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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

> 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'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.

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.

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

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

(Hi Mars!)

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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