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Comment by hop | Hacker News Reader

Your resume could be part of the problem - http://www.andrewhorner.com/documents/AndrewHorner.Resume.pd...

Some constructive criticism: Thats a lot of ink to print that out, drop the black and grey banners. Try using a resume theme from Pages or Word for a start and just use black fonts on a white background. Use Myriad Pro or something more modern than Arial. Make it one page. Your first entry shouldn't be that you can use OSX and WinXP, my mom can do that.

Drop "Proficient in...", it sounds like you just know enough to get by. I would also drop your high school info to be more concise. Your HS GPA says "4.58 (weighted out of 4.0)" Either its bad math or its not out of 4. And I would switch up your order of things - employment, education, skills & projects combined.

Good luck!

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The rule of thumb that my university's career center used is that after your junior year of college no one cares about what you did in high school anymore.

And I second all the comments of the parent...resume definitely needs some work.

If you still want a non-cookie-cutter resume template, try making one in Latex. I personally use a heavily modified version of the template mentioned here: http://www.thelinuxdaily.com/2008/10/latex-resume-examples/

While that is the De facto rule in career centers, there is a rule that usurps it, which is if it really does distinguish you from the average applicant, use it.

Maybe I'm just prejudiced, but I look at snazzified, graphical resumes like that I think, "This person wastes time on things that aren't important."

Go grab a LaTeX template, replace the filler with your own information, and get it down to one page.

Hopefully you're not representative of people normally judging resumes. When you're unemployed, finding a job is probably the most important thing you can do. Making something pleasing to the eye can only help your efforts, as long as all the information is there.

There are so many posts on HN about A/B testing. I'd A/B test my resume if it were possible.

His website now seems to link to a different version of the resume, which would seem to have incorporated this type of feedback: http://www.andrewhorner.com/documents/ahorner.resume.pdf

Almost. While in a LaTeX-y format, it was still made in MS Word! :-)

Agreed. Also, sentences like "I mastered the ability to combine several strategies, each with varying strengths and weaknesses, highlighting the strengths and nullifying the weaknesses" are no good. What strengths? What weaknesses? When I read something like that, it says to me (or perhaps screams?) that nothing substantial was actually accomplished. Definitely in need of rewording to make things far more concrete.

His whole resume reads like that:

Cernium Corporation Reston, VA

September 2009 (a short job contract)

I learned how to work with a team to set goals, outline those goals in a design document, and accomplish those goals in code within a very small timeframe.

Is HR gobbledygook, and doesn't tell me anything about what he was doing, why or how hard it was. Unless I find something cool while searching for "Andrew Horner" <programming language that I'm hiring for> on Google, his resume doesn't stand out.

Weighted GPAs can be higher than 4.0: A+ grades in advanced courses are often given 5.0 points, and so on.

I had a system like this in my high school too, but technically it's not "out of 4.0". The maximum possible grade is usually dependent on what courses the student takes. For example, if you took an "honors" course, an A would get you 4.5, B would be 3.5, etc. If you took a "high honors" or "AP" course, A would be 5, B would be 4, etc. If you know what classes you took, you can calculate your maximum score possible.

If he had said he got a 4.4 (or whatever) out of 4.6, it would convey more information than what he said on his resume for two reasons:

1) It would tell the employer at roughly what rate he took harder courses than he had to (this would be especially true if he somehow found the school's average maximum GPA).

2) It would tell the employer the actual ratio of his grades to the maximum possible score.

If I recall correctly (and i graduated high school 10 years ago), so I may be a bit fuzzy on this. But in THEORY you could not calculate a max "out of 4.6" because you could take more credits than the baseline by taking summer school, college courses, etc.

So one could end up with an "average" of 6.3 or 7 since they are divided by the baseline (i think it was like 28 classes? at 4points max each so 112) so assume I took ALL AP classes all 4 years, I'd get a 140/28 (7 classes/year/4 years?)

I think my school's valedictorian had like a 6.X gpa.

Never heard of that sort of system, and I'd never before heard of a valedictorian having a GPA too far north of the 4.6 region. Well...I suppose it's difficult to say if my experience applies generally (I'm sure it doesn't). However, at least in my high school, the absolute maximum possible was something like 4.6. You could, and we regularly did, calculate it based on your own classes. External classes would usually be counted either as honors or AP (unless it was a remedial course).

I had a 5.2 graduating from hs (weighted of course). I took mostly AP classes, but wasn't a straight a student by any means.

I think honors classes were 5 points and AP were 6

I'd also add that you should try to list things in order of most importance. I would list something like the UCF Vision Lab work before "Operating Systems". I also concur with making it one page and losing all that extra ink.

Thanks, I hope Andrew is reading this but I am not him. I submitted it because I appreciated the ingenuity and thought HN would as well.

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