Clearly, being (viewed by employers as) a jack of all trades is bad. You cannot present that on your resume. Sending out resumes to posted openings - a waste of valuable time. You find a position you're interested in, then you portray yourself as Mr. Whatever that is, because that's who they want to hire. Emailed resume doesn't cut it, you gotta get face to face w/a decision maker.
Different job requirements, different resume, tailored to those job requirements. Don't lie of course, but you can spin a long way without lying. Not qualified, it doesn't really matter. Someone like you, you're smart you'll figure it out. You need to make a good impression and that's it. Acting like you don't need their job can be helpful too, but there's a way to do it - without coming off the wrong way.
I wouldn't put too much stock in what a recruiter tells you (or most others for that matter). Free advice sucks almost all the time (except on HN :), and worse than not helpful it can be harmful. If I'd listened to recruiters about what jobs I could and couldn't get it would have cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years.
Best to keep your name off the Interwebs. You have to control the information flow to the world about yourself. There's services that will help scrub your name off sites, I don't know if they work or not, but I can say when you Google yourself, you want the first couple pages to show up exactly what you want to show (or put there yourself).
Now view this as a good thing.. Most hiring is mostly completely subjective and based off whether someone likes you or not. That's really what's going on. Eventually someone is going to like you, so you will find a job eventually if that's what you're after.
> Clearly, being (viewed by employers as) a jack of all trades is bad.
My problem is that I can't dumb-down my resume. One Google search and most of what I've done, going back thirty years, is all there. I can't get it all deleted. At some level, why would you want to? For example, there's a 1985 paper on robotics I presented at an ACM conference (while still an engineering student) that still shows-up on a search.
Have you actually tried tailoring your resume to a specific job role? Or are you just speculating that people will find you on Google and not consider you?
Different job requirements, different resume, tailored to those job requirements. Don't lie of course, but you can spin a long way without lying. Not qualified, it doesn't really matter. Someone like you, you're smart you'll figure it out. You need to make a good impression and that's it. Acting like you don't need their job can be helpful too, but there's a way to do it - without coming off the wrong way.
I wouldn't put too much stock in what a recruiter tells you (or most others for that matter). Free advice sucks almost all the time (except on HN :), and worse than not helpful it can be harmful. If I'd listened to recruiters about what jobs I could and couldn't get it would have cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years.
Best to keep your name off the Interwebs. You have to control the information flow to the world about yourself. There's services that will help scrub your name off sites, I don't know if they work or not, but I can say when you Google yourself, you want the first couple pages to show up exactly what you want to show (or put there yourself).
Now view this as a good thing.. Most hiring is mostly completely subjective and based off whether someone likes you or not. That's really what's going on. Eventually someone is going to like you, so you will find a job eventually if that's what you're after.