Your resume is too long. Try to fit it to a single page. When I worked at a FAANG I was once sent a list of 80 resumes to review. I didn't spend more than 30-60s per resume (recruiters often spend way less) and yours would take at least 5 minutes to read completely. This is what your resume could look like if shortened: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Lt9zJF119f2G-XDcyBKUOxj6o2X...

Also reach out to every single connection you ever made, previous work colleagues, alumni, even the person you briefly talked to in line at the cafeteria. Reaching out to anyone you ever shared a connection with will lead to better response rates than throwing your resume in the abyss that is called an online job posting.

I have about 12 years of exp too. I was given a lot of advice to just increase it to two pages, especially when most jobs lasted less than a year.

Agreed that they have to be read in about 30s. It's important to have the major points clear - a summary of the person in 3 words, best jobs, and so on. Someone who worked at Apple 6 years ago, sure, put it up there on the first page even though it's not chronological. The purpose is to get the interview or at least past the first round of resume skimming. The facts can come on a second page.

How exactly do you reach out to connections? Is a LinkedIn DM saying something like "hey, do you know of any job opportunities/got anything for me?" too blunt?

Wow, that might be a little too short. But as much as I critiqued his resume in another comment and said I would trash it just because I would be mad that he thought I should read a three page resume, I would definitely call him in for an interview based on your shortened version. I would do it out of curiosity to ask deeper questions.

Thanks for this!

- Your summary section should be 1-2 paragraphs that summarize your experience and skills in a narrative format. Not a list of specific things you accomplished. Something like, "Experienced developer with 10+ years of experience at a variety of startup companies writing Python..."

- Those specific accomplishments should be listed under each of your jobs, and there should be no more than 3-4 per job. Right now you have too many things listed under each job, and at least 50% of them are irrelevant

- Don't list all of your jobs in one place at the top of the Experience section.

- In general, the formatting feels very cramped and difficult to read. You need to give each section more white space. Write out the full month and year, not "Feb '19". And the spacing with commas and parentheses you have in these sections is not correct:

Funded Startup(100 people) - Noida, India/Vancouver,Canada

- Your independent projects section doesn't have much information. You need to explain what that site/project is, not just give its name.

I would put this PDF into ChatGPT and ask for basic suggestions. And ask a few friends to take a look. Because there are quite a few easily fixable problems with it.

I'm sorry to hear about your illness, I hope you're doing better now.

Personally I have found the market to be quite good recently, at least based on my LinkedIn inbound.

Something that might help is to condense your resume to 1-2 pages. There's a lot of detail in your resume and it's quite difficult to understand it at a glance.

Other than that it can help to reach out directly to people at a company your interested in working through LinkedIn rather than applying through forms. Having a coffee or online chat can open doors.

Based on your experience I'm also assuming that you've got a considerable network. Can you reach out to people you've enjoyed working with in the past?

Thank you! I am better now!

I do have quite a big network, but haven't really tapped into that at the moment!

Do you mind sharing whats your profile like(FAANG/Start-ups, Frontend/Backend etc) and the kind of inbounds you've been getting on linked-in. I just get recruiter spam that they almost never reply to!

> I do have quite a big network, but haven't really tapped into that at the moment!

Tap into this. Go for coffees. Ask people if they know people needing help.

There's so much spam in the job application process that having a warm intro will be extremely helpful.

There are also a lot of folks looking for work, which makes such an intro doubly helpful.

> I do have quite a big network, but haven't really tapped into that at the moment!

Your work network's primary purpose is to facilitate job placement. Use it! If you submit your resume to N companies every day, you should also send out a message to at least N people from your network, until you've exhausted your network.

It is a very tough job market. I have been looking for 11 months myself with zero interviews. And 500+ applications to jobs I am qualified for.

The summary of your resume is very dense. Opening it felt like a wall of text, I wanted to immediately close.

Have chatgpt rewrite it.

Because of ATS resume systems, your resume may be getting screened out. After chatgpt has rewritten it.

Throw it into an ATS resume checker like https://www.jobscan.co to see how it is performing for ATS filters.

I particularly like https://simplify.jobs that can tailor your resume and autofill for applications. Will save a lot of time if you do not have this already.

Best of luck. It is extremely tough and unusual. Apply for jobs in your immediate city or a place you could relocate to, as a priority... as the remote ones are extremely competitive.

FWIW: I just used Job scan and put the job description of the closest I could find to my current job at my current company - it’s actually a level below my current position - and my resume and it showed only a 63% match. I was just hired a year ago based on an internal recruiter reaching out to me.

I had a hard time making it through the Summary section of the resume. I assume the bold was there to help people skimming, but some of it seemed almost random. The first line has “roll out new features quickly” in bold, which is pretty generic and makes me question the value of the bold text. The “y” in “quickly” also missed getting the bold treatment. So from the first bullet I’m questioning judgement and attention to detail.

Should bullet 3 say, “based of chart museum” or “based off chart museum”? “Of” seems like the wrong word there.

Halfway through the summary I was ready to stop reading.

I would tighten that section up a lot, and distill it down more. Make it easier to read with less jargon. Make sure there are no typos. It should be easy to skim because it’s well-written, not because words are in bold.

Thank you for this!!

I will go through it very very carefully!

I think it’s mainly because of the year gap. Try lying about it. I had a 5 month gap in my resume (I quit my last job without having something new) and I got rejected a couple of times without having a single interview. As soon as I put that I’m still working, I got the interviews again on track. I don’t think it’s unethical to lie about that: if I pass their (shitty) interview, that means I “fit” their “culture”.

A lie is far worse than a gap. I'd much rather see someone simply be honest about the fact that they've taken a year off to focus on their personal health due to a serious medical condition. Further, if the lie is uncovered at any point, trust is likely broken forever. This is awful advice, in my opinion, and I certainly don't want to hire anyone who agrees with it ... ever.

> A lie is far worse than a gap

It's only a lie if it's found out.

Just say you were working on your own project or freelancing or something.

Think of all the lies you've been told in your life where you never found out the truth!

I think the only thing applicants should hide is whether they have a mental illness of some form. It's probably legally best to hide medical information anyway; it puts interviewers in a tough spot.

I've never had an issue with a gap. Sometimes relatives get sick. Sometimes they go on a 3 month road trip on a bike, or a pilgrimage. Sometimes they try to start a business. None of these are negative things. Sure, some guy might be in prison or rehab, but that might not really matter.

Whenever we see catch a lie on a resume, the interview is over.

Why would a company that is filtering resumes based on whether there’s a gap be worthy of trust?

One shouldn't lie on a resume, but omissions and partial truths are fair game. Consider listing years instead of month and year. That can make some gaps disappear. If they ask you clarifying questions about it later, that means you passed the resume screening. Consider leaving out dates and listing duration instead: ex: worked at X for 1 yr, 6 mo; worked at Y for 4 yr; etc. Gaps don't need to be reported in that format.

I've been told on this forum, when I was having a hard-time landing a job in 2022, that it's a tough hiring market. Since then, the sentiment is exactly the same, if not worse due to long-term economic uncertainty and LLM job/resume spam. In my experience, this is the worst it's been in 20+ years, and we haven't seen the bottom yet.

The only thing that saved me was asking everybody in my network until I got a job from a friend of a friend, which I'm holding on to for dear life. Do that and prepare a plan B (self-employment/career switch/move to a lower cost-of-living area)

I believe we are in a recession, and I received downvotes for mentioning it last time. But there aren't many opportunities out there. Most opportunities are in AI startups, and some people claim it's a bubble. If that's true, sooner or later, things will get much worse. Just imagine...

I've also noticed that people have been discriminating against Indians. It's almost like there's a green card to voice anger against. I don't hear about it in London/UK, but in places like Lisbon in Portugal and USA, people are just shameless. The H-1B news had some of the most hateful comments imaginable.

You seem to have a good skill set and experience, but the text is hard to read. You can improve it! Maybe design the CV a bit differently. Don't be shy about sharing who you really are. Nowadays, most job opportunities are shared on Twitter or X, where people showcase their capabilities and stories. I understand that sharing sensitive information is difficult, especially due to your illness, which I hope you recover from. But it's good to bring some projects to life and talk about them publicly.

Once you get interviews, you'll notice a pattern where HR, HM are cancelling last minute, stop hiring for the position suddenly, or simply ghost. Or, when rejecting, don't provide constructive feedback. So, be mindful of the time you invest in preparing for these interviews.

Good luck and hope you find a job soon!

Do you need visa sponsorship OP? That might be making things substantially tougher

It is an impossibly tough job market (which started in late 2022 and has had no recovery since).

Third-party AI interference has made everything worse through the imposition of cost on everyone. (Fraudulent Ghost jobs/Candidates tortuously interfering)

There are some things you can do with your CV but the major issue is in getting through the door and talking to someone. Most places have outsourced their HR departments to AI, and the problem with that is the black-box nature of weights may be (and probably is) discriminating against protected classes.

The CV to cold call ratio has gone from 1 in 100 to 1>1500. You may get lucky if you somehow manage to find a place that has a process that ignores this and goes physical. Some are going back to this now.

With that said, the gap in time isn't going to help. There aren't a lot of jobs.

If you continue to see poor callback ratios, first verify your phone is working properly. In many places too, calling service reliability has degraded without people realizing it.

You'll need to arrange to test your phone like any call center would.

One regular timed call, one regular text message, twice daily with a 5-10 minute delay threshold on the texts and voicemails. Also one randomized call from a random external number.

Test voicemail as well. Calling has been failing for some people in the part of the failure domain that is interrupt driven (the part where you never know you missed a call), and the voicemails may not show up for days to weeks.

I've heard from others and seen this myself on both AT&T, Verizon, and third-party VOIP-based networks. Its a real problem that is absolutely crazy-making. Tickets get opened, 30 days later closed without resolution or explanation. Its been an ongoing problem for at least a year and a half now and we regularly see calls dropping/being degraded on a non-insignificant count on weekly basis.

If you can't find work in your given profession, you may need to look at retraining to other work. Usually 2 years is more than sufficient time before making this choice. Its horrible to have to make a choice like that but that is what happens when you have coordinated layoffs in an oligopoly industrial environment.

Competent people naturally have options and go where their efforts are rewarded economically.

Your resume is way too long. I have 30 years of experience across ten jobs and my current resume - that I keep updated quarterly - is a page and half with decent spaces and margins and a 10 point font I believe.

Second, it just seems to be a hodgepodge of technologies and numbers. Despite the advice you see on the internet, no hiring manager for developers pays any credence to numbers as far as how much you made or save a company. It doesn’t really tell a story.

Why are responsibilities and achievements separate? Why would I care about your responsibilities? I care about your results?

Honestly, if I were looking at your resume, I would throw in the trash. It would make me mad just because you were wasting my time making me look through three pages of word salad instead of getting to the point.

Are you developer? Are you DevOps? Redo your entire resume. Make it shorter and briefly describe your major accomplishments - not responsibilities - in STAR format.

I usually have bullet points like “Did $x using $y technologies”. I don’t list technologies separately

I work in cloud consulting now specializing in app dev + cloud architecture. So if I squint I can see what type of positions you would be qualified for. But you would make me work way too hard to figure that out.

For context: From what it looks like, you have a similar combination of experience that I did in 2020 when I did interview for AWS ProServe. I just emphasized leadership and accomplishments more than technology. Now I’m a staff architect at a 3rd party company.

Also the job market is tough now. Even with my experience and credentials, when I was randomly submitting my resume to ATS’s as a Plan B while I was waiting to hear back from my Plan A - my network and targeted outreach where I had a specialized set of skills they were looking for, I heard crickets. I found a job quickly (within two weeks) based on my network - not my resume.

Your experience looks solid from what I can tell your resume is horrible though.

Edit; I take it back about the numbers. I saw the shorter version someone posted. It looks like you were a team lead and did some more strategic stuff? It’s hard to tell from your original resume.

When you were a “director” were you a real director - a manager of managers? Did you have a budget you controlled? Were you involved with strategy initiatives? How many people reported to you?

:-( Sorry bro. Your previous career is over. Go do something else. For example, I'm trying to become a teacher.

The faster you realize that, the faster you can move on and start your new career.

You spend decades refining your craft, then one fine day, its market value drops to zero. It is a damn shame, but the market is the market. Best of luck.

Its a tough market for sure and has been for sometime now!

I will probably want to put in all the effort I can to evolve before I give up on tech! But the though has crossed my mind!

That parent response smacks of ageism. Don't give up. Although depending where you are located that sort of ageism may be prevalent in the companies you are looking at. Have you considered government work? Doesn't pay as well but work is work and ageism is probably less of an issue

I agree but I can imagine the anxiety and the hopelessness people are going through right now!

I don't think ageism is a big concern for where I am right now. I am basically 34 and have about 12 years of experience so might have 2-3 years of good work left in the industry before ageism starts to kick in I suppose!

I am in India(had to move back from the west - Canada because of my health issues) so goverment work is non existent!

Ah ok, definitely not an ageism issue if you are only 34. Definitely don't give up. Tech skills don't go out of date that quickly. And with LLMs it's easy for a knowledgeable dev to pick up new languages and frameworks. Sorry I can't be much more help but disregard that other comment entirely. Your career isn't over you just need to find the right company. Perhaps loook for meetups and conferences in your preferred tech and build up a network. What languages are you proficient in?

>> Your career isn't over you just need to find the right company

This is so spot on!!

I can basically do Python, Java and Golang(and Haskell as well but no ones hiring for it)pretty well!!

I sincerely hope that the attempt to obscure your identity in the resume wan't intended to be serious, A.C. The fact that you left all your former employers' names other than the current one made you a trivial single-hit search on LinkedIn, for whatever it's worth. If you were serious with your attempt at operational privacy, tighten up your information hiding because you're an easy match right now. If you weren't serious, I'd suggest removing the obfuscation altogether. Best of luck.

Nope, not trying to be super private!!

Thanks for looking me up though!