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Comment by imack | Hacker News Reader

Having screened many, many resumes from co-ops and interns, I buy the shorter resume arguments. A lot of people put crap that some job counsellor told you will make you look more rounded, but the sad truth is that I care about your ability to not mess up the code base so much more than the fact that you volunteered on 'campus day'.

It also makes you stand out in a very basic way. In the stack of 30 resumes, you'll be the one person who could articulate in 1 page where everyone else took 2.

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I haven't screened too many resumes but I prefer to see everything. I'm in IT, not HR so it's not like I have 5,000 other resumes to go through per day. The person working for me will be someone I work with all the time and I don't mind spending 35 minutes instead of 15 to go through the resumes.

Show me everything you got. Show me the weird but cool techy projects you've been involved in. Show me the platforms/technologies you've worked on and show me the clever stuff you did. Tell me about the role you played in the team and your personal contribution to the project. As far as I'm concerned saying "added mDNS support to project" beats "lowered TCO by $1.5m."

I don't care about action words or acronyms. I care about what you actually did. "Actuated exemplary leadership skills" or "Decentralized payroll processing system" doesn't tell me anything. Tell me you wrote a C-module to interface with backend-DB or scripted rsync to remotely backup 75 Windows desktops. Basically, tell me you know what you're talking about by giving me an insight into your career not a mish-mash of big words, acronyms, and jargons.

Also, customize your cover letter. I actually do read it because I want to work with you for a long time.

Customizing resumes or websites for the audience is the logical next step after A/B testing.

I've always customized my resume for the job I'm applying to - isn't that common?

It's common sense, but unfortunately it's not common :(

It also discourages people from embellishing their resume with stuff that they don't really know.

I think a lot of especially younger people don't realize that if you list a programming language on your resume it's sort of expected that you'll be able to write something in that language (maybe with minor syntax errors). I'm appalled at the number of people who list C/C++ and yet can't write a simple string manipulation function.

Actually, this phenomenon is kind of useful because it the quickest way to filter out more than half of the candidates applying.

From my experience, a lot of employers are Nash level-two thinkers here: they know that everyone embellishes their resume, so they assume that you've put union of the sets "things I know how to do" and "things you require" on it, rather than their intersection. Thus, they require "10 years experience in Clojure" etc. because they think that anyone who doesn't say they have it really doesn't know anything about it, even though that usually disqualifies the Nash level-three candidates who honestly evaluate themselves.

How many two page resumes do you get? I'm in college, and I've never seen one of my peers take a two page resume to the career fairs.

I've read TONS of two page resumes. I've noticed that headhunters seem to encourage them. However, I'm not going to spend more than a few seconds looking at any given resume, so with multiple pages the chance that I'm going to see what you want me to see is far lower than if it were condensed down.

Really hard to fit years of relevant experience on a single page; you'll see a lot of two page resumes from people with more than a few years of experience. Of course college students don't have two page resumes, they don't yet have enough material that actually needs to be on a resume: they typically have a skills section, an education section, one or two short-term relevant jobs, and maybe enough fluff to fill the rest of the page.

In Germany, Résumés aren't necessarily limited to a a page. Two pages is considered fine too. Three pages is where it starts to be a problem :) Somehow related: The european union standardized a format for a CV:

https://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/europass/home/vernav/Euro...

(Which is a horrible idea imho, but still...)

In France, résumé is only one page because the résumé will give you an interview. And the interview will give you the job.

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