How do you get feedback about what works?
That said, still not as much of an impression as a good cover letter written to demonstrate how their strengths match the vacancy.
- I hired one of the best technical professional writers to help me write a better google doc resume. This took about one month of iterative question/answer comments. Said person is actually the comment above my original comment
- I went and found the best resume designs online, normally from UI/UX designers working at FAANG companies (bestfolios.com/resume). I studied these extensively and took the best elements from various resumes.
- I also have a lot of experience in outsourcing work. I found a designer with similar skills as mine. We did a 10-15 hour design cycle essentially reinventing the resume, this came out to about 100 design iterations. Font-sizes, font-types, white-spacing, font ratio-sizes, greyscale support, layout, were all considerations done.
- I took resume, over another a month and asked developer friends for blind feedback. I think I asked at least 20 or 30 developers. They dumped dropbox comments on the version-controlled PDF, I took every suggestion to heart and considered whether it made sense. Sometimes I would load my resume with bad typos, errors, and sometimes bad designs intentionally as a control to vet the best reviewers. If they didn't catch those errors, I wouldn't take the feedback as seriously.
- I asked my friend who is a senior instructor at LinkedIn/Lynda.com for feedback. Usually this feedback was more tailored toward content.
- I have a background in HR as well. I know what gets read and what doesn't. That being said, while I did job hunt I also asked for feedback from my recruiter friends. I learned how ATS parsing worked after applying to many jobs, most ATS parsers show you previews of what gets uploaded. Some recruiters use word doc resumes, I got to see how they modified my files and present it to prospective employers. This gave me more benchmarks on what content employers actually like to see. My good friend is a recruiter too so I get insights all the time.
- Potential employers told me what they liked best about the resume. I kept those and amplified it. These were generally svg skill-icons
- Sometimes, I noticed recruiters would struggle to find content, usually this was skills tied for specific projects. I decided to use a key-legend style approach found in geographic maps, people overall liked it.
- I decided to clickmine the resume. I wanted to do actual data analytics in how often my resume's links actually got clicked. I used bit.ly to track how different user groups would click on different parts of resume, this was done in different user testing cycles. I noticed trends in what people clicked who knew me, vs employers who did not.
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So... to see what feedback works. Just ask your friends, employers, recruiters, etc what improvements you can make. Look at what recruiters are actually doing to your word doc resumes. Is your resume self-explanatory (are employers asking you to explain it)? If it's not ... then it's not doing a good job.
That being said, you should really tailor your resume to each job. I still do via a google doc or quickly one-off mod my PDF. But sometimes you don't have too, especially for one-click apply sites / services.
For the record I never use cover letters unless a company explicitly wants it. I don't recommend anyone going down this path of making your own resume, it takes a lot of time and effort.
I only did it because I didn't like any of the resume designs out there. Having a designer resume as a frontend developer is a complimentary skillset anyhow. Also during an interview, I never talk about the resume design process whatsoever. It speaks for itself.
If your curious this is what it looks like: http://bit.ly/hackernews-resume