Ask HN: Describing skills and competencies in a resume? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Describing skills and competencies in a resume?

222 pointsmelle104 comments

Dear HN,

I'm starting to look around for a new job, and need to update my resume. In my current resume I have a section called "Skills & Competencies" which includes a mixture of languages (C#, python, Go, JS etc.), products (various DB systems, BPM suites, etc.), areas (front-end, back-end, "cloud"/aws, db) but also practices/skills (project mgmt, TDD, agile development methods, CI, etc)

To me this feels like a mishmash of things and it does not give a clear picture. I'm not sure how to "design" this piece of my resume.

I guess the main point I want to bring across is that I'm an all-round developer who cares about getting things done and uses whatever means are best for the job. I'm able to learn/understand tech quickly but this is just a means to an end. I like to focus on the team and there interaction / openness.

How would you solve this? As interviewers, what would be helpful to bring this point across? What would trigger you to invite me for either a cup of coffee or a job interview?

Thanks a lot!

View on HN

As somebody that has hired a few IT people, it's frustrating when you receive a CV where the main focus is a list of skills. For example, I can receive 100 CVs that all say "I can do JavaScript", but skill level ranges from those who can just about activate a jQuery plugin through to people that could probably build jQuery from scratch. I want to see examples of how you've used those skills, because then I can form my own opinion of your capabilities.

So talk about your achievements, and mention the skills you used as part of that. Be specific, and focus on the most important bits instead of listing every single item. Remember to include human skills like planning and leading.

While your suggestion appears meaningful, I argue it is not; it's just hindsight. Very often a seasoned developer has a multitude of skills; if I need to be specific, I cannot list them all. Unless I use tens of pages - then the CV is too long. The most important bits may be very different for different companies and positions - but it's not easy to tell from the outside, especially from a job application form which may be very vague and indeed just list a number of technologies.

Also: it's very hard for people to compress their lives in a CV.

Recently, when writing a job ad, I usually ask something like:

"send us your CV, or a link to your blog, or write something about you, what you like to do and what you do well, tell us something great you did in your career, or just send us anything you think it's relevant for us to understand your value".

If you just ask a CV, you just get a CV.

> Also: it's very hard for people to compress their lives in a CV.

It's very hard, which is why those that do it well stand a better chance of getting the job.

FWIW, I have compressed my CV to the back of a business card. Sure it misses out an awful lot of detail, but it leads to someone looking at my full CV, which leads to a full interview, which hopefully leads to a job.

"those that do it well" is subjective. It's hindsight. Very often, "well" will mean "what I wanted to hear".

Maybe somebody didn't compress their live "properly" for your target, and they passed under your radar. But you don't know.

Just an example: you. I just took a look at your homepage and the "About Me" box. Great summary, beyond the "Caprhone" typo: but I'd say that your description is not at all deep. You're a developer, sysadmin, copywriter: do you really do ALL (or any) of those things really well, or you're a bit of a generalist that produces a so-so result in everything?

I took a look at your CV: If I need somebody who's a great, pixel perfect, web designer, is that you? I know what you've done, but I don't know what you excel at.

It's not easy!

Thanks for pointing out the typo, I'll fix it ASAP.

I will agree that I have probably turned down some excellent candidates because their CV wasn't written clearly enough. That's kind of my point.

My CV is not designed to be a 100% complete and accurate representation of my life. It's enough detail to initiate a phone interview.

I've also taken on board what you said about making it clearer what I do best. I'll try rewording the intro a bit.

My father used to re-write his resume for every single job he applied for, tailoring it to the exact job. And then had my mother write it up on the typewriter. He was very good at doing it, probably at least partially from so much practice, and never had a problem finding a new job.

My point is that he always made sure his resume said what people wanted to read in it. He never tried to make a generic one that fit every job he might apply for, and that tactic was very effective.

I don't do the same thing, but I think if I found a job I really wanted, I would do it.

Exactly. Times have changed, but wise people used to say, the resume -- always accompanied and focused with a concise cover letter -- gets you the interview.

It gets you to the next step. (And maybe serves as a basis or starting point for some of the questions and conversation, then. Depending on the interviewer.) That's all it does.

Tailor accordingly.

Sometimes you get a job ad, and you submit your CV. There, if the ad is good, you can tailor.

Sometimes a recruiter asks for your CV, without a specific position in mind. Sometimes you just publish your CV somewhere. What should you tailor, and how?

If you want/need a new job I'd tailor it for whatever I felt would be easiest to land while still being interesting enough to consider.

If you're not really looking I'd tailor it for whatever job I'd really really want. You never know, but even if that dream job isn't available a CV like that will emphazise what you're truly passionate about. It might lead to something great

Read this for an insight on what counts:

https://steveblank.com/2011/08/05/bonfire-of-the-vanities/

Point is, the purpose of a CVis to get yourself an interview. Nothing wlse counts. Optimize it accordingly. Keywords (for computerized pre-screens and HR). Short (for all). Results (for the hiring manager).

Unless you want to be a permanent part of the faceless bigcorp IT job shopping underclass. For those jobs, you need to take exactly the opposite advice.

This is why I structure the main meat of my CV by projects relevant to the position.

Sure, I have a list of all dunno-how-many programming languages I kinda used, and DB-engines and other crap so techies can satisfy their curiosity about the strange tech they might look for.

But I consider it much more useful to have a bunch of projects I did that are relevant to the position, what tech was involved, and how the tech was involved. I consider that a lot more valuable than a dumb list of stuff I might or might not have used less or not more or whatever. Especially if that list already display a level of self-reflection.

In the experience part of my resume I provide a reverse chronological list of jobs, with bullets that explain my responsibilities and achievements.

Thanks for your suggestion on planning and leading, those are easy to forget (as is elicitation of requirements I guess)

Wouldn't mixing tech/skills with job positions make it more confusing?

Remember that you're writing a sales brochure about yourself, not a biography or index card. Nearly every CV that comes in will look identical. You stand out by making your selling points easy to find, instead of forcing me to look for them.

Examples:

* Used Angular and Rails to build an intranet application used every day at Acme Inc by over 200 people, increasing efficiency at the company by 150%. Features included uploading and sharing documents, with commenting system and email notifications.

* Optimised a Java algorithm in the backend of Foobar Corp's service to increase response time by 200%, delivering business value of $60,000 per year.

Here's my fairly up-to-date CV if you want a complete example: http://dblo.ws/cv You sound like you're a better programmer than me, so you should have plenty of good achievements.

> increase response time by 200%

"Increase"? So now getting the response takes 2x as much time as before? Hardly an achievement... ;-)

EDIT: Also, things like these are hard to quantify (and verify) and even harder to come by - you can work for years without ever being in a situation where your work "increased something by 200%". I have a feeling that many people will read your advice as bullshitting your way through the CV-based selection, to maximize the chance of getting an interview, where you can explain all the details. Which, unfortunately, is not that bad a tactic - but I don't think it's what you had in mind.

You're absolutely right! That's another thing - always get someone to proofread for you.

> bullshitting your way through the CV-based selection ... I don't think it's what you had in mind.

That's _exactly_ what I had in mind, though I might phrase it as "honing your sales pitch". On something like a CV, you should always be happy to lose a little accuracy and completeness to gain some clarity. That doesn't mean you can make stuff up, but you do need to phrase yourself carefully to highlight your strong points.

You'd be surprised at what you can quantify. See "How to Measure Anything (https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Measure-Anything-Intangibles-Bu... for some ideas. Measurables are the language of those who hire you (and decide your salary) so learning how to show this kind of stuff is essential.

* What was the conversion rate on that page you made before and after?

* How long did it take staff in your company to complete that process before and after you rebuilt it? How many hours have you saved the company?

* How many bugs were reported per day for that module before you fixed it, and how much did it cost the business to process them?

I agree about making selling points, however, the examples you provided there with metrics can't be easily derived and I see them often as being emphasized. One could work in a multidisciplinary large team, or help implement a test automation framework whose value cannot be expressed in dollars, however, for the team and the product owner it's of the tremendous importance and value. This is especially valid for any large, long term project that's starting from scratch.

edit: extra word

If they could be easily derived, we'd all be doing it all the time. Spend some time doing it before you apply for your next job (or salary review) and you might be pleasantly surprised at how well the conversation goes. I linked to "How to Measure Anything" in another comment, and that's a good read - https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Measure-Anything-Intangibles-Bu....

If you really can't find a way for your current job, then say how many downloads your open source project has got. Or how many comments or page views your blog gets. For some reason, employers get excited when I tell them "I'm in the top 3% on StackOverflow". (Yes, I know how ridiculous that sounds.)

But that guy who earns twice as much you and does half the work? This is what he does. He talks in the language of the people who decide his salary, and that language involves specific numbers that matter to the business.

Thanks for sharing!

But a question: Is your CV battle tested? What I mean is, having significant experience already and I assume industry connections, do you find that your CV is what gets your foot in the door for an interview?

To put it another way, do you find that after a certain point, CVs simply don't matter?

I can't say definitively as I haven't done any kind of "split-test analysis", and clearly there's a lot of selection bias in that I tend to speak only with recruiters who like my CV. Also, when going for a specific job, I edit it to prioritise the relevant bits.

For the type of jobs I want, in London, I do need a good CV. I also need a StackOverflow profile, industry connections (which I tend to make through meetups and conferences) and a portfolio. I should really have a blog as well. But I'm simply too small a fish in too big a pool to get by without a good CV.

Bullet unique achievements. Responsibilities will be better in a few sentences in paragraph form before the bullets.

The again, some great VCs I've seen included a section that was explicitly called "Keyword Stuffing". Sign of the times... If CVs weren't scanned using keyword search things might be different, but it's unfortunatly only going to get worse in the short term.

I've started writing my resume in a more prosaic form, and dropping the stilted language of resumes past. I talk about not just what I bring to the table, but also what I'm not looking for in an employer. Check it out if you'd like to get a better sense of what I mean.

(It's also worth noting that I have ~12.5 years of experience in the software industry, Seattle—the city where I live—has a hot tech market, and I have focused mainly on iOS software development for the past six years. Relatedly, I never apply for jobs through websites, only through people, meaning that I manage to skip buzzword-skimming front-line recruiters. So YMMV.)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0tntyr8isf2l47k/Aaron%20Brethorst%...

Coming at this from the other side of the table, my first reaction to reading most resumes is "so what?" Tell me why I should care that you increased Flibbet production by 22%, or that you decreased bug volume by 19%. What does that translate into in terms that someone who doesn't work at that company would care about?

Some initial criticisms:

1. Avoid saying things that apply to everyone. Example, "I love building products that delight my users." Who wouldn't say that when applying for a job? This, "help create positive social change" is more interesting and should be the focus of your intro.

2. Avoid useless phrases. Example, "This has manifested itself in many ways during my career." Boring filler.

Overall, you could cut the length of this by 30-50% just by removing cliches and filler phrases. It would immediately become much more readable and emphasize your technical skills.

Thanks for the feedback. I do disagree on the 'delighting users' thing though. This is not something that occurs to many engineers.

I think you might want to consider how it reads to your audience. I think it's one of those phrases that triggers a "well duh" reaction-- especially since it stands alone without anything that supports it actually being true or unique.

You make a good point. Thanks again for the feedback. I'll take another look at it.

Have you gotten any feedback on the length of your resume? Four pages is considerably longer than the often recommended single page.

Four pages is tl;dr length for recruiters and most hiring managers.

Fine by me. Those are the ones I don't want to speak with. Like I said, I don't go through the front door when I'm looking for a job.

Nah, four pages is really too long. As much as I agree with the notion that being prosaic has some punch, and that your CV is the only piece of marketing you'll ever be writing about yourself, the fact is that recruiters won't endure much more than a page per decade of experience. Plus one maybe. But not two or three, so methinks get to the point faster.

You're the founder of Cocoa Controls?? Thank you for creating an incredibly valuable resource that I've used frequently for many years, and do get in touch if you ever find yourself in LA and would like a free beverage on me!

Thanks, josh :)

Thanks for sharing your insights and resume. It's really refreshing to see you describe your work in previous positions in such a clear and meaningful way.

I guess the next step is to write a blog post to assimilate everything I learned today about setting up a 'dev' resume.

That is a really great format. I'm going to model mine after that. Great work.

thanks, and happy to help! :)

Nice format! Small typo:

"Most recently, I been the de facto architect of NBC News’s four iOS and tvOS applications."

I think your cv is great example how to sell benefits instead of features.

Hey, you live across the street!

I've been recruiting software engineers for nearly 20 years and started a side resume business (resumeraiders.com) a couple years ago when seeing how much people were being charged for sub-par resumes. Your question is somewhat common.

A Skills section is usually for the purposes of an ATS (automated resume scanner) or a human that will be looking for certain buzzwords, like a language or a framework that is most important to the job requirement. Recruiters know they can go to a skill section and find those things quickly.

I think in your situation, listing specific examples of your accomplishments is going to be even more important. You can tell me "I'm an all-around developer who cares about getting things done..." all day long, but listing specific things you've developed to illustrate that point is much more effective. It's not unlike people who say they have excellent communication skills - don't tell us, show us by writing something or demonstrate it in conversation.

Recruiters and HR are looking for those buzzwords, but engineers reviewing the resumes are looking for an interesting project that they can ask you about. Ideally it will involve a problem the company is trying to solve.

Start with a summary to quantify your experience - this starts the reader off with a big picture of who you are. Don't trust the reader to figure out you're a full stack dev, because the person first reviewing your resume might not be technical at all. They need to be told specifically what you do, and it's your job to do that. Your summary might start "Full stack developer with n years of experience across a mix of languages and platforms in Agile/TDD development environments. Additional skills in Project Management..." or similar.

Next, experience section with responsibilities (the day to day) in a couple sentences in paragraph form, then bullets for your novel accomplishments.

Skills, Education, other projects, community involvement, etc. to follow.

Thanks for sharing. My current take on setting up my skills and experiences is to put them in context of my previous positions. Would that work for an ATS? (For a human, I'll probably highlight the words somehow)

The ATS doesn't care where the words are usually, it's just trying to find certain words. If you're applying to smaller firms it's less likely to be an issue. As long as you incorporate any buzzwords (usually languages, tools, frameworks) that are likely to be listed as firm requirements by the company, where they are included on the resume shouldn't matter much.

It's helpful to list skills at the bottom of your resume for HR departments doing basic pattern matching. However to paint a clearer picture I would:

1. Write relevant bullet points that show what value you provided for your previous company and BOLD languages along the way.

E.g.

- Architected a product that does $X revenue with Y languages

- Stabilized systems of X which allowed throughput of Y% more connections with Z language/framework

2. Include a summary/objective in your LinkedIn/Resume. E.g. I'm an all-around developer that isn't afraid of X, Y, Z

Focusing on the business value is great advice!

I do think that this would be especially beneficial once you've passed the first screening. I might be wrong here, but I don't think most HR people take business value into account as it is not in the 'official' job description.

Depends on the company.

At smaller companies they might not have dedicated HR gate keepers or the person reading resumes might have a combined business/HR role. And at all companies being able to state your accomplishments in terms of business value helps a gate keeper understand your resume better and shows your ability to communicate effectively.

http://www.slideshare.net/perlcareers/how-to-write-a-develop...

Goes in to great detail about exactly what to put in there and why, including a template that will appeal to the recruiter, to the hiring manager, and then to the interviewing developers.

Excellent advice. A bit tough to keep everything in one page with this format though.

As an aside, I wish there was a recruiter like Pete, but for Python developers (he focuses on Perl). You should check out his site: https://opensource.careers/

This is a great resource for getting to know the different types of people that look at your resume and their perspectives. Thanks!

My 2 cents as someone who has interviewed a fair number of people,

State your accomplishments. Technical skills can be learned. I feel that learning technology is part of the job, not a prerequisite for the job. on your linked-in, okay list every little thing if you want non-technical recruiters to find you w/ keywords... But as a hiring manager, I want to see someone who can learn and grow into the role. Having technology experience relevant for the role is worth highlighting but not every bit of technical experience. Otherwise highlight technologies you've used in your accomplishments only but focus on the accomplishment itself. Focus more on the activities - what big important features did you implement, not what technology you used to implement the features. The positive outcome of the work is more important than how you got there.

Eg having worked on an open source project, managing contributions from other developers, releasing etc is more important than the project itself.

That sounds like good advice. It's also how I feel about software development in general. The tools are a means to an end. Control of the process/project is often much more of a challenge. Thanks!

The list of skills is there to catch automated keyword searches. A simple bullet list is fine.

Right above the list of skills I have a 'Summary of Qualifications' which explains my overall caliber.

> I guess the main point I want to bring across is that I'm an all-round developer who cares about getting things done and uses whatever means are best for the job.

This is what you put in the summary, written for a resume of course, e.g. "Veteran developer with X years of experience using a pragmatic and goal oriented approach to development. Focused on solving problems and shipping software" etc.

The summary of qualifications approach sounds really nice. I guess this could also be 'tailored' to fit the job your applying for. Thanks!

I recommend a Summary of Qualifications that talks about what you are able to do. It's the "executive summary" that makes the HR screener want to read more. I can tailor this to the job if I need to do so.

Then I recommend listing work experience focused on acheivements. Recruiters want to see how your past experience will translate to future success so don't list job duties. List accomplishments at the job. How much revenue did the apps you wrote bring in? How many active users did the app you built support? Did you mentor other people and were they successful? Did you contribute to an open-source initiative?

"Built and maintained web applications using Ruby on Rails and React with over 200,000 active users per month."

I do list skills both in context and in a skills section.

My résumé has gotten me an interview every place I've sent it for the last 15 years. These things will never hurt you to do on yours. They will only help you.

I've heard that objectives hurt, and I know that work experience that reads like a job description hurts too. My wife is in HR and I've asked these questions of her network of people and that's the general consensus. So I hope that helps.

Thanks for sharing your insights. Tailoring the executive summary for the job opening seems like a good idea. I guess I could treat movement from cover letter to summary to the rest of the resume as a conversion process, convincing the reader to invite me for an interview :)

I like to have a clear title and opening purpose statement at the top, to set the direction for the rest of the resume.

In fact you already have something to work with in this quote: "I'm an all-round developer who cares about getting things done and uses whatever means are best for the job. I'm able to learn/understand tech quickly but this is just a means to an end. I like to focus on the team and there interaction / openness." (but fix the sp of "there interaction")

If the audience sees something like "Senior Software Engineer" followed by the above paragraph it helps them understand how you see yourself fitting into the organization.

Next I would follow with a simple tabular format of skills (languages/frameworks/platforms for example) that is quickly scannable and has been pruned to remove outdated or out of favor technologies.

Recently I've tried an approach where I send two documents when asked for a CV:

- a "classic" CV which describes education, skills, work experience, and "miscellaneous" projects (late night hacks mostly);

- a second document entitled "friendly CV" but which is actually a short pdf with slides. It is super casual and I explain my previous work with pictures of algorithms and technical stuff. I cut down all the noise and try to speak directly to the inner geek of my potential reader.

From my perspective, I'd say I had quite some success with it.

I think it doesn't matter if you do exactly that. The point is to wake up your reader if you're the 50th CV they're reading this afternoon.

Consider that your resume is a landing page for you, the product. A list of "Skills" is, essentially, early aughts SEO... though I suppose it can also double as a feature list.

How are you going to use this resume? Sending in applications, posted online? Would affect my advice.

In general, two types of people will read your resume: hiring decision makers, and their agents/gatekeepers. Ideally the resume speaks to both groups. Gatekeepers use pretty simple filtering, though it won't all be disclosed. For example, if you've got 5 years of experience, and the rest of the applicant pool has 2, and they all went to Harvard and you went to University of Phoenix, you're getting filtered out unless there's something really amazing about you. The "top school" filter may not be disclosed in the job posting, or even known prior to seeing the applicant pool. In some cases these institutional biases are more or less public knowledge, in others not. Worry about passing the obvious, stated filters. It should be clear, in under 3 seconds, that you pass or exceed them. Don't be afraid to ELI5.

For the reviewers giving more than a passing glance, tell a short story. This is like pitching your startup idea, or selling anything, really. Quick, punchy, hook them and let them call you for more.

The resume gets you the call. The call gets you the meet. The meet gets you the job.

Thanks for this. My approach would be to phone the company directly, and have a chat with HR or the person responsible for the job opening. I believe that'll give me a first advantage over others and a bigger chance to get a foot in the door. After the phone call I'll send him/her an email which functions as my cover letter with resume in PDF attached.

Based on your and the other comments, I think a list of skills is 'required', but might be meaningless without context (as in, where did you apply this)

Like anything else, consider the audience. If you can engage directly with a decision maker, or even a gatekeeper, great. Not always possible, or helpful.

I would caution that, while generally a solid approach, this does not advantage you in the final hiring, only in the initial screening stage. Not a bad thing, but keep in mind there are multiple stages to getting hired, and avoiding the first filter pass shouldn't be where the majority of your efforts are focused.

Of course, if you're goal is to get into a specific company, vs "any company" or "any of these companies", your approach will be different.

This is a good approach, if the hoops needed to find that person can actually be jumped through. At a smaller company this might be easy. At even a modestly-sized company it's likely heaps more difficult.

I like to chime in here with my own observations since I run/own a recruiting software company (SnapHop). We make career portals that sit on top of legacy or existing candidate tracking software (aka ATS: applicant tracking software).

From an apply process a resume should contain keywords and should be easy to parse.

What I mean by parse is that we automatically extract details from the resume and if the resume is too hard to parse this may minimize your chance to be noticed (the ATS does this as well downstream).

So ideally you want your resume to be a small plain document. That is either MS Word, or plain text. You do need the keywords because there are some ranking algorithms that some ATS use and sadly it is based on simple keyword matching. I recommend putting this at the bottom of the resume to keep the parsing happy (ie list of technologies used). Or if your resume you think is large perhaps at the top but a short list in case it is is truncated.

I stress small because the bigger the document the more likely systems downstream can fail (our system can handle 100MB resumes no problem... and yes people will upload resumes that large but downstream systems cannot).

Finally I think including links in your resume of work you have done is also beneficial. I believe it is the future of resumes. We are seeing more folks doing this and we already to some extraction based on this (ie github profile, github projects, blogs, linkedin profiles, etc).

In large part the resume doesn't matter once you have made the initial HR/Recruiter pass. So make sure you get past that.

Could you elaborate on why you suggest an MS Word document? Every suggestion I've seen from recruiters and job placement officers (my experience is limited to applying to entry level and junior positions) is that it should always, absolutely be a PDF.

Is this because MS Word documents are easier to parse (by SnapHop, not humans)?

Actually we don't have issues parsing PDF but rather downstream some old ATS are not very good at parsing PDF (particularly MS technology based ones that we push to).

The other issue with PDF is that some cheap PDF conversion tools will just turn into an image and thus characters are lost.

Most apply processes allow you do paste your resume as text and attach. I recommend doing both.

Pretty much. Most applicant tracking systems will do a better job with processing an msword document.

Honestly it'll depend on the size of the company you're applying to. I manage the ats for a large NGO. We process 27k applicants a year. We live and breath by the fact the system can process those resumes. A boutique software shop probably doesn't care as much.

My first reaction would be: This looks like a SEO hack "back in the 'ol days", where you would include relevant keywords with the same background color in your webpage :)

As others have commented, I guess it's a good idea to provide context of skills and competencies by describing your previous positions. Maybe a separate list for "skills" would be an option as well.

I came across some sites that required MS Word, which I still find weird, as extracting text from a PDF shouldn't be too hard as well.

I just recently updated my resume and was facing the similar issue.

I did few groups of skills I have:

- Currently focusing on (skills I am interested in and best at)

- Relevant skills (git, agile development, tdd...)

- Also worked with (other tech I encountered during my career: DBs, languages, frameworks...)

Hope it helps.

ps. I would love to hear some thoughts on this problem from somebody that actually reads resumes

I pretty much follow a similar route and list my skills at the bottom of my resume, grouped into three categories of current experience, past experience and exposure to. In addition, I tend to add a final summary after each of my past jobs with a comma separated list of what I actually learned or utilized on the job during that time.

As a hiring manager, I see a lot of resumes, and I rarely see skills being cleanly defined; so most of the time I parse the descriptions of people's past jobs and determine what they were doing, and what questions I needed to focus on to get the information I needed to make a decision. Additionally, I will use key things in a resume as a reasoning to ask certain things. If someone mentions design patterns, then I will be asking them about design patterns. If someone said they worked on a project, I will ask them what their level of involvement was, and how they worked with others.

Personally I think it would be great to have a clearly delineated list of skills, grouped they way you do it. The reality is, when you look at a ton of resumes, you eventually follow your own 5-second rule. If a resume can't grab your attention within 5 seconds of skimming through it, then it's probably not worth your time (and it might seem harsh, but there's plenty you can pick-up on in that short amount of time).

Based on my own experience viewing CV's. 5 seconds is quite a lot. Any CV I've gotten gives a first impression based on formatting, and I tend to dismiss people applying for a developer position that don't realise that maybe 12 different styles and colours mixed together randomly is a bit much.

It made me realise why so many HR agencies request the person's CV only to take the information and reformat it into the agencies style (which is generally boring, but sensible).

Don't get me wrong. I love unique CV's, but given the choice between 'unique' and 'useful' there's only one possible answer.

That's a good idea; I list my current/previous skills/interests in order, but it's not necessarily clear that they're time-based.

That's actually a clear distinction. How did you separate the technology (programming languages, tooling) from the practices (TDD, agile)?

I didn't really do any distinction, why would I? Here is the screenshot of the part I am talking about.

http://i.imgur.com/JG1IZLi.png

I built my resume based on few assumptions:

- There are people that go through hundreds of CVs a day

- There are people that take a look at just couple of them but want more details

- People from the first bullet if interested usually want more details

This made me thinking that I should probably get all basic information across as soon as possible and if people are interested they can find more details. Copy/paste from top of my resume:

> On the 1st page, you will find general information about me and what I have been focusing on since I started professionally programming about 5 years ago. The rest of the pages will provide more details and recommendation letters.

The first page is designed to help filter my resume second to show actual competencies. My job descriptions on the second page provide information on how different skills were used.

That's a nice approach. Will copy :)

First, write your application for the job you're looking for, or at least interviewing for. Also write it for the culture of the team. The language of the job specification should have plenty of hints there, since a hiring manager (aka, whoever will be your manager) probably wrote it. Blog posts, too, if available. This doesn't mean parroting back their language, just try to figure out what makes them tick.

Apply selectively. Construct a narrative about your career that shows an inevitable trend towards the exact role you're looking to fill. Employers are generally looking for someone to shore up a skills gap, or augment an existing team. The job spec generally makes this an open book exam.

Really, the biggest thing is figuring out what sort of role you want, and trying to see your career through the lens of the person hiring for that role.

I'm currently recruiting for our startup in Berlin. We receive a pile of applications every day and the ones whose pop in are those who took some care to explain how they used skills on some real projects.

If you successfully can describe your current/last positions, point out how you had used technologies and competencies, you’ll highlight yourself.

I don't think there's a good reason to have only one resume. Tailor your resume/cv to the position (or type of position) you're applying for. For certain jobs (for your dream job, for example), it may be worth writing a special resume just for them.

Each hiring manager should be able to quickly scan through your CV and check the mental boxes in their head, so that they can move your candidacy on to the next phase. That's really all the resume needs to do. So streamline each resume you submit to make that process as quick and painless for the hiring manager as possible.

Later on, when you're getting to know the company (and they're getting to know you), that's when you can bring in your multitude of experiences that aren't directly related to the job. But there's no reason for that initial submission to be an exhaustive list of all your great qualities.

Unless you don't have any experience (fresh grad or something), I would minimize /eliminate the skills section, and focus more on the experience - that way, you are mentioning skills in the context of specific projects and organizations.

Skills on their own (9 out of 10 on JavaScript) don't mean much.

I'd actually disagree. While it's important to put skills in context, it's also pretty important to have an easily-scannable list of "stuff I know".

When I'm hiring it's what I look at first to see if there's any alignment on the tech stack at all. Then I check to see what has been used IRL lately, whether professionally ("day job") or not ("side projects").

It's a balancing act.

This seems to be a common theme across answers. I think I'll combine my previous positions with skills/tools/experience/responsibilities/etc. Thanks.

I had always assumed that it was buzzword soup to get past HR/Recruiting (it's sad to see recruiters basically admitting this on this thread). As someone who has hired people I care far more about your experience and what you did at your last job(s) than a list of enumerated skills.

I would say make the skill section brief. Don't list every flavor of SQL you've ever worked with, just put SQL, etc. Or go crazy, but put it at the end. Honestly, I never begrudged someone doing a word dump at the end of their resume, as long as the rest of the resume was good. We all know that recruiters have no clue and might scrap an application if a buzzword is missing.

Something I do on my CV. I have a prominent section talking about my "specialties". These are the core skills (not only tech ones) that I want to focus on, and the ones that I am interested in a new job.

It doesn't make sense to put in the same level "bash" and "JavaScript" if you really want to look for JavaScript jobs.

Then, in each of the previous jobs, I put the main tech that I have been exposed to. That gives an idea of the different skills and tools, but making a clear distinction in terms of which ones I am interested or consider that are my core skills.

Why not go with the direct method and say exactly what you mean e.g.

"I guess the main point I want to bring across is that I'm an all-round developer who cares about getting things done and uses whatever means are best for the job. I'm able to learn/understand tech quickly but this is just a means to an end. I like to focus on the team and there interaction / openness."

I usually just write working with Java stack / JVM technologies and a few sentences what I (not the team) accomplished in my previous jobs, because I don't think resumes all that important.

That might work if you got referred to the company, of if you talk directly to the person who you'll work for. My experience is that HR essentially treats your resume as a checklist, like a first filter.

They're important to get you in the door, though.

For better or worse, they're the first thing people see: it's important they describe your talents, interests, and passions.

I have a pretty non-standard resume, but I include standard parts like the ubiquitous bullet list of "things I know", but it's augmented with info that gives some insight into my personality, approaches, etc.

The people that don't like my resume are people I don't want to work for, so it's win all 'round.

For what it's worth, I recently applied for a few jobs, and did get an offer. On the other hand at least one of the places I applied replied with a "we're not hiring anyone this round" - so obviously I missed on that one. Probably due to them using a horrible Web based application system and that I forgot to upload attachments (grade transcript etc).

My view is that a CV/resume (non-academic) should list relevant work experience and education. Probably also certifications if relevant for the position.

Perhaps a section on other experience (leadership/management/responsibilities/achivements in volunteer/leisure activities - eg: successfully guided a hiking trip through a storm, etc).

Then the cover letter should put those experiences in context for the position you're applying for. And it probably should be no more than (half) a page for the letter and one to two for the CV.

Maybe I'm a bit extreme, but I strongly believe in not wasting the time of people doing the hiring (hopefully for an engineering position they're not full time HR and have other things they'd rather be doing).

I work in tech recruiting but I tell people to focus their resume on what they are most interested in doing and then list other skills/languages they work with. If you have been working as a .net developer that should be very clear from your resume but linking to the node and react project on your github is a great way to show you are flexible.

I did a big write-up for my students on the process of getting/doing technical interviews:

http://blog.robertelder.org/50-interviews-with-facebook-twit...

You may want to start at the section "How Do I Pitch Myself"

For some months, I have been thinking about the same problem as well. From an employer perspective, Hiring is tough. Very tough! People list down tons of skills and qualities they may or may not have on their resume and problem is you need to have good interviewing skills to evaluate them and spend countless hours to have the right candidate. To me, a good measure of someone's skills is their feedback from their current/previous coworkers (if it can be somehow achieved in a profile and which is not biased so it can be anonymous). This way you are able to screen the employees. Not trying to blow my own trumpet here, but I am trying to address this in my startup PleasantFish where you can get feedback from your coworkers and as a user improve your skills by getting latest content based on your skillset in your personalized skills based newsfeed

I would structure your resume to focus on your projects, giving them detailed descriptions, in which you can describe the languages, libraries, etc... that you used to implement them. That way, you put the technology in the context of the solutions you were delivering. For example (making this up...):

Selected Project Experience:

Consumer Finance Protection Reporting Database (2014) - Backend Developer. Developed the platform to support a consumer finance protection website that allows users to put a lock on their credit account without navigating customer service telephone lines. Built the backend with Django (Python) and Postgres and implemented a robust API with the Django REST Framework.

Etc...

I think the skills-list is not for actual employers. They are more for the first filter of HR people and recruiters who are reduced to checking off lists because they don't have software-specific knowledge.

So try to match the list as best you truthfully can to the one in the job description. If they put languages and skills in one big list, do the same. If they have some other format, use that. Just don't parrot their list so exactly that it looks like you are lying.

As for your main point: make it directly in a summary paragraph somewhere near the top of the resume.

There's a few levels to this. I'd say it's important even if you are personally handing the CV to the decision maker.

"Architected a solution and led a team of developers to implement a custom solution for a large merger & acquisition company" doesn't tell the HM whether you know her stack. Depending on other strengths or weaknesses of your application, this may cost you the call. Yes, a great engineer/dev can learn your stack, yadda yadda, but maybe you're hiring because you're the only one who knows it, you're already training the rest of the team, and need someone to hit the ground running, you know?

Good to have all the checkboxes from the job spec covered. Avoid uncertainty on their part.

You are right.

But that reinforces the practical part of my advice: don't worry if the skills list doesn't make sense to you, as long as it conforms to whatever the job decription is asking for.

Agreed, and I meant to include that in my comment. Your practical advice is absolutely fine.

Just wanted to clarify that it applies to all cases, not just passing recruiter/software review filters.

MY CV - FOR CONSIDERATION TO MR HIRE McHIRING

Name: Cody McCoder E-mail: cody@mccoder.any

Profile: "I'm an all-round developer who cares about getting things done and uses whatever means are best for the job. I'm able to learn/understand tech quickly but this is just a means to an end. I like to focus on the team and there interaction / openness."

Skills: "a mixture of languages, products, areas but also practices/skills"

Portfolio: ...links to your case studies with code, rationale, team contribution and comments...

DONE

You should not be creating a resume that you will then send to multiple jobs. You craft individual resumes for each job posting, using that posting's own keywords and required/recommended/nice-to-have skill set.

Resume screening is about cutting a stack of 100 down to 10, so it's all about finding a reason to say "No." If the job calls for C# WebApi and Angular experience and you start listing Python or Go projects, that's an easy no.

I thought the industry was desperate for talent. This doesn't sound like the kind of mechanism you would use in such a situation.

Do you really want to aim mostly for the organizations that are "desperate for talent", or would you like to be contacted by the employers you would really like to work for? (Not that the sets need have no intersections..)

I'm under the impression that everyone is desperate for talent. Even the top-tier companies, apparently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12059056. So, are all these people just blowing smoke up out collective asses? I see conflicting statements like the one I responded to here and the one I linked posted all the time.

Regardless of the current market for talent (which will change drastically based on the sector, the specific job, the company, the geographic region, etc), why would you not want to give yourself the best chance?

Generic resumes receive a fraction of the responses that resumes crafted for the position do. This has been well studied and cited. So why not take 20 minutes to customize a resume?

Don't overthink your resume.

This is great advice for me in general. I'd wish overthinking was limited to my resume :)

A format I use that I have received compliments on is just a 2-3 column table with headers like this:

New | Proficient | Expert

Or something along those lines. Then list your skills in there and it's super easy for people to very quickly see your skills and how you rate yourself. The New column is a great way to show that you are learning new things on your own. Most recruiters I've showed to it like it.

I have a section for skills (project management, leadership, etc...) and a section for Technical Proficiencies (Python, Ruby, PostgreSQL, etc...)

I pretty much keep my work experience the same but change around my Skills and Technical Proficiencies to match the job I'm applying for.

I lot of people have various opinions on what does and doesn't constitute a good resume. It'd be nice if some people would post theirs so we could get a nice visual representation of what it would/should look like

1. Relevant experience

2. Personal connection

Reply on news.ycombinator.com