sides of the spectrum. On the one end, there are people like me who used to tailor resumes per job, and write cover letters specific to the role/company, who then one day decided to ask whoever responded with feedback on the cover letter, only to always hear: "Oh, you sent a cover letter?" On the other end are HN users who are managers who claim they read them.
I'm a hiring manager and I always read cover letters. For me, they are your opportunity to clarify some things in your resume and point how relevant they are to the position you're applying for. This is actually a win for the candidate, as they don't need to modify their resume for each employer (which is more work).
E.g. "Although you use Angular 11 in your stack, I believe my 5 years of experience with Angular.js and 3 years of experience with React will allow me to ramp up quickly." or "Having worked developing CRM systems for 5 years at company XYZ, I believe I would be of great value for this project."
While I wouldn't disqualify a candidate for not having a cover letter, I would wonder why they wouldn't use this tool that increases their chances of getting hired.
> While I wouldn't disqualify a candidate for not having a cover letter, I would wonder why they wouldn't use this tool that increases their chances of getting hired.
The answer was in my original comment: It's expensive to write one, and while you may read cover letters, you are in a minority, and a job applicant has no way of telling which camp you're in.
Also, I'd like to ask: How often do you disqualify a candidate based on their cover letter? If you do, given that you don't disqualify for not having one, wouldn't you agree that those you disqualified after reading their cover letter put themselves at a disadvantage by writing one?
> The answer was in my original comment: It's expensive to write one, and while you may read cover letters, you are in a minority, and a job applicant has no way of telling which camp you're in.
Why is it expensive? You can write it in 10 minutes. I've looked at the last cover letter that I wrote, it's 12 sentences in total.
> Also, I'd like to ask: How often do you disqualify a candidate based on their cover letter? If you do, given that you don't disqualify for not having one, wouldn't you agree that those you disqualified after reading their cover letter put themselves at a disadvantage by writing one?
I don't recall ever in my career disqualifying someone based on the cover letter. I can't even think what they could put in the cover letter that would automatically disqualify them.
> Why is it expensive? You can write it in 10 minutes. I've looked at the last cover letter that I wrote, it's 12 sentences in total.
10 minutes multiplied by how many applications one makes? If you apply for 60 jobs, that's 10 hours of work. Moreover, it's 10 hours of work where there's a good chance no one will read it.
I'm not saying anyone is right or wrong here. It's a question of whether one wants to take a gamble in curating and thinking someone will read it vs going for raw numbers and applying to as many places as possible.
Of course, if you know the other party will read it, it makes sense to write one.
> I can't even think what they could put in the cover letter that would automatically disqualify them.
Experience that is different from what you are looking for (or not at the scale you need, etc), which wasn't clear in the resume.
The last time I had this discussion on HN, I did get responses that said they have disqualified people for what's on their cover letter.
Yeah, I don't think anybody looks at cover letters, but tweaking a resume for the listing still makes sense. And you can just write a short cover if you're sending correspondence with the resume.
Hi Person (if you got a person),
I heard about your opening for X from Y. As you can see from my attached resume, I've got relevant experience working for company Z (that you might have heard of). Looking forward to blah blah blah
> Yeah, I don't think anybody looks at cover letters
Oh, you should see the negative responses I got when I posted that the last time on HN. Some people are absolutely pro-cover letters.
One interesting theme in some of the responses, though was: "I always read cover letters if present, but it just occurred to me that I disqualify candidates based on the content of their cover letter, so in some cases those that didn't submit a cover letter are at an advantage." Essentially, the more you talk, the easier it is for people to rule you out.
So a cover letter could give you an advantage over those who don't supply one, but it also could disadvantage you. On the whole, I take it as a net neutral at best, and so why spend the time?
When you are sending hundreds of resumes, how you manage that?
For example I've been looking for a job for eight months now. I did create multiple resumes for different industries (and languages, I have portuguese and english versions) but still, I've been sending resumes in mass, and got invited in these eight months to only two interviews... and one of them was kinda a scam (the guy looked like he wanted an employee, but in fact he was a publisher looking for people that will shoulder most of the risk)
Are there really hundreds of different jobs or careers that you want? I have only ever tailored my cv and cover letter for the exact position that I was applying for so that they knew I knew everything about the company and what they were doing and why they needed me to help them solve their problems. When they read my Cv they are like thank god our search is over, this guy can do it. Because it you are going to get the job you can do it and you will do it! It might take some training and some extra hours to get up to speed if your experience isn’t an exact match but you can say that, I’m going the extra mile to make this relationship a success, to make this deal work so that we both get what we want.
People want to work with people that are happy to be there. If there are hundreds of different jobs you could have to me that says you don’t really care about any of them. Find the one job you desperately want and go after that.
When I was first starting out of university, I sent about 40 CVs out, and just started copy+pasting different combinations of paragraphs together for a cover letter.
I did eventually get a job out of that, but since then I've never sent a cover letter, and just keep 1 file updated as I hit notable milestones at my current job.
Conversely I recently had a position I did actually really want because it aligned very well with my background before going into IT as well. I got through a phone screen and then got rejected after a 2 hour programming test which wasn't complicated enough to actually signal anything. Going after 1 job you really really want is going nowhere.
Outside of CS jobs, sending out hundreds of CVs isn't unfamiliar.
I'm in biotech. Job searches routinely take 6-9 months, and hundreds of applications. The supply of good jobs is low and the demand is high. As such, it takes a while. Granted, I last searched for a job in the before times, so things have likely changed.
I've friends in legal, engineering, and other 'white collar' sectors. It took them a long time too.
I'm generally unemployed at the time. So it becomes my full time job.
Generally when I look for a new job it's about two solid weeks of applying for jobs, two solid weeks of interviews, a week of negotiation and bidding.
The only job I had where I didn't have at least 5 companies trying to outbid each other was my first.
I'm not special, I'm not even a good developer. I just know how to convey my worth in a way people understand, I'm also honest enough that people trust me relatively easily.
Nope, and this advice is responsible for untold misery among people who spend all of their time perfecting 50 job applications when they could have spent all that time simply shotgunning thousands of applications out. I have seen so many of my friends take your "advice" and then end up without internships or jobs for long periods because they couldn't imagine that getting a job is a "numbers game" like I do.
Your advice makes sense for people who already have a job who want a very specific next job. Outside of that, please shove it somewhere the light doesn't shine because people who follow it are knee-capping themselves in the modern jobs market.
They say don't use annoying buzzwords, but personally I find "convert" to be a particularly grating buzzword. What's wrong with saying "gets you hired"?
For titles, shorter is typically better. In this case, it's nowhere near the character count limit for HN, but limits of that sort are another good reason to err on the side of "shorter is better."
But it boils down to cognitive load. Attention spans are limited and it's a busy world full of distractions. You need to grab someone's attention with the least burden on their limited resources -- mental bandwidth, attention, time, etc -- and get them to click.
A good title can be the difference between a successful article and a flop and titles are hard.
"Gets you hired" would be far less cognitive load than "convert" to me. Maybe its just me, but I haven't seen it used like that previously, I've seen it mostly with ad clicks converting to them signing up or buying something (which is only slightly less grating, but I can understand the need for a shorter expression when it is industry jargon)
To be fair, they are saying you shouldn't use buzzwords in a resume, not everywhere. I agree with you that the phrase 'gets you hired' is a lot stronger though.
Its just an anecdote from my personal experience, but perhaps it shows how little an resume influences the decision if you get a job or not:
About 7 years ago i was unemployed and a little depressed because every single application for a job i wrote got rejected... at one saturday night i returned from some good time with a few friends and perhaps a few beer (..and whisky, and whatever else) too much and had the "wise" idea to check a few job websites. I found an offer for a sysop job and wrote the (obviously) most drunken and horrible application ever... at monday morning i got a call, the next friday i signed the contract.
Morale of the story: The boss got curious if i really was just an drunk idiot and invited me to see for himself.
I still work at this company and i am reasonable happy here.
But... perhaps this is something which will work only with smaller companies.
A few years ago I was working as a video game programming teacher. My boss showed me a resume asking if I thought we should bring the guy in. His resume was a 8ish page affair in the Japanese style. I flipped through not that impressed, until in the middle of his resume somewhere he mentioned working on Japanese dating sim games with ridiculous names like “How to date a hot girl II”.
I figured we needed to interview him after that, if only to hear that story. Anyway, we ended up hiring him. Really nice guy - and his students adored him.
I’m not sure what the takeaway is. Maybe, just like a dating profile, don’t be afraid to be interesting in your resume. The point isn’t to get you hired. It’s to give whoever reads it reason enough to interview you.
... when I open it up in Word, I don't want to see lots of red squiggles form misspelled words. If JavaScript is spelled three different ways, that's a problem.
The care and attention to the resume (which the candidate has time to prepare and consider) is used as a proxy for the care and attention that a potential employee will pay to the code base.
You could disable the squiggles in Word, you know.
> The care and attention to the resume (which the candidate has time to prepare and consider) is used as a proxy for the care and attention that a potential employee will pay to the code base.
It is very often used as a proxy. That doesn't mean it is an accurate proxy.
If I've got more resumes than time slots to call back on, its necessary to filter them somehow.
When the word processor that the person used is flagging things as misspelled, or grammatically incorrect - the person didn't use the tooling available.
I've had resumes where one section was indented and bulleted, and the next section was numbered rather than bulleted... or indented without bullets or numbers (just a tab - that has a line wrap go to the left margin rather than the tab stop like the bullets and numbers in the other section).
Many of the things I've seen aren't an accidental oversight but a deliberate choice in the formatting of the resume that is wrong or inconsistent with a very short glance.
I mentioned in another comment that I've seen a resume where various keywords were bolded (annoying, but common). Among others, the word "Java" was bolded. "Worked on Java microservices using Spring Boot". Ok. However, Java was also bolded in "Used NodeJS to write JavaScript backends" - "Script" was left unbolded.
The accuracy of the proxy is less of an issue when you are able to find at least the number of acceptable resumes as there are time slots for interviews.
Are people submitting resumes in Word files? Looking back at my experience with Word and its "consistency" in formatting that seems like a suboptimal idea, misspelled words or not.
Yes... though if one uses tabs, bulleted lists and the standard formatting; then it all works out well.
When tabs and spaces are mixed to try to align a non-monospace font, or right justification is done without using the proper tabstop - then it gets ugly and the formatting becomes less consistent.
However, I'll give a pass to that unless it is really clear that they didn't put any care into the formatting.
And yet, its things like bolding every instance of the word "Java" (I had one where Java in JavaScript was bolded, but not the Script). Or having "JavaScript", "Java script", and "javascript" on three consecutive lines. Or having every single word that was a technology bolded, even if it was one that wasn't applicable to the job description. Or having those words instead of bolded... be blue.
I can forgive a lot in lack of familiarity with the tool - but its the deliberate choices of formatting and deliberately overlooking things that the word processor is trying to help you fix (and it is right about) that make a resume move from the "too look at" stack to the "probably don't call back" stack.
Yes, your advice is generally good for a software engineer with less than 10y experience.
For senior ML researcher, for example, you are expected to list the many things you did and know. You still are going to be filtered on arbitrary things, but HR is expecting a thicker doc.
I use a 1 page resume as an ML engineer. I have a section dedicated to keywords called "Skills". Seems to work quite well for me and I firmly believe that a longer resume would have hurt more than it would help.
I used the term "ML researcher". I'm also talking from experience and generally agree that less is better for engineering jobs.
For research jobs it is very very common to list tons of things (papers, committee positions, awards, etc.,) and when your first filter is an HR person you ARE often going to be screened by volume (stupid as that may sound).
Sure, there are exceptions, if your resume starts with "PhD from Standford, advised by Prof. Hinton" you are probably going to be OK. Otherwise, you just want to play the game that is being played in the field, which, unfortunately, does often include the volume of work a proxy for success.
How exactly can you attribute certain actions to broad results like boosting sales x% YoY? I feel like its rare for someone to be in the position to know that well enough to say that without stretching the truth.
Maybe the secret sauce is that it's impossible to verify?
Everyone owes it to themselves to understand directly how their contributions create value for their comapny. It will help you enormously in compensation negotiations.
If you aren't creating value for the business, you're on an eventual path to downsizing and should look for another job.
I am a developer. I mainly fix bugs reported by customers and I implement some features asked by PM. But I have no idea how to quantify this value. I'm paid X$, so I assume it is > X$.
Maybe PM knows, but they don't tell me the value of each features.
Am I on the path to downsizing? Or what should I put on my resume?
Late here as I was brought in through another HN thread so hopefully you have a chance to catch this.
If I was in your position I would be looking to understand from other business stakeholders how many customers my bug fixes have impacted, both from those that asked and those that would naturally benefit from them if they use the same product. If you know the total customer base, you now the % of the customer base that you have helped (1) improve the actual or perceived probability of retention, (2) directly influence the customer satisfaction of your product(s), (3) improved the chance that the customer continues to subscribes, buys other products / features that your company sells, or recommends your organization to their peers. This can be expressed as contributing to achieve retention goals, improving / meeting targets of NPS scores or other satisfaction measurements, and influencing quarterly or yearly upsell / expansion targets, which you might be able to get explicitly from those other business stakeholders.
Likewise I disagree with the sibling comment that you might be considered a cost to that organization (the organization might actually perceive you that way, but in reality that's actually not the case otherwise there would be no one fixing bugs and implementing features) as are a fundamental core to an organization's strategy of maintaining or achieving retention targets and influence its upsell potential.
Based on the description I would say that yeah, your business probably views you as a cost rather than a source of value. If financial circumstances for the company were to change, your position would be insecure. (aka, sales people get fired last). Your negotiating power for higher salaries is also probably limited.
There's plenty of jobs that are like this and if you're comfortable than I can't really tell you what to do, but I always position myself to be a source of value to my company rather than a cost. The salaries are much higher here.
I'm also a developer, but deep on the IC track (architect). I create platforms that give my company whole capabilities that it wouldn't have otherwise. I can directly measure the value in what I do.
Having been on both ends of the hiring process (in tech):
1. You don't have to be 100% qualified. Just show me that the skills you have are transferrable.
2. Tailor your CV & cover letter to the vacancy and company. List at least one work/life/volunteering experience (preferably a project with end results) that is linked to each of the requirements.
3. Keep it short and to the point. A quick glance and relevant keywords should jump out and pique my interest.
4. If you go "but..." to any of the 3 points above, you're probably wasting everyone's time.
I'm going to "but... " point 2, having been there last week.
There were 10 requirements. It was a niche job that I was skilled at. For 1 I had life experience with end results (do ppl have life/volunteering experience that applies to job requirements? I'm nearly 40 and don't). For the other 9 I could link them to exact work matches - except all are under NDAs with different clients, so had to be described vaguely.
The company I was interviewing with weren't impressed, which was ironic as I'd had to sign a NDA prior to the interview.
They also wanted to inspect code I'd written - can they see a project? Well no, because it's written for a commercial client. What can I show them on GitHub? Nothing helpful as I develop in private repositories and what is public is experimental code doodles.
How do you handle strict NDAs and private projects?
If it's under NDA then don't talk specifics, but during the interview you can talk about difficulties you overcame or lessons you learned during the process. The key is to show that you are equipped to solve their problems.
If they're pushing for you to break NDA, then you probably don't want to work there anyway.
I find statements like "boosted sales by x%" completely out of place on a resume. Imagine you are an account/sales manager at AWS - cloud sales will still go for a while, no matter what you do. So you are basically just riding the wave of booming cloud which is completely independent of your personal sales skills.
You're nitpicking the details of what the created value was. The absolute best candidates I talk to almost always detail the value that they created. These people also negotiate better salaries for themselves.
99% of everyone just lists their responsibilities on their resumes and it makes them almost useless.
The difference is that of that 1% of people, I will interview 100% of them. From the general pool of 99% I am looking for mistakes in your resume to not talk to you.
A resume is not just a piece of paper, it is a piece of paper with lies on it. And it can mean difference between not getting a job, and not even coming close.
Rule #2 - Once you get an interview, realize and lean in...you're interviewing them as much as they're interviewing you. It's a date. Be thorough. Your future, career, health and satisfaction might depend on it.
In a way. It's also pretty easy to send your manager an email saying "My last date at mega/micro-corp will be X." Or ghost them. Don't, because it's not professional, but ghosting is one way to quit.
The problem with resume guidelines is that there are too many factors that you cannot control. What makes a good resume is widely dependent on culture, and that includes the place you live, the company culture, and even the personal preferences of the HR folks.
Any tips, even along the lines of "you should not even need a resume" are just that: tips. They might be valuable tips in one situation and completely miss the mark in another.
It's probably easier to compile a list of things to avoid in a resume than with a positive list of things to do. But the first of the two would likely be so trivial as to be of little use. I'm thinking about "insights" such as "avoid typos". But the further you move away from such low hanging fruits, the more you enter the territory of "it depends".
The purpose of a resume is to introduce yourself to the hiring company as a contender. It's a sales pitch in a way, sent to people who are very experienced in receiving sales pitches. But you're not a snake oil salesman, the goal is not to get them to buy something they don't really need. The goal is to transmit the most complete picture of the relevant aspects of yourself.
My personal thinking has always been that HR folks have seen it all. There's no point trying to impress through style - referring to both your great visual layout as well as your choice of wording. Sure, you should not suck at both: if you cannot even align your indentation, perhaps I'm less inclined to buy the 20+ years of experience in the office. But other than that, all the bells and whistles will probably do little to impress.
I'm sure there are people who think it's the worst ever, but I'm pretty happy with it. It has served me well over the years, and (maybe) even helped some friends who adopted a similar format and style to get their jobs.
Some things I strive for:
* No redundant labeling like "Name: <your name>, Education: <your degree>" etc. It should be obvious what's what. (and it saves space)
* Summary at the top (most people won't even read the resume, a summary at the top enables them to shortlist after a quick glance)
* Examples of tech used (mostly to trigger keywords)
* Plain English. Can't stress this enough - I hate resumes full of vague business sounding fluff. Eg (I'm just making this up but) "streamlined collaborative efforts and alignment between multiple business critical priorities" <-- wtf does stuff like this even mean? Doesn't pass a bs smell test.
* No bullshit. Eg no "improved x by y %" - you can list duties and actual accomplishments without resorting to that style.
I wouldn't disambiguate AWS (should be pretty obvious what it is to people reading the resume), but if you feel it's needed, you can do it only once in the document.
Otherwise a very clean, short resume - I would say in the 80th percentile :-)
Hi all -- founder of RezScore, free automated scoring tool. Have spent about a decade studying the subject.
1. Brevity: Keep it concise, under 800 words. Every extra word is a bullet they can kill you with if they're on the fence.
2. Impact: Use a readability score (ie Fleisch-Kincaid, any built into Word) to keep the reading score equivalent of ~11th grade. They're smart but not geniuses.
3. Depth: Keep your sentences short, under 20 words per sentence is good rule of thumb. Reward their laziness.
Other useful tips...
* Use a large professional headline (ie LinkedIn), swap out just this part for each job you're applying
* Prune out responsibilities, only talk about achievements
* Lots of numbers
* Pay attention to aesthetics/formatting
Don't obsess about perfection -- devise a system to crank out 10 copies a day and you'll iterate it into a job in no time. At any rate, if you're applying resume first you're doing it wrong, everybody getting the plum jobs networks their way in, resume is a formality.
Always happy to hear about your job search and provide specific resume feedback, email us at hey AT rezscore.com
The difference between the preferences of posted job requirements and recruiters is stunning. From reading hundreds of job requirements you get the strongest indication it’s a keyword game and nothing else matters, but recruiters who are actively and manually sifting through resumes are clearly looking for something different.
Example: according to most job postings for web developer the new hot title is Fullstack Senior Engineer which consists primarily of React on the front end with a fallback to Angular and Java with a fallback to Python on the backend. Everything else reads as insignificant filler. I don’t want to blindly dick around with your framework insanity like a junior so I am sure to omit this from my resume and recruiters still contact me about TypeScript and Node.
After having to read through about 50 resumes today, so we could interview a max of 4 people for 1 position it's really hard to tell who's is good / bad.
I found the easiest thing to look for was some portfolio of work to try and differenciate the candidates
Employers are looking at your education, companies you worked at, years of experience, and maybe a vague idea of what your work area was before this. Just this info is enough to make a decision for whether to call you for an interview, and after that the resume is useless.