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Comment by fecak | Hacker News Reader

>As I've gotten older my resumes have gotten shorter.

That's refreshing to hear. I hear too many people claiming "I have so much experience and accomplishments that I simply can't fit them all in under four pages". The problem there is just an inability to assess what is the most impressive or relevant experience.

Many people do get emotionally attached to the work they've done. I've worked with people transitioning into tech from other fields, and it is hard for them to swallow the thought of distilling their 10 years as a litigator and law school into maybe 2 lines on a resume. If you can detach yourself from the work, are efficient with words, and you know what employers are looking for, it's not difficult to create a one or two page resume even with lots of experience.

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> I hear too many people claiming "I have so much experience and accomplishments that I simply can't fit them all in under four pages". The problem there is just an inability to assess what is the most impressive or relevant experience.

As someone who recently did some job hunting I will tell you that while I agree on an idealism level with your comment it's just simply not true in practice.

I had many, many companies outright reject my truncated resume even though it provided an outline of years of experience and some top accomplishments simply because it didn't include enough of the buzzwords they were looking for. Resubmitting with my longer, 5 page resume (which I absolutely hate doing)? Accepted. Every time.

I will say, however, that if you can apply directly to a person via email (the "Who's Hiring" HN posts are perfect for this, typically) then the shorter resume will work just fine.

For CVs for monster/linked in I have a buzzword bullet list where not everything even gets it's own bullet so it doesn't take up much space.

So as a dev one ends up with bullets like (exaggerated here for effect):

* C# / .Net (ASP.Net webforms, MVC, WCF, Entity framework)

* SQL ( T-SQL, stored procedures, sql-server management)

* Python (Django, Flask, south, numpy, scipy)

* Javascript (jQuery, ES5, ES2016, webpack, bower, npm)

* Front-end frameworks (angular, react, knockout)

* Unit testing (mocha, jasmine, chai, nunit, xunit, junit)

* sourcesafe, bamboo, trello, docker

Yes, there's a danger it can look a bit redundant but it's mostly just there for the box ticking buzzword finding recruiters and prospective employers should understand that too and really be reading the other parts to try to get a better picture of your depth of those and the relevance at your more recent roles.

> box ticking buzzword finding recruiters

Sums it up well

The 'in practice' part might have some non-human readers involved, but even an ATS scoring a resume isn't likely searching for a huge number of buzzwords that couldn't be contained in the average skills section - a list of maybe 3-4 lines of an entire page.

I definitely agree on the benefit of sending a short resume direct to a human like those on a "Who's Hiring" post, but I don't think a human reader went through your entire 5 pages, and I'm pretty sure you could have achieved the same positive result with 1-2 pages if optimized properly. Maybe not though.

> I don't think a human reader went through your entire 5 pages, and I'm pretty sure you could have achieved the same positive result with 1-2 pages if optimized properly. Maybe not though.

Possibly. I didn't take a ton of time testing different scenarios. And yeah most of the ones that rejected me were within minutes even applying late at night so I assumed an automated system.

I don't know if I've ever read my own 5 page resume all in one sitting, heh. I use it as more of a career / professional catalog of just about everything so I can pick and choose when I update / tweak my truncated resume depending on the employer.

This is cultural too. In some regions it is normal to list absolutely everything to the extent of "Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Outlook)". If you did that in other regions they would bin your CV for what looks like mere padding.

When I see a 10-page resume, I sense stupidity. And usually it turns out that, indeed, it would not matter if every single statement in said resume were true or not.

My resume includes articles I wrote in 2007 and the tutoring I've done; why? Because very few software devs have done that sort of thing.

It's funny though because in general I could pare it all down to maybe two paragraphs, I've done all sorts of tech work and can do everything but if you wanna get past the HR filters and have something to talk about in the interview, you pile on more details in the resume.

So true.

Some years ago, I changed my career from Linux System Engineer to Web Developer (Rails and JS). I know that the fact that I was building HA clusters some back then has 0 relevance with the job I am doing now, but it is hard for me to just delete this from my résumé, to leave more room to explain what I am doing now.

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