Ask HN: Are new grads expected to exaggerate their skills on resume?

So, I graduated last December (2014) from a small accredited University in Texas with a BS in CS. I applied to 137 companies before I accepted at Capital One. I had many friends of friends who were HR and recruiting at other companies and during my arduous process I picked up many things that I felt helped me (and hopefully they'll help you). I ended up getting 43 offers, and at least a ~80% return on contact back (I forgot the actual statistic).

If you choose the shotgun approach, as I did, Keep a spreadsheet, or something, to help organize all the information.

Always Customize your resume by using the words that they put on their job hire post. (This will get you past electronic screenings and non-technical HR people who just look for keywords). This is really annoying (writing your resume each time) but I felt it helped me.

I always researched the company the night before resumes and try to find a technical blog that a company may produce, or some niche thing that the company does. (Capital One and it's AutoNavigator is what I focused on when I was interviewing).

Lastly, I did embellish the truth a little in any of my stories. Not to the point of a lie (... sort of ...) but I made my past technical experience an enjoyable story to listen to. There was a quote I read in 'Iterating Grace', paraphrasing it: Great Stories are better than Great Facts. Don't lie in the facts, but like statistics, you can bend the truth and still let it be truth.

Another piece of advice is make sure you are confident when you walk in. Even for technical roles, confidence is key. Being able to talk and have the interviewer like the interviewee is one of the many keys I found to being successful.

If you don't mind lying, most companies will never check your GPA past the transcript you hand over (if you do that at all). So you want to embellish that 3.2 GPA to be a 3.5+ go ahead. Most companies never check. (Come to find out I didn't have the correct GPA on my resume when I changed semesters even though I had an updated Transcript I was sending out. No one ever bothered me about it). I did not ask the HR at my company this question as well and they did not confirm this fact.

I hope that helps you some :D

Wow, this is really interesting. I have never considered a shotgun approach before when looking for a job. Can I ask you how you chose the 137 companies?

1) Does the company work in the Tech that I know (at the time I was Java, C, SQL, JS, and R mainly)

2a) Did the company recently have any bad press? (Smaller companies were harder to judge on this, but larger ones are easy. i.e. JP Morgan Chase was not on my list, However Capital One was.)

2b) (This was only used if I was unsure after 2a) If I knew someone in the company over my professional network, or a frined of a friend, etc. I would reach out and ask them about the company. Most people responded to me which was nice. Come to find out we would talk about our mutual relation and then I could ask them about what they do. I also got some good general advice as well.

3) Does the company 'smell bad'. This was something I didn't really use until I was applying/in the process of getting hired. I would keep my nose out for bad signs. (looking at you Cerner (Great Engineers I chatted with, but their recruiting was a nightmare to deal with, but that may of just been me)).

If you can't tell, I did my best to logically choose and look at data in a very organized fashion. This was due to the amount of data that I knew I was going to manually be mulling over. I needed a way to figure out to to translate my research/feelings of one company to the research/feelings of another.

(Also, you have no reason to believe me, but I did get to last round interviews with Google. I never even applied with them. They reached out to me via LinkedIn. At first I was like 'This must be spam trying to phish me or something', nope real deal. I was keeping a Blog on Blogger about Software Engineering, School, and other semi-professional things. I blame that for them reaching out to me.)

Please don't lie about your GPA. Having read hundreds of resumes, I won't freak out when I see 3.2, as long as you have interesting projects. Anything that shows initiative beyond class work. If you didn't do any internship, didn't write any open source code (even the tiniest of code), I'm more likely to pass on your resume.

> If you don't mind lying, most companies will never check your GPA past the transcript you hand over (if you do that at all). So you want to embellish that 3.2 GPA to be a 3.5+ go ahead.

That's potentially a criminal offence in the UK, and probably the US.

(Fraud act 2006 in UK)

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3bbd58ec-6df3-11e1-b98d-00144feab4...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10941476/...

From the US, and am a hiring manager, can confirm. I'd suggest people just leave their GPA off their resume/CV. It won't hurt you to do so, and if the company wants it you can give it later (or not and run away from that company).

Such outsized importance is placed on projects these days, and the state of most CS programs is so bad, that I would only care about GPA if you graduated from a very good school or I was an academic admissions person.

As someone who sits in or runs technical interviews fairly often, we will try to determine if someone is lying on their resume. If a skill is on your resume, you are expected to be able to utilize it in a professional context. For entry level folks that bar is pretty much "did you touch the language in a class" or "have you committed code to a FOSS library" (to use two example).

That being said, if the extent of the lie is that a group project is sold as an individual project, as long as the person can talk intelligently about all aspects of the project it's nearly impossible to find something like that out. New graduates are expected to have few skills and produce largely academic (read: bad) code.

But you are correct that technical aptitude by itself has very little to do with getting an interview. You said you are getting your Master's, have you had a programming job in the past? What is your field? We take a pretty skeptical stance with candidates who have advanced degrees and no experience, because nothing we work with requires that sort of knowledge. That may be part of your problem.

When I was reviewing CV's recently (not specifically for new grads) I notice that some people list about more than ten languages and frameworks. For me that was slightly offputting as it shows shallow knowledge on lots of them, rtaher than deep knowledge in any of them.

That's why when I list languages I have experience with, i try to put a self assessment in proficiency as well. so instead of just saying "C#, C++, Ruby, PHP" i'll put "Expert proficiency of C#, advanced proficiency of Ruby, and PHP, and working knowledge of python, and TCL"

so if someone is doing a keyword search, i'll still show up, but when someone is actually reading the resume they can say "oh he's a C# and Ruby guy" I'll also mention the language once in the experience section to demonstrate how i used it.

Generally speaking though, as i've searched for more senior positions I've toned down the specifics of the technology, and concentrated more on the results I've achieved.

You probably just have a weak resume / cover letter. Post a link to your LinkedIn, I'd be happy to give some constructive criticism. I'm sure your school also has a career center which can help you polish them up.

What are the actual numbers? Like, how many resumes have you sent out, and how many return calls have you gotten? And that of your friends?

A big fact about the field is that a large number of companies aren't in a place where they can hire new graduates or junior programmers. I have a suspicion that most of the difference in number of responses is that your friends are simply hustling harder and sending out more applications than you are.

Don't hide that a project was a group project - that's a good thing. Use it to your advantage. You worked well with people, you took ownership, you distributed tasks and managed the workflow.

Don't put down technologies you don't know but lets say you can write something in javascript.. like an anagram generator. In that case you can put javascript even if you don't know node, angular, react, etc.

If you're a new grad, getting a callback is probably more defined by where you're going to school and whether you have internships in the past than any of the fuzzy stuff like "skills list" on the resume. Where did you go to school, and do you have any internships?

I wouldn't lie, but I would exaggerate my skills. I know plenty of very talented people who don't know how to sell themselves. The quicker you learn how to balance selling yourself without being unethical, the better your career will be.

Selling yourself <> exaggerating your skills (AKA lying).

I wouldn't lie, but I would exaggerate my skills. I know plenty of very talented people who don't know how to sell themselves. The quicker you learn how to balance selling yourself without being unethical, the better your career will me.

No, I think it's dishonest. However it is an honest mistake to underestimate the skill of people with a decade or more of experience and oversell yourself simply because you don't know how good good can be.

Yes. You know the game whether or not you play our cards that's up to you.