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Comment by bwang29 | Hacker News Reader

1. Some links on the resume (github, portfolio, linkedIn) return 404 or access denied. This is suprisingly common.

2. Little facts / actual performance data, and over use of words such as "passionate", "strong", "self-motivated", "success", "thrive", etc when describing themselves in the resume.

3. Changing jobs very frequently and no consistent theme in jobs, say 5 jobs in 5 years, one in A.I., one in e-commerce, one in gaming, without specific pursuit of interest.

4. Have a big, long "technology used" for a project. For example, "technology used" in a project includes "Python, Java, Javascript, HTML, CSS, jQuery, SQL, C#, Django, Messaging, C, Bash.."

5. Too specific on trivial details in a large project, such as "work on JSON network request and return error codes to frontend".

6. When sending your document, try sending a PDF but not a .docx

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> Have a big, long "technology used" for a project. For example, "technology used" in a project includes "Python, Java, Javascript, HTML, CSS, jQuery, SQL, C#, Django, Messaging, C, Bash.."

I've also seen this recommended as a way to get past recruiters in big companies.

I feel we should have two separate resumes. One for the recruiter crapshoot (where we play buzzword bingo) and another for engineers.

yeah that's difficult. Recruiters who know their stuff will be equally annoyed by buzzword bingo. My advice; read the job ads carefully and tune for their style...

> 2. Changing jobs very frequently and no consistent theme in jobs, say 5 jobs in 5 years, one in A.I., one in e-commerce, one in gaming, without specific pursuit of interest.

If my resume contains many short stints, what's the best way to paint this in a positive light? I've already removed the months of my job history so that only years are on there, which makes some of my positions appear longer.

I think you probably want to have a short blurb / cover letter paragraph in the beginning of the resume, and explain why you were doing the stints.

Make sure you are only including positions that help you. Common mistake I see is including tiny 2-3 month long positions, without considering whether including them is additive or not. It's often not.

What should you do about the time in between then?

Personally I'd consider undescribed gaps of 3 months in between the interesting projects unusual.

In fact I'd rather see "waiting tables" rather than nothing.

  I'd rather see "waiting tables" rather than nothing

But why? Maybe the person used that time to study technologies, to update her skill set. Maybe she used that time to relax and get a long deserved vacation. (Or a myriad other possibilities.) What is wrong with that?

If somebody set aside 3 months to study something they should write that. Otherwise it loos like they've been unemployed, in jail or something they rather don't want to talk about.

Also I read it as multiple 3 months gaps. I might have misread though.

> no consistent theme in jobs, (...) one in e-commerce, one in gaming

Not sure why that's a bad thing. I've done telco, cloud provider, ecommerce, embedded systems. I'm happy with that - it gave me much better experience on a path towards an architect position than any one industry on its own could.

It's not a bad thing, I think they phrased it poorly. If you're doing network operations or devops work at an ecommerce business, then in a gaming company, then telco, yeah you'll definitely be more well rounded.

If you're a developer at these companies, and you try to claim you're an expert in each of these fields... yeah I'm going to raise an eyebrow.

I don’t think it’s terrible either. But if I’m reading your resume for a non architect position, I might be thinking that your going to come in, learn the field for a year, and then leave. That’s not the most attractive hire.

I guess the company's response is also interesting for me. It could be yours. Or it could be: this is a person who can fill in another role in the future and will already have a lot of company experience. (I get that this is not possible under some reasonable company size)

Alone, it's not. However, when you are "Changing jobs very frequently and [have] no consistent theme in jobs", then you don't really have much experience that would help you toward an architects role.

> When sending your document, try sending a PDF but not a .docx

Is that a suggestion or a red flag?

I've been a contractor in the UK for a long time...

I've tried switching to using a PDF a couple of times, but I've had pushback from Recruiters/Agents each time, and have had to revert to .docx

Maybe that's just here.

This is because they want to easily remove some personal details you may have put on the CV, like your email, mobile number etc. before they send it over to the company and they usually dont have a app that can edit PDFs.

Not having the ability to edit PDFs is a red flag...

Workaround for #4. List all relevant tech at/near the top of your resume under a section called something like "Skills" or likely a better name than that. Try to be as concise as possible and avoid going too granular (listing just SQL vs TSQL, MYSQL, XYZSQL). I do something similar and avoid listing the tech used for jobs. If I was versed in many stacks/frameworks, I might have a bullet point/mention under each position what stack each company used (Rails, .NET, Django). As a side note to all of this, I believe resumes/CVs should be a single page

Single page resumes made sense when it was typical to stay in the same job for decades. They're not much use for explaining 20 years of experience and growth with 2-4 years at each stop.

I guess this goes back to being concise. I comfortably fit 5 jobs and volunteer work on mine. I have no issue getting interviews or offers. I know others who stick to 1 page that have decades of experience, and similarly don't have issues finding work.

> Try to be as concise as possible and avoid going too granular (listing just SQL vs TSQL, MYSQL, XYZSQL).

Tried that. Got endless calls from recruiters who assumed I knew Oracle, Sybase, MSSQL, etc.

What did you do, upload your resume somewhere lots of recruiters have access to?

Well, yeah, that's kinda how it goes.

If you're in tech you shouldn't need to do it that way. Indeed/linkedin/stackoverflow/craigslist etc all have tons of tech jobs which you can selectively (or not) target. Many require not much more than a resume to apply

> 3. Have a big, long "technology used" for a project. For example, "technology used" in a project includes "Python, Java, Javascript, HTML, CSS, jQuery, SQL, C#, Django, Messaging, C, Bash.."

How exactly is this a red flag? Javascript, HTML, CSS, jQuery, SQL, C#, Messaging would be a typical project for me and there are likely to be integrations with other languages and I usually have some bash scripts for various parts. I wouldn't typically use java and c# in the same project but it wouldn't be the first time either.

I think it might be a red flag if that same resume only has 1 or 2 years of work experience, and the section read like the person just dumped every buzzword they could think of, even if their "experience" with said technology consisted of reading a tutorial once.

Without supporting evidence, it looks way too much like claiming credit for and expertise in everything any of your friends or coworkers has ever done. The chance of one person doing production grade work on all of those things is quite small. Tell me which of those you're expert in, and which of those you're familiar with because it was used around your specialty and you had opportunity dip your fingers in. Even your shorter list - while being more believable - would have me asking questions about your strengths at each layer of "full stack" you're claiming. Every great fullstack dev I've met has been open about specialising in some part while being some degree of competent or capable in other parts.

If you say that you created a web based app which did X using JQuery and C# with a MySQL back end most people would know that you used those technologies.

I think it means the word salad. Are you really working on a project that mixes Python, Java, C# and C?

On the flip side of the coin, this word salad appears on many job posts. It would be nice to see them clearly define their stack but also other languages they accept on a separate line.

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