Ask HN: What's Wrong with My Resume? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's Wrong with My Resume?

4 pointsfaizshah4 comments

Hi HN,

Over the years this community has given me amazing advice and support that I can't thank you enough for. I'm now looking for jobs/internships and I'm having a rough time.

I'm about to graduate this semester from college and in the past two years I have applied to over 150 internship/job apps but I get a frustratingly low interview rate.

The hiring process at tech companies is frustratingly opaque, I have no idea what I'm doing wrong.

Could you guys give me some constructive/actionable criticism of my resume?

Here's my resume (with phone and address removed): [redacted]

View on HN

Put relevant coursework at the bottom or, better, get rid of it entirely. It's already understood you've taken classes relevant to your field of study, and no employer is going to base whether to hire you or not based on which specific classes you took. Your internships are most important and it should look like what you value the most. This makes it seem as if you are excited about working and felt you did good while working.

As far as projects, they're all school homework assignments, right? I'd get rid of all them except the ones you really are proud of, and if possible have a link to the source code on the resume. Otherwise it looks like your desperately padding.

It's alright to have a short resume. If you are straight out of college, it's expected, and some employers prefer younger, less experienced workers because they are more likely to do what their told. What isn't cool, though, is to try and make it look like you have more experience then you do, and then when someone reads your resume more closely, they discover that you've been trying to look like something you're not.

Thanks for the advice. Last time I went with with a shorter resume and from like 20 or 30 applications (with cover letters) I got 2 interviews. So this time I went with a different approach I added every significant project to my resume (in my major every coding class has a 2-4 person, 6-8 week final project).

So last time I got some feedback that they were “looking for someone more experienced” (for an internship) so this time I just went with enumerating the coding experiences I had.

I’ll cut it back down, thanks!

couple of things:

- first, I would highly recommend to stop blindly submitting resumes... go talk to some people. Meetup is great for it, but there are all sorts of ways to network with other developers, they can refer you if they like you.

- it looks like you literally put everything that you've ever done with computers on that resume. This makes reading it tedious. It also doesn't leave much to the imagination.

- The vast majority of your resume are projects and coursework (physically it takes up 2/5) cut that down to the most important stuff.

- Your linkedin needs to be fixed asap.

- Whether or not it is true... you have a massive amount of frameworks, languages, and libraries on there as well... for those of use that have been in the industry for a while its kind of a red flag that you don't know any of them particularly well. Try honing it into your best skills and your favorite technologies... it will help when you interview.

> It also doesn't leave much to the imagination.

I never thought of it this way, thanks! Last year I went with a short resume without the coursework and I got 2 interviews from 30 apps with a cover letter. I managed to get feedback last time that they were “looking for someone more experienced” so this time around I tried to enumerate my experiences...but I guess I overdid it.

> Whether or not it is true... you have a massive amount of frameworks, languages, and libraries on there as well... for those of use that have been in the industry for a while its kind of a red flag that you don't know any of them particularly well. Try honing it into your best skills and your favorite technologies

Thanks! I didn’t think about this, I basically tried to write out a summary of what languages/frameworks I used in that project. I guess I should cut it down to be less specific like just python, SQL, google cloud instead of going into particular libraries and technologies.

Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate the time and perspective!

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