Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnmcd3 | Hacker News Reader

The mistakes I see made most are:

(1) Not concretely listing the candidate's contribution (vs the team or project description), and

(2) Not focused on the most impressive and relevant items, but instead a laundry list of things unrelated to the opportunity at hand

Some tips and a resume template: https://www.careercup.com/resume

View on HN

I've had the "opportunity" to read several 4+ page resumes like this. (Current record is 9 pages!) Candidates are definitely not doing themselves any favors. I expect that you used source control at your software engineering job. Listing it as a bullet point on your resume is just wasting your space and my time.

Another favorite is people who don't trim down previous experience. Every time I add a position to my resume, I go back over every other position and remove or compress bullet points based on what I think is important from that job now. And, of course, I've completely removed things like irrelevant college summer jobs. This is the main mechanism that allows my resume to still fit on a single (!) page.

The problem is that, to use your example, if a job requires Git there might be an automated filter looking for the keyword Git. A good rule of thumb is that if it's in the job description it should be in your resume somewhere.

You can just list them as a list of keywords somewhere.

Individual technologies should just be listed somewhere. There's not enough space to waste an entire line for a single technology. Your bullet points should be talking about how you used technology to deliver business value. Not how you used a technology to do the thing that everyone does with that technology.

On several occasions I would have ended up writing a multi-page resume as well if recruiters/job ad websites hadn't told me explicitly not to do so. One easily ends up worrying that you need to show off a tower off knowledge.

For my next job hunt I definitely concentrate on the things relevant for the kind of thing I'm looking for. Especially adding bullets about things one dislikes backfires eventually after taking a position. At some point one will get asked to work with exactly that stuff because nobody likes doing it

This template follows where mine has ended up. I forget where I sourced the material from but it suggested listing the worthy contributions to the company with action verbs like "integrated large payments system responsible for millions in revenue". It's a very concise sentence that clearly explains the value you brought to a previous company. I used to have a resume like 'proficient in MS Word' which some companies do care for but they can usually suss out important things during a phone screen. We're also the types that largely self learn though so the "what you know" becomes more irrelevant than "what value you brought to the company based on what you know or have learned along the way". It's a subtle change that seems to have much greater impact.

My resume is ultimately more than one page, not much more, but it reads very quickly. In the source material I vaguely recall you have seconds, like maybe 30-90 to really hook the reader. Long paragraphs read much more slowly than concise yet robust bullet points. If you want to pack absolutely everything on your resume, keep the unimportant stuff towards the end. I list time travel as one of my interests at almost the very end of my resume. Getting comments on it let me know someone was either skimming for an interesting phrase or really read all of it.

If you tailor your resume you are wasting your time, period.

I disagree with that assertion. When looking for my current position, I had a much higher response rate when each resume was tailored to the position.

Tailoring, in this case, meant relatively minor tweaks - if it was a more engineering role I'd highlight those skills and contributions whereas with the more data science-y roles I'd highlight more relevant aspects. I think it's very arrogant to think that a single resume is appropriate for every job application.

I disagree completely. I've worn several hats at every job I've worked at, each one demonstrating a different skill set. I will reword, change the order of, or even completely delete or swap out bullet points under jobs to highlight the skills that a particular req is looking for.

If you're "just another developer" applying to a "just a developer" req, then yes there's probably no reason to tweak. For anything else, you should absolutely be reconfiguring your resume to highlight your relevant skills.

Isn't that what a cover letter is for?

Cover letters are not really in style right now. But, even then, it still helps to align your resume to what you write in the cover letter. It wouldn't look good to talk about all this good stuff in the cover letter, and it has no visibility in your resume.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com