CV Compiler is a robot that fixes your resume to make you more competitive | Hacker News Reader

CV Compiler is a robot that fixes your resume to make you more competitive

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152 pointsLexandrit126 comments

I took the dive and let them hack away at my LI. No telling what kind of spam I'm going to get now. That said, wow! This is terrible.

The first thing that they say I should improve on is: Must-Have-Words. Here is their list of those words: Deployment Security API Scalability OOP Continuous Integration (CI) Availability Docker SOLID NoSQL Configuration Management (CM) Robust Tuning Algorithm Web services Networking Design Patterns Unit testing Open Source AWS Hadoop Continuous Deployment (CD) REST Big Data Agile TDD Machine Learning Microservices Artificial Intelligence GitHub.

They also say that after I pay for the service I'll get access to the other fields of things I am missing. Those include: Niche IT Skills, Numbers, Online Presence, Technological Proficiency, Typos, Soft Skills, Your Old Projects, URLs.

They do say that I have a good amount of 'Action Verbs'. But that I need more of them and give the examples of: Devised Debugged Utilized Upgraded Assembled Overhauled Redesigned Coded Rebuilt Maintained Initiated Solved Investigated Developed Architected Trained.

Again, once I pay, I'll unlock a few more categories, which are listed here: Resume Size, Accomplishments, Your Most Recent Roles, Abbreviations, Outdated Tech, File Format, Summary/Objective, Employment History, Short-Term Jobs, Marital Status, Religion, Broken Links, References, Teams

In case you haven't really read through that list I'll highlight the 2 most INSANE items there that should make any HR department dive for the pepto-bismol: Marital Status, Religion. Now, I don't know if they are warning AGAINST including those fields or encouraging including them. However, that they are items that are there at all speaks to the 'demographic' that they are targeting: complete numbskulls. Not a single person that can fog a mirror would ever include those 2 fields in a CV in the English speaking world.

> Utilized

lol

One of the only people I've ever interviewed where I cut it short was a guy who admitted he lied and put "MongoDB" on his resume to get it past any robots that were screening.

Anyway, that massive list of must-have-words reminds me of the old days on the internet where web pages would have a block of content near the bottom that contained many keywords written in the same color as the background. Now I am wondering if that's the direction resumes go for some short period of time.

>Anyway, that massive list of must-have-words reminds me of the old days on the internet where web pages would have a block of content near the bottom that contained many keywords written in the same color as the background. Now I am wondering if that's the direction resumes go for some short period of time.

That's essentially the purpose of my "Technical Skills" section.

> Now I am wondering if that's the direction resumes go for some short period of time.

It is. I have (reliable) reports of CVs listing words like "Stanford" in white on white background, to pass the automated filtering at some companies.

I used to do that kind of thing when I just got out of school but later took it all out. I had heard the algos were smarter and went through hoops to take all that out. Guess that 'hack' still works.

I'm tempted to do this, but openly. Like a bold heading that says "Buzzword Section." Maybe with a parenthetical explanation that although it makes no sense, there are no lies in it.

I've been doing that for years - my resume has a block labeled "buzzwords" immediately after the contact info and just before the job history.

My resume is also kind of aggressively old-fashioned, a single page of 80-column ASCII text, because that's the kind of person I am and I figure anyone interested in hiring me ought to know what they're in for. :-)

How's that working out for you?

It works really well. I've never had to spend more than a couple of weeks looking for a job.

Hard to say if it’s due to the CV or general awesomeness though.

Cold-search or are you consistently being referred to by friends and former co-workers? Because if the latter you CV document might not even factor in your success rate

It is mostly the latter, as you'd imagine, and therefore most people encountering my resume already have some reason to pay attention. I think that lets me get away with being more opinionated in the way I present myself.

Yeah, but I happen to know that one of those jobs involved working on a BASIC compiler, so...

(Hi Mars!)

yeah, what slayed me about this resume tool for coders is that it doesn't accept plain text, but does accept word/doc

I do that too! The fixed width, not the buzzwords. I've gotten a few double takes, but it works. Mine used to be longer but one page is plenty, and more than most interviewers will read in any case.

Just for laughs, I just wrote a simple script that achieves exactly this: https://github.com/nachowski/cv-warfare

Much of that is driven by low-value resume screening services many big companies use, a la:

"Sorry, we see you only have "Ubuntu" and "CentOS" listed on your resume, the client requires Linux experience, we've decided to pass on you.

Similarly, I have a section on the bottom of my resume labeled "Skills" that's just a dumping ground of any buzzword I'm comfortable talking about.

at least he was honest -- i hope mongo was a core requirement and that it wasn't just the lie (aka the application optimization) itself ;)

Hah, no we didn't use Mongo at all. It was just the lie.

I can understand why you’d reject someone for that, but I have to wonder: would you have seen the resume at all without the keyword stuffing, and had you seen it, sans said keywords, would you have interviewed them anyway?

And even if his answer is yes, the applicant had no way of knowing.

I get around this sort of thing by not lying.

Well I don't either, but I've also been rejected out of hand by non-technical people for lacking keywords.

Well it's lose lose for applicants then. We get shuffled aside by non-technical HR reps and automated processes for lacking specific keywords that often aren't even relevant, and then we also get rejected for playing the game. I would have continued the interview.

Has anyone tried this with resumes? Embed the pdf with white text at a tiny font size so machine read the keywords, but then they never show up for a person reading them. Not sure it would get you anywhere, but gets past the machines or something. Not that I think this is a good idea, just curious what would happen.

Seen resumes with this, but a person somewhat reviews them for a few seconds after the giant batch filter - so you'd want to work for a company that does this and somehow thing your resume would qualify even if you dont have the thing they want.

I worked on applicant tracking databases, it's not worth your time - just go to a networking event or find some human face to the company if you want to skip their dumb systems.

edit - I would also say ATS systems are largely a waste of time.

I've been doing it for 3 years. Smallest font possible, white coloured text, just a list of keywords. It has worked pretty well and I'm honestly disgusted that these kinds of strategies are being rewarded.

This list of keywords were things I knew about or had experience with, just didn't want to ever mention on my actual CV text out of self-respect: things like 'Agile'.

> The first thing that they say I should improve on is: Must-Have-Words.

They might as well expect everyone to read the following texts:

https://i.imgur.com/DQcks8u.jpg

https://john.do/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/buzzwordfirstdesi...

Religion? WTF? My bet is that they find religious keywords and recommend you purge them. Hopefully?! Still funny to see it here.

Anyway thanks for the word salad buddy, I'm gonna sprinkle some in my own CV. Not too much, just a smattering.

> In case you haven't really read through that list I'll highlight the 2 most INSANE items there that should make any HR department dive for the pepto-bismol: Marital Status, Religion. Now, I don't know if they are warning AGAINST including those fields or encouraging including them. However, that they are items that are there at all speaks to the 'demographic' that they are targeting: complete numbskulls. Not a single person that can fog a mirror would ever include those 2 fields in a CV in the English speaking world.

Why not? There's nothing lost and only anything to gain in mentioning you're a Christian/Satanist/whatever. Tossing someone's resume on the grounds that they mention they're a Satanist is actual discrimination and the applicant would have a justifiable complaint. If anything it's a challenge-- "I dare you to throw mine away without a damn good reason."

In southern states it's incredibly common for general contractors, handymen and such to stick an ickthys on the back of their truck or include it somewhere on the side vinyl. It's an appeal to customer sentiment-- "I can trust this guy not to screw me, we're both Christians." The Jews have done similar insourcing for centuries.

I personally once went on a lunch interview for a dev position where the president and his CFO expected me to join them in saying grace before the meal. Guy had more crucifixes in his office than the Pope himself. Guarantee you they would have loved it if candidates disclosed their religious affiliation on their resume; they would not have wasted their time on me.

It's a mess but not as toxic as you're letting on.

> Why not? There's nothing lost and only anything to gain in mentioning you're a Christian/Satanist/whatever.

Well, this clearly isn't true but your general point is correct: sometimes when applying for a job it can be helpful to advertise your religious beliefs. Still, those jobs overwhelmingly don't come through LinkedIn.

Lol just say it and Latin and mention your a lay member of Opus Dei or a Jesuit.

Your point about

>in the English speaking world.

and

>Resume size

don't make me confident that this will apply very well to any job not in the USA. Or in something other than Silicon Valley web-dev.

The 'English speaking world' is to clarify that the Religion and Marriage Status fields are heart-attacks to any HR department in the US/UK/AUS/NZ/CAN.(Granted I did not pay them, so they may be telling me to take those things out).

I know in other countries and in other cultures, such questions may be routine. For example: in Japan, blood types (O+/-,A+/-,B+/-) have been included in interviews: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2009/02/04/in-ja...

And in parts of the UK (Northern Ireland) you could well create a political firestorm and piss of the Unionist or the Republican tradition.

NI has a load of extra laws around sectarian discrimination.

> Marital Status, Religion

This is just completely at odds with modernity in the west. I wonder if this service was created by Indians? I say this because I've done a lot of hiring in India over many years, and almost every CV I see has unnecessary personal details such as age/DoB, gender, marital status and home address.

Occasionally they include religion too, and I've previously been cautioned by Indian managers to be careful about putting together teams that mix Muslims or Christians with Hindus or Jains (I obviously ignore this).

> I wonder if this service was created by Indians?

"Take CV Compiler, a new product by Andrew Stetsenko and Alexandra Dosii"

Going by the names, I guess Eastern European.

Slightly tangential but I believe the resume situation is another part of the "broken hiring in tech":

1. There is a whole cottage industry of resume writers. My CV got me mostly where I wanted and then some, but of course the professional "resume reviewers" told me it's awful and I need to pay them $50 to make it noticeable at all.

2. The "importance of results" makes people willing to bend the truth and then resumes start looking very sleazy. I saw CVs of interns from Silicon Valley darling companies who claim in every line how they saved millions of dollars here and there. Hard to believe frankly.

3. And what do those results even give us? If resume A says "Implemented ETL tool that improved customer acquisition 420%" and resume B says "Implemented ETL tool to work with customer data in Java", there is no reason to believe candidate A is at all better than candidate B. Well, they are better at resume writing or hiring resume writers. Or maybe they are good at office politics and were able to put themselves on impactful projects. But will they pass the FizzBuzz?

Re:3

Frankly, I think a lot of managers in some places (maybe places you wouldn’t like to work) would care more about their employee being good at inflating their accomplishments and engaging in low-scale office warfare with people outside the group than having really good technical skills.

At one of my employers I was hired at a probably bad time in my life where I was quite unskilled technically (spend a whole day or something to write a fairly simply SQL query), but I would start small office fights (and contribute to office fights of my manager) over any perceived slight, and always view anything my team, me, or my manager did as delusionally impactful and important and loudly proclaim it to everyone around. They bent over backwards to keep me on board. But the technical level of this group was extremely low, so if this was in a group where someone else could verify that I wasn’t that good it may have played out in a more normal manner.

As I invested a lot in my technical skills and got a lot better/more efficient at my actual work (while caring less about fighting office people about their choice of wording in an email or something) they all began to hate me, with my manager wondering aloud to me why I had become so much worse of an employee after a great start.

That’s funny, because although the 420% statement seems more appealing, it doesn’t give any idea whether things improved drastically or just from terrible to slightly less terrible.

420% of zero is still zero ;)

Resume A in case 3 shows that the person cares about delivering measurable value which is certainly a plus in my book.

What if they are a 10x programmer put on the project that was shut down after a year of development? Did they produce measurable value or not and more importantly, do you want them on your team or not?

What if they were just doing whatever was asked of them without caring about value and now are pulling up some measurements out of mostly thin air because the hired resume writer told them to do it? Do you want this person on your team or not?

We hire interns and co-ops regularly. Often times, the local university forces them to redo their resumes in such a cookie-cutter way that they appear near identical to eachother. It's utter garbage to boot.

First question we ask: do you have a copy of your ORIGINAL resume? The ones who understand what we mean and actually have it are off to a great start.

In my resume writing business, I get a ton of kids who've taken their cues from the student books put together by university career centers. Everything possible is jammed onto one page in as small a type as can be minimally read. Real disservice to the applicant.

If you're still sending in resumes cold you're doing it wrong.

You need to either apply through connections or turn "cold" job postings into warm leads by finding someone in the company to refer you. How? You can find people on Twitter, LinkedIn, I've even found employees of companies I'm interested in on HN and reached out to them to establish rapport and get interviews. Get creative. I've also written blog posts about companies I'm interested in that lead to job opportunities.

Even jobs I got through connections I still had to send in a resume.

In my experience, if you're coming in through a contact, the resume is just a formality at that point. Make sure that you tick all the boxes, basically due diligence.

It's not that black & white. It's fine to use both paths to a job. 26 of my 30 years in software were at jobs I applied to cold, with no leads or connections.

Strongly disagree. I got my first job at apple, and a job at another unicorn by cold submission. I find as an engineer, cold submission on a website will often get me in contact with a recruiter quicker than any other method.

My experience has been the opposite- I haven't had a job via a cold application since I started in tech (2009). Maybe because I'm not an engineer.

What’s the response rate on your resume? Mine was pretty abysmal in my last job search, and I don’t really know what the issue is. Maybe it’s my nice, PDF formatting, or maybe it’s the content; I just have no way of telling.

My experience is similar to yours. I found a couple jobs I was interested in the last time I did a search. I submitted my plain-text resume with no buzzwords (other than maybe "Go") and immediately heard back from both. My interviews were done within a week or two. I took one of the jobs.

My advice for engineering candidates with some experience is to just talk about your past work in paragraph form. If Docker or whatever was an important part of your work, it will probably come up. If it's not mentioned, you're probably not the expert in that area that they're looking for. Saves everyone some time.

Couldn’t agree more.

A long time ago somebody recommended Nick Corcodilos‘ book, “Ask The Headhunter“, and it changed the way I thought about job hunting.

There’s a lot of great resouces on his site: https://www.asktheheadhunter.com

Resumes: necessary, but insufficient.

Both of my jobs (though you can tell how new I am to the field from that number) have been cold submissions.

“We found that many job applications were being rejected without even an interview, because of the resumes. Apparently, 10 seconds is long enough for a recruiter to eliminate many candidates"

What exactly does he think the purpose of a resume is? If someone does not have the necessary background or experience for a job, moving forward to an interview is a waste of time for all parties involved.

It's not that simple. You may have the necessary background and experience but if your resume that doesn't show it clearly you get filtered out. Writing a resume that gets noticed is a very important skill. When we hire most resumes are really bad but there are some that stand out because they are well-written, concise and convey a clear message. It's rare though.

When I was an engineering recruiter, 10 seconds hit the nose.

If anybody wants to writeup a ruleset that mirrors the (definitely fallable) process I used to use, here's the rules:

1. Candidate probably local? {check address, if listed, else check location of previous roles} (required by our clients)

2. Candidate doesn't need sponsorship, probably? {check address, if listed, else check location of previous roles to ensure >5 years working in US, compare against university location} (required by our clients, and saturated market anyway. didn't like this one but that was the job)

3. Candidate has proper job title? {check last job title, ensure it's not >1 year ago, check previous job titles, ensure has had job title for some required amount of time}

4. Candidate has clean work history? {check for gaps between roles, or length of each individual role, look for big gaps or many short jobs} (not necessarily a disqualifier, but will be asked about)

5. Candidate has specific keywords required by position? {scan each job in earliest->oldest chronological order, ensuring recent and decent time spent on {{TECHNOLOGY}}}

If I've gotten to bullet point 5 I'm probably already tapping their phone number into my phone, and doing a final scan for

6. Red flag? {look for political opinions on the resume, opinions of their previous bosses, proudly listed membership of organizations like the KKK (it's happened), too many spelling errors, rants about the job hunting process, odd demands surrounding salary or compensation or work style, or just general signs of weirdness/assholeness/difficult-to-deal-with-ness}

What’s with this obsession with “gaps”? What are you trying to screen for? Is everyone supposed to be working non stop from their first job until they retire or die?

I can sort of understand if it’s been years since the last position and the individual is applying for your company after being away from the market. But a gap in the middle of the job history? Why do you care ?

> rants about the job hunting process

you're out, mate

Maybe they were in prison for murder!

(I am also curious to hear why.)

> What are you trying to screen for?

People that can't keep a job, or get a job, often. It was Oil and Gas, so turnover was expected (projects finish, everyone goes away), but if consistently over the last decade or 2 they couldn't get on another project, it was a red flag. Not disqualifying, but a red flag.

If it was a big gap ten years ago, nobody cares. If it was a single big gap less than 5 years ago, probably nobody cares, I'd just have to ask about it, because my client would want to know.

How big of a gap is a "big gap"? I have a 6 month gap before my current employer (of 2.5 years) because I spent some time doing stuff other than work with my savings. Should I fill that with "freelance, travel, and open source" or some such (even though I didn't do all that much freelance work)?

I would leave off the months on your resume so that it doesn't look like a gap.

Or, put "2016 - Present," and then if they ask about what kind of notice you need to post, say "oh, I actually don't work there anymore, woops, I forgot to take off the 'to present' on my resume, thanks for bringing that up."

I've been willingly unemployed for months and somehow it hasn't negatively affected my ability to get interviews. I think the obsession with gaps is dying out as the old guard retires. Companies run by boomers might think negatively of gaps, but ones run by Gen X'ers and beyond don't seem to care at all. Some of them have even been curious as to how I've been able to quit my job without another lined up!

Well 1 Linked in stubbornly refuses to acknowledge that just because my post town is Milton Keynes - I don't live there I rejected an approach for a MK job last night on LI for this reason.

And part of 6 indicates that you are looking for NeuroTypical's "interesting" :-)

"proudly listed membership of organizations like the KKK "

That's actually an excellent filter :-). I bet a lot of employers will reject you but others probably will take you probably just for that reason.

Klean Koders Klub?

What's the take on people who have had a career break of 1 to 2yrs? Through travel or medical situations or whatever. A friend of mine took a year and half off after having worked non-stop for ~15yrs (burnt out), went exploring and is now trying to get back into work but is having some difficulty for recruiters to call him back after applying. He never had any breaks in his work history before the recent and only one.

Huge red flag. Put for the last job "2016-Present," and then if they ask about it, say "oh, I actually don't work there anymore, I need to update my resume, thanks for pointing that out." If they ask when you left, be honest and say "yea I must have missed that bit, it's been "to present" forever haha."

That just sounds shady and wrong. Plus, I don't think anyone is really going to believe that a person who is actively looking for jobs has left his CV that sloppy. If it's a couple of months sure, but 1.5yrs? Hmmm..

So basically, people see a one and a half year break, and wonder when he’s going to have his next burnout.

It’s not really fair, but I can see the reasoning.

Well, they can't/ shouldn't deduce that he had a burnout. That's something I know as a friend. He went traveling around the world, ticking off places from his list. It's a simple career break. People aren't/shouldn't be expected to work non-stop through out their lives.

I’ve taken 6 months off, a year off, even 5 years off (!) to have different life experiences in between IT gigs. In the case of your friend, perhaps suggest that they add an 18 month block of “consulting” work to the resume, rather than leave it as a gap, and see if the response rate changes.

Just for the fun of it; what do you consider many short jobs? What do you consider a short job?

Industry dependent. For Oil and Gas, one year is minimum length to be considered "ok." Below that is red flag and will either be skipped or if rest of resume is perfect, asked about.

The only exception is if it's a project we all know - like a named Brownfield project on a certain refinery that everyone knows only lasted 8 months or whatever.

The job title thing worries me. My current title is “designer” but I’ve ended up doing more front-end than design at my current workplace. I was hoping to find work as a developer elsewhere. Will I get filtered out because my title isn’t already “developer”? What should I do in that case?

Swap your job title to "Designer, Front End Developer." Or leave it as "Designer," and then in the description, put something like "performed front end engineering duties such as..."

Also make sure to highlight your use of JavaScript, whatever web framework, etc. "Coded React frontend in JavaScript" etc.

All you're trying to do is get on the phone. Make sure your frontend skills are hot hot hot, you gotta be able to back this up. Throw an open source projects section on there and list your title as frontend engineer for those, whether they're personal or free work for the city or something (find volunteer civil hack meetups).

This is great advice. Thank you!

> 1. Candidate probably local? {check address, if listed, else check location of previous roles} (required by our clients)

So wait, are you going to dismiss my resume if I live far away, even though you don't know whether I'll actually want to move to your town on my own dime? This is something you should be figuring out in a phone screening, not just using your intuition by reading a resume.

Yes this absolutely happens, which i why I've let many a friend from back home use my silicon valley address on their resume when applying to jobs out here.

You're a wonderful person :-) As an international resident, trying to get a job there has proven quite difficult whereas here (Sydney) it is easy. Although I do completely understand why recruiters are hesitant to employ people that reside out of area.

>So wait, are you going to dismiss my resume if I live far away, even though you don't know whether I'll actually want to move to your town on my own dime? This is something you should be figuring out in a phone screening, not just using your intuition by reading a resume.

Hey man, don't shoot the messenger. It was a saturated job market, we "should" doesn't really apply.

A candidate already local is more likely to accept, there's no chance our client would have to do relocation, no need to worry about them not liking the city or whatever. More reasons to reject such a candidate than bother calling them.

Eh... as someone who has done a _lot_ of interviews, I think you're making two mistakes: 1. assuming all resumes are created equal in terms of providing useful information, and 2. assuming recruiters can properly assess "necessary background experience" from those same resumes.

If you're not getting hits from a recruiter, I'd bet several dollars that it's not a background or human ability mismatch, but a plain ol' resume keyword mismatch.

"Know your audience" as they say. The gate keepers aren't technical. They've got a bunch of keywords against which they 'judge your background'. If you wanna maximize your chances of getting through the first non-technical stage, taking time to tailor your resume is time well spent.

On my Trello job-hunt board I even have a "Rejected @ resume" tag.

TODO: write a counter-compiler that recognizes resumes based on the stylistic "improvements" suggested by this tool - and mark them for rejection accordingly.

Why? The whole interview process is a dumb game full of bullshitting and half-truths. What does it matter if a robot helped you come up with them?

To be honest, looking at resumes now is a bit like ‘find the bullshit’ from a hiring perspective.

Professional resume writer here that comes with 20 years of experience in recruiting and hiring for tech startups. I have no fear of being replaced by AI anytime soon, and I don't have any knowledge of this company but can certainly vouch for their statement about other resume firms trying to upsell a service based on a shoddy review.

I often have clients that come to me with perfectly good resumes that tell me some online rating system said it was terrible. A resume can be somewhat accurately 'scored' for fit based on matching keywords, but the tech isn't mature enough yet to say if something is simply good or bad.

Not to mention the different tastes from different companies. I write a bit differently depending on who the target audience is for a resume. I don't know if these review companies account for that at all, but they don't seem to.

Tried it with my current PDF. Didn't really manage much other than "use more keywords that employers like!"

Are you comfortable sharing your resume so we can compare this report with the output? I'm gonna give it a shot and will do a write-up after my 9am.

Sure - https://rjp.is/resume.pdf

Huh, looks clear on the keywords for me. I wonder if it's mad because you don't list hot button things like Javascript or React or whatever.

This is a great format, by the way. Very clear, yet still fairly non-traditional. Good use of horizontal space!

Shouldn't the period go outside the parens?

> Capable of understanding business requirements and working with the team to achieve the best solution (technologically or pragmatically.)

I'm no expert. I've no idea with regards to parens, but with quotes, this is definitely a UK/US difference.

In the US, a terminating/trailing period or comma goes inside the quote, "like this." — Whereas in the UK we do it "like this".

Personally, and as a programmer, parsing the UK usage makes more sense to me logically, and I find the other way to be mentally jarring. Just my 2p.

Hmm, I think you're right, thanks! Found a couple more (although "..., etc.)" seems to me that it requires the full stop inside the brackets because that ends the sentence. Maybe.)

This seems to be the crux of the product (I'm exagerating, there are paid levels that might eventually provide value).

It might be better served by a static page saying: these are the keywords/verbs you need on your resume, than a full-blown product.

Great. Now everyone will juice his resume with something like this and we'll all end up in the same relative positions we were before, except 1) actual resume information density will be lower, as we'll have decreased the SNR through keyword juicing, and 2) anyone not paying attention to these tools (and focusing on work instead) will be unfairly penalized in early-stage hiring filter.

This is the best timeline.

You’re assuming it works well. But less tongue in cheek, this is pretty close to the current market, as it is. Things like this might help close some of the arbitrary gaps.

I agree with your sentiment regarding the timeline. We really could manage scarce resources more socially appropriately.

I don't think this follows. To a degree, it's already true, because a lot of tech interviews just boil down to "have you learned all the pet CS questions in Cracking the Coding Interview?". A CV just gets you the interview.

Of course you're right, some companies have software to filter CVs by keywords, and often it's as dumb as if the ad says "experience with Puppet", you need to say "experience with Chef, which is like Puppet". This is just playing the game, like everything is.

Why do they do this? If you've been involved with hiring, you know the number of terrible CVs even a small company will get is shocking, so I'm sympathetic to automating things a bit. A lot of them are minimal effort, but that's the best case. Worst case is a flat out lie, because it takes more effort to catch - usually during the interview.

So if we accept that CVs aren't just useful for raw information, but also convey some kind of measure of diligence (e.g. spelling), which you want in a programmer, then knowing about tools is also a useful measure. So I don't think it's going to be as bad as you make it sound.

This seems like a great way to harvest lots of resumes to sell to recruiters.

If you're working on your resume, you're probably open to a new job, right?

Ok, I gave it a shot. For reference, here's my resume (google doc link so I don't have to PDF bomb people, and because I never bothered to transfer this thing to HTML): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A3Ns93sbE8v70hCt7yWJigoi...

Apparently I have only 7 of 30 "Must Have Words." I have TDD, Open Source, API, AWS, GitHub, REST. I should include, according to this site:

, Security , Scalability , OOP , Continuous Integration (CI) , Availability , Docker , SOLID , NoSQL , Configuration Management (CM), Robust, Tuning, Algorithm, Web services, Networking, Design Patterns, Unit testing, Hadoop, Continuous Deployment (CD), Big Data, Agile, Machine Learning, Microservices, Artificial Intelligence.

I use "enough" action verbs that "emphasize my tech skills":

engineer develop architected engineered code built

But I could add some more:

Debugged Upgraded Assembled Rebuilt Investigated Trained Devised Programmed Maintained Designed Redesigned Applied Utilized Overhauled Initiated Solved Reduced

Now it's got some freaky little pie chart thing that I don't understand, but it says that to applicant tracking software, I look like a "Other 16%, Back-end (Javascript), QA, Cloud Computing, Front-end" guy.

Looks like I have to pay to unlock some other things, like it says it found typos, something about soft skills, something about resume size, dunno. Mildly interesting, though I find this fairly useless compared to just having someone professional look at your resume. I'm not sure adding the word "Unit Testing" to my resume increases my chances at getting into netflix, I already list my unit testing frameworks and my testing experience at electric imp, though I suppose it will be missed by a non-programming recruiter just scanning for keywords, so that keyword stuff is probably the best advice this thing gives.

Next episode of Silicon Valley: we find out that they are literally using “machine learning” - adding those words to resumes to get them picked up by recruiters.

In all seriousness I think it would be interesting to explore the latent space of their model, and try to explain it- what does it think the magic words are?

Given how this thread is going I thought I'd mention a resume review robot I actually like.

I use Novoresume.com to build my resumes and I find it's resume suggestions to be pretty useful. It's free for one page resumes too. I am not associated with novoresume in any way, I just like the product.

Ever since I had a run in with an extremely "motivated" team of head hunters my belief has been that resumes are almost useless.

I was responsible for hiring a team a while back and, in retrospect, believe I put way too much faith into my practice of filtering candidates by resume content.

Thought I'd shout out my product, https://resumeworded.com/score, here. Gives a similar, but much more detailed analysis of a resume.

I do not care about signing up until I see the value your product would bring.

So the more successful this company gets, the less effective it becomes?

Wait, I don't get it, why?

Because as resumes coalesce around their (admittedly, really fucking terrible) conception of what a good resume looks like, they all start becoming completely indistinguishable from each other, which makes them worse. As someone who's sat on both sides of the table (screening resumes, interviewing, hiring, and applying/being interviewed) a lot recently, the worst thing you can be isn't being inexperienced, it's being boring.

You use this service so your resume stands out from the others. The more people use the service, the less likely your CV will stand out.

Basically this is like SEO, but for resumes. There is only so much attention there is to divide, and everybody is fighting for a slice of the pie.

It seems like they just analyzed a million resumes and then try and make your resume match theirs. Doubt they graded all million of them thoroughly, so whats to say the quality was good? Why should you want to match those million resumes?

Also, if you are using ML to try and make your resume closer to the ones that are analyzed, aren't you making the resume more average, not making it stand out more? If everyone uses the service, and adds all these keywords to it, then how are they of any value?

More importantly, every job posting or resume may mention stuff like "git", "CI", "Docker", "OOP", and whatnot. But I would argue that for many roles it's hardly an important thing to list on your resume. Just because it's mentioned doesn't mean it's important.

Microsoft Office just added this capability via LinkedIn, fully automated.

Open a resume in Word, an assistant pops up.

Good luck agains that.

"Hey, it looks like you're writing a CV"

We're gradually getting to a point where the hiring process is merely about bots outsmarting other bots.

"allowing you to shine to recruiters at Google, Yahoo and Facebook"

Wait, Yahoo? People still try to get hired there?

Improving your resume is a nice tag for also getting competitive intelligence.

Does it drive anybody else crazy when resume and CV are used interchangeably?

In the British English 'CV' and 'resume' are interchangeable.

I know in US English 'CV' means something more in the academic community, but it doesn't here.

lovely looking website. Interested to see what segment of the engineering community this service will prove greatest value to.

Likely a lot of connected, visible, high profile engineers won't need this, but they are the 'conspicuous minority'....suspect a lot of folks will find this useful

Tech Crunch looks like advertising.

So seo for resumes?

I once made a buzzword generator thingy, so here's some suggestions, use them wisely.... and by wisely I mean in the form "I like to $A $B $C of $D, $A $B $D $C and use $D to $A $B $C", if you want to refer to past positions simply add a "d" to the verb. But before you do, put on a seatbelt, your career might just go vertical! (up, I mean vertical in the upwards direction)

$A:

appropriately, assertively, authoritatively, collaboratively, compellingly, coherently, competently, completely, continually, conveniently, credibly, distinctively, dynamically, efficiently, generally, holistically, horizontally, interactively, literally, objectively, organically, practically, professionally, progressively, provably, quickly, radically, rapidly, seamlessly, strategically, synergistically, theoretically, totally, uniquely, vertically, sequentially, non-sequentially

$B:

actualize, administrate, aggregate, architect, benchmark, brand, build, communicate, conceptualize, contextualize, coordinate, create, cross-pollinate, cultivate, curate, customize, deliver, deploy, develop, disintermediate, disrupt, disseminate, drive, e-enable, embrace, empower, enable, engage, engineer, enhance, envisioneer, evisculate, evolve, expedite, exploit, extend, fabricate, facilitate, formulate, foster, generate, grow, impact, implement, incentivize, incubate, initiate, innovate, integrate, iterate, leverage, maintain, maximize, monetize, negotiate, network, optimize, orchestrate, pontificate, position, productivate, productize, productivize, promote, pursue, re-engineer, recaptiualize, reconceptualize, recontextualize, redefine, reinvent, repurpose, restore, revolutionize, scale, seize, strategize, streamline, syndicate, synergize, synthesize, target, transform, transition, utilize, visualize, whiteboard, ideate, update

$C:

abstraction, analysis, application, aquisition, archival, assessment, benchmarking, certification, clustering, computation, computing, convergence, conversion, correction, counting, debugging, decentralization, definition, demonstration, deployment, development, diffusion, discovery, display, distribution, enforcement, engineering, enhancement, exploitation, extension, fusion, identification, indexing, integration, interaction, interfacing, marketing, processing, production, protection, recognition, redefinition, research, response, separation, solution, support, tracking, transaction, transfer, transportation, updating, visualization

$D:

addiction, advice, alignment, authority, bandwidth, big data, bullshit, certificate, change, chemicals, clients, coherence, communication, confusion, content, convergence, data, deniability, e-business, e-commerce, education, encryption, energy, entertainment, estimation, eyeballs, equity, exposure, fear, feedback, greed, health, ideas, information, intelligence, knowledge, mindshare, music, networks, partnership, plausability, privacy, productivity, public relations, quality, quality assurance, reduction, relaxation, research, sales, security, software, space, speculation, stability, standards, storage, sustainability, synergy, technology, traction, traffic, transparency, trust, vacation, visibility, warfare

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