How to Create a Software Engineer Resume Hiring Managers Will Love | Hacker News Reader

How to Create a Software Engineer Resume Hiring Managers Will Love

standardresume.co

36 pointsrileyt36 comments

One thing that's not on here: Proofread your resume. Have a friend look over it for you. Spell things correctly. I don't care if you use "JavaScript" or "Javascript" but pick one and stick with it. If you're a software engineer, the ability to type and attention to detail are important so show it in your resume. The number of resumes I've seen with glaring mistakes is too damn high.

Totally. Spelling mistakes and grammatical errors are the easiest way to destroy an otherwise good resume.

+1 on spelling. Having gone through thousands of resumes, I've seen some hilarious things. I'd never take away points for a couple of errors, but blatant ones are definitely a turn off.

Also, a public service announcement: if you were leading a project in the past, its "led", not "lead" :)

At the very least, make sure you get rid of all the red squigglies, and ask someone else to read it for you.

What is the easiest way to do that in Word, when it flags many technical terms as spelling errors? You can turn off spell check, but that setting doesn't stay with the document. Also, if you spell check and mark the item as correct, sometimes that action will stay with the document, however grammar items don't seem to stick with the document even after you mark it as correct.

The only way I can think of is to turn it into a PDF, but many places still want a Word doc.

You should be able to add words to your dictionary. I have no idea what to do about the grammar items. Those are the green squigglies. :)

Alternatively, maybe don't use Word? If you must submit a Word doc, maybe export to .DOCX format at the very end of the process?

> Also, a public service announcement: if you were leading a project in the past, its "led", not "lead" :)

I always wish there were verb form of "tech lead." You can say "led X" or "served as tech lead for X" but neither is quite ideal.

"Foobar project [tech lead]"

Resume items do not need to be complete sentences or even fragments, if they communicate information clearly.

I have found errors in sections of my resume from ten years ago, looked at by me and many others dozens of times.

They can lurk.

I don't know if you meant to imply this, but if you think having "Javascript" in one place, and "JavaScript" in another is a "glaring mistake," I think you might just be too damn picky.

It shows a lack of attention to detail, and is a big red flag.

No, it doesn't. It shows a human wrote the text. If this were the one and only inconsistency in the entire resume, it doesn't even rate as one of those tiny flags they sometimes put in mixed drinks.

I disagree here. I think this is a valid way to distinct 10x engineers vs other ones.

Yeah, because the 10x will probably have a sloppier resume and still go where they want while the average people who need to take every advantage will be more likely to meticulously fret over their resume like this.

I'm interested to see your data showing this is the case.

In a profession where

  void f(const std::vector<std::string>& arg);

and

  void f(const std::vector<std::string> arg);

do very different things, I'd say that you should at least sell yourself as paying attention to detail.

You could say that this is a poor design of C++, but pick your language, there's usually something like this somewhere. At least in any of the commonly used languages. (Although, C++ is particularly bad about it.)

Your example likely wouldn't even compile. Get back to me when there's a compiler and testing framework for resumes. Nobody misunderstands when you write "Javascript" once and then "JavaScript" later on. And, even in code, where there are compilers and testing frameworks, bugs happen, even in code written by excellent engineers.

I'm not saying a resume littered with typos is a good thing. But, a couple here and there? Whatever. Tell me you've never made a typo in a document you've written for work.

I am torn on this.

I want to agree with the logic.

But many of the best software engineers I know can't spell or format English consistently.

Of course resumes are higher stakes than code comments.

But I care #1 that your resume communicates clearly to me what I need to know to judge whether you would benefit my team. If you typoed something, or your formatting is a bit wonky, even if I notice, I am not likely to care.

(Obviously, an excessive amount of errors can demonstrate a communication issue.)

Another aspect to consider is that weighting English errors strongly can introduce bias against many demographics.

Rather, I find it best to assume good faith, that the candidate prepared their resume to the best of their circumstance. Only evidence to the contrary should hold weight.

Agreed. People know the difference between hyper attention to detail for code and lax attention to detail in English.

You can go pretty far down this rabbit hole and be a grammar Nazi. All it shows is that you’re a grammar Nazi.

Not something I'd consider a glaring mistake, but it already shows me you didn't bother to look over your own resume in great detail. It wouldn't cause me to reject a candidate, but I can't not think about that.

Good engineers make mistakes consistently. It’s a hallmark I was taught when working on power substations. So no, it’s not the end all be all but it is valuable signal.

Most important to keep in mind is the immediate goal that each recipient of your resume is trying to achieve.

The hiring manager is trying to narrow down a (potentially large) field of candidates. Make it easy for them to spot on your resume the reasons they should consider you.

Your interviewers (i.e., future co-workers) are looking for things to talk to you about, ways to connect with you. Include on your resume conversation starters which will provide you the opportunity to connect positively with them and demonstrate the value you will bring.

I have not been a hiring manager, but I am often the "future co-worker". Often we are handed your resume minutes before interviewing you. If I cannot quickly find anything interesting to ask you about because your resume is too difficult to scan, contains too much jargon, or has too much extraneous information, you may not get the opportunity to tell me those interesting things.

The classic writing advice applies: remove anything unnecessary to convey your message and help the reader achieve their goal.

Before a human reads it, a machine will read it.

It is 2020, every other HR who wants to squeeze out a little more time for themselves (may be to use it to browse insta/whatsapp/FB) would end up using some shit "AI/ML tool" sold by some snake oil vendor portraying it as suberb intelligent automation that aguments recruiters' intelligence for recruitment, at scale.

Every one first has to please the API/ML-model even before a human casts a look at the resume.

Tune resume to be read easily by a machine.

The best move is to get referrals. A referral almost always allows you to bypass the nonsensical "AI/ML tool", as well as many clueless recruiters.

Does anyone have suggestions for how to check if your resume is correctly parsed by these tools?

I have a question that I haven't seen answered. How do I put mentoring skills in a resume?

I am currently mentoring 2 interns, two new college graduates, 3 new college grads from last year and a few others that I met over at other companies or online.

How do I put those skills on a resume? Because I've seen that my colleagues aren't very good at this. They're neither patient enough nor expressive enough to mentor someone and share learning resources, sympathise with newcomers, or slow down their pace and not make it seem so obvious that mentoring or pairing with an inexperienced engineer sometimes does slow us down.

Do a lot of employers still ask for resumes?

I haven't applied to a job in a while, but as a hiring manager, I usually just ask for their GitHub and LinkedIn, making the resume optional if it's more up to date than LinkedIn or the don't have LI.

From our experience, that's still relatively uncommon, but a growing trend.

Standard Resume gives you a web resume, in addition to the PDF. The web resumes are a good replacement for a LinkedIn profile if you don't have one, and are a better branded and easier to read version of your profile, if you do have one.

Here is an example: https://standardresume.co/r/dana-andrews

The formatting is fine, but I learned surprisingly little about the candidate's work, skills, specialisations, character or aptitude, considering what they must have done over the course of 20 years.

So the example resume doesn't seem to me like something to aspire to.

(That said I've been struggling to write mine for a while, so I don't want to imply it's easy.)

That's a fair analysis. We are working on better sample resume content, to match the quality of the template designs. That copy was from our very first sample resume, when we created the app as a side project, five years ago.

What resources have you been using to help you write your resume?

Yes. In finance, pretty much all you do is proprietary and all opensource work must be painfully precleared, so most of GHs for people are empty.

Most companies (even megabanks) also have strict rules what you can and can't put on your linked in.

A resume is therefore crucial.

> Most companies (even megabanks) also have strict rules what you can and can't put on your linked in.

Fascinating! I hadn't heard this. Do those restrictions apply to resumes too, and are just harder to enforce? Or are they actually LI only restrictions?

> so most of GHs for people are empty.

Oh, to be clear, I don't ding anyone for having an empty GH. There are lots of reasons not to maintain one. I just like to see it if they do.

Resumes are much harder to enforce, so they tend to be juicier. But if someone comes in and starts spewing clearly proprietary stuff, its a huge red flag during hiring.

The post says to use a 'modern font'... what is that?

I'm a designer who usually cares a great deal about typeface usage. On your resume, I don't care if you use Times New Roman (but pick one) as long as you can present your information well.

I still prefer to send my resume as a plain ASCII .txt file.

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