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Comment by aaron695 | Hacker News Reader

Rather than taking the clichéd lesson that recruiters are not humans and evil.

How about, apply for jobs even if you don't have the skills they are asking for.

Because id rather apply to a job at a company that pays enough respect to write a useful and information rich job description before asking me to spend time researching them, writing a cover letter, and tailoring my cv to highlight relevant experience for their needs.

Then don’t do that. I have never tailored my resume to a specific company. As far as cover letter, I haven’t written a cover letter in 25 years.

On the hiring side, I’ve never actually paid attention to one and I thought they were kind of quaint.

Cover letters are sometimes requested, you look like a dick if you ignore the request, more so if you copy and paste without atleast a basic find and replace.

As for tailoring your cv to the role, I have 15 years of work experience, and I limit my cv to one page so it stands out, interviews are required, and my age doesnt show easily. In the half or so page I have available for work experience examples, I have to show relevance. Its pointless me talking about that time I wrote embeded software if Im applying for a react/node gig.

What does your cv look like if you can just send the same thing everywhere?

Which company in tech requests cover letters?

My resume is two pages - nothing before 2008 on it.

I only started taking my career seriously in 2008. Since then, I’ve been very focused about which jobs I will target and which technologies I will work on. Both my resume and my job search focus on that. Anything mentioning my C bit twiddling days got removed by 2012. Of course I didn’t mention my stint writing FORTRAN on Stratus VOS mainframes.

2008 - I was an “expert beginner” and I did have to massage my resume to get a mid level C# enterprise Dev job. The next two jobs after that were focused on staying in the “full stack developer role”

2015 - My focus was getting a job where I could lead a project so I focused on the projects that I had led. My resume focused on that for the next two jobs.

2020 - I was focused on getting a job as a “digital transformation consultant”, “enterprise architect”, or a “cloud consultant”. My resume was very targeted toward that. I only applied for one job - Amazon/AWS. By the time I was looking post Covid, every other decently paying consulting job had disappeared. I didn’t have to tailor my resume to AWS - that’s where all of my experience was on that side.

These sorts of inflated requirements disproportionally discourage women and other underrepresented minorities.

Care to source that myth?

https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless...

This doesn’t mean anything.

How so? I would imagine it be the case if the job requirements were "3 years exp with k8s, 5 if you are a woman".

Correct. Years of experience requirements are there to filter out people who aren't confident in their skills and keep them from even applying.

Though I did get bounced later in a hiring process because my "total years of experience didn't qualify for the amount we require for this level of job".

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