Resumes and cover letters: An extension school resource (2021) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Resumes and cover letters: An extension school resource (2021) [pdf]

hwpi.harvard.edu

190 pointswabbu108 comments

Just FYI, if you use those suggestion for a German company that requires a Lebenslauf, good luck getting picked. These rules are general enough, but they are VERY American.

Boasting about your results (e.g. about how you saved your previous company A LOT of money singlehandedly) will not fly very well in a German setting, even if it's an international company.

There is a U shaped curve here. Even in the US, boasting on a resume is considered 'non-elite' and 'low-class' once you reach high enough levels.

If you have won international accolades or have a recognizable marker of prestige, then your credentials do the talking for you. Boasting can be seen as compensating for a less than stellar resume. You don't need to mention any qualitative technical creds if you've won international competitions, published at top conferences or are the maintainer of a high-stars open source project.

Similarly, for the first few years out of undergrad, your resume gets shorter before it gets longer. It is a recognition of dropping useless credentials from your resume, to keep only the high priority markers of prestige /impact among all your undergrad cruft. It it shows a certain confidence in what you have listed (1 great project is enough), recognition of the limited time spent on it by a recruiter, and an understanding as someone who has an "insider's" view into the industry. Famously, the most elite will have an almost inconvienently barebones profile, as a flex. (Practically, Often to avoid terrible recruiters and getting a high SNR ratio)

Why would a German company not want to hear about the impact that a potential employee created? What's the difference in culture here? Genuine question.

It's a cultural difference. You would be seen as someone who sells themselves too strongly. There's also a general disbelief around extreme individualism. You can't possibly have done all that alone, you still had a network of people around you. And even if you were indeed instrumental to reaching that goal, boasting like that shows that you are not a good sport that acknowledges colleagues and carry them along and up.

I think one of the biggest cultural clashes that Americans experience abroad, especially in Europe, is discovering that life isn't a constant sales pitch to sell yourself.

Oddly enough I hear these recommendations here in Ireland as well, even though we're generally a culture that hates bragging in all its forms. Maybe this is rooted in the English-speaking world in general?

The main argument I hear is that phrasing achievements in a team centric way makes it sound more like you're claiming the achievements of others. Eg:

- I developed project X increasing revenue by Y

- Part of team A which developed X increasing revenue by Y

Depending on how you phrase it the individual statement could sound like you're unrealistically claiming what must be group achievements, or the humble answer could sound like you had nothing to do with the achievements at all and are trying to claim some bare meaningless connection to success.

Ireland seems to have an intense undercurrent of begrudgery; it's a very strange place. I've had pretty good experience with my American-style resume (not really a CV but meh) - but I also generally discount Irish companies since they pay half as much as the multinationals.

I worry about my kids growing up somewhere success is viewed as something to be mocked, and hard work is for chumps.

It's a residue of being historically a very poor country. There's no belief that hard work is for chumps - laziness is also looked upon very negatively. What we do have is no faith that hard work will lead to "success" or material wellbeing - hard work is what you just have to do to survive.

Until very recently the Irish historical experience has been that you work very hard your whole life and at best your children's conditions are the same as yours, at worst they deteriorate.

In this context it makes sense that bragging or boasting are looked upon very unfavourably. If everyone is working themselves to the bone to just barely survive, then "success" isn't so much a result of your moral superiority and work ethic as it is a result of dumb luck. In that context boasting is distasteful.

The attitude that success is to be mocked and hard work is for chumps comes from the belief that luck plays a much larger role in outcomes than an individual's actions. If someone is successful mostly because of luck (but not humble) they deserve to be mocked, and if you work hard all your life but don't get lucky, you'll just be a worked out chump with nothing to show for it.

I don't necessarily agree with the attitude, but there is something to be said for optimizing your choices around a slightly pessimistic assumption of luck.

To be fair, hard work that isn't well-directed is a waste. Digging a giant hole with a spoon is hard work but won't get you anywhere. But it's strange to me that if I tell people an idea here in Ireland the first thing people do is look for reasons it won't work, but if I say the same thing to friends back home in California they'll look for reasons it could. Maybe it's just my friend circles.

This was exactly my experience growing up in Ireland, and was the primary reason I immigrated to the US after college.

Pretty sad that our biggest success story is the Collisons, who knew to get the hell out.

> - Part of team A which developed X increasing revenue by Y

Well, I always use anon-personal construct that shifts the interpretation to the mind of the reader:

- Development of project X increasing revenue by Y

If it strikes them as an important piece of information, I'll explain my role in it.

What you said is true about the way people there emotionally process things.

However, it also flies in the face of reality sometimes. There are indeed decisions and choices that can be made by single individual people in a single moment that can cost or save an organization huge amounts of time, money, or both. Telling the truth about those things is not boasting.

Of course, many people overstate the issue, but this general allergy to claims of greatness is a good way to also reject the actually-great.

When every CV is embellished to the extreme there's no way of distinguishing the superstars from the braggarts.

Assuming that the most bragging CVs are all written by superstars who single handedly saved every company they've worked at is the less realistic of the two options.

Oh yeah, I agree. I'm not claiming that it can't be true that one person alone might be instrumental to a big change or a breakthrough in companies. It's the way you present it that wouldn't fly.

Traditional German bosses also have a very bad trait that is the complete inability of motivating through positive reinforcement, or through verbal appreciation. It's so well known that there is a flourishing coaching industry based around teaching exactly that.

That said, if I had to point out a deeply detrimental trait of the German recruitment culture is the over-reliance on degrees, masters, institutional certifications, and such, which are mostly useless in determining the cultural fit of a potential employee.

You can boast with true statements. "I lifted 100 kg, and it was no big deal." Contrast that with "By maintaining a workout program I managed to work up to lifting 100 kg without issue." It is about the tone and the "spin" if you will.

And which one is better in your opinion?

FWIW, American cultural attitudes about this seem to vary widely (as far as I have a basis to compare), and many who do self-promote reserve that only for professional contexts.

Coming from an American environment in which "boasting" was discouraged, the seemingly necessary self-promotion around some universities was unfamiliar.

I still naturally prefer to say "we" when speaking of business successes, though all the coaching for resumes and interviews advises the opposite.

Possible tip for people programmed against boastfulness: Consider the scenario of being interviewed, when you keep naturally saying "we", praising colleagues, etc. Imagine that the interviewer is not understanding, due to culture gap, and is underestimating you in a way that threatens your survival. You might find yourself naturally making arguments for your value, which is closer to what that interviewer expects. Remember those arguments, and reuse them in similar contexts, with less of an insecure tone. :)

That's interesting, thanks. Out of curiosity, is there a guide to learn more about the German style?

I think this guide is not too bad [1]. Some stuff depends on the business you are in and the company you are applying at. Listing the marital status used to be very important, but I don’t believe it still is.

German companies love official certificates, as if they really prove something (most time it doesn’t imo)

As most people here, I am working in IT. Since there is a demand for us, I don’t feel like I really have to stick to those rules. For example, I gave up on having a German CV, even for non international companies. I was tired of curating two CVs. Companies expect us to be proficient in English anyway, so I expect the same.

[1] https://hallogermany.com/blog/cv-lebenslauf

Just to back this up, Jana is a fairly experienced career coach. Her advice is definitely worth listening to.

However, I suspect that resume cultural differences aren't that big of a deal. I've seen my share of resumes, and they tend to be bad in a universal way.

It turns out that most people aren't great writers, so they just emulate what they think business letters sound like. It reads equally weird in every country, like any DIY promotional material.

This is correct. IT professionals are such in high demand, that company might indeed overlook the "American CV Syndrome" a lot more for them.

> IT professionals are such in high demand

This is a myth (Fachkräftemangellüge) and utter nonsense. If it were true, IT professional salaries in Europe/Germany would explode to the insane heights we read about from the bay area and FAGMAN companies. I can provide you infinite sources that explain that the average salary for software engineers in Germany is somewhere around 65.000 euro a year, before taxes. Even the vast majority of IT employees with "architect" in their name won't even make 100.000.

My international company based in Austria, Vienna has no trouble at all to fill vacancies and we usually get several fitting candidates we can pick from.

It’s just a pain in the ass to have a team over there.

In Europe? Why?

I am not sure about German companies but I'm almost always sceptical of these claims. It might be that I have always worked in high tech manufacturing industry and any person making a "single handedly" claim is lying. You may have come up with the algorithm, but someone made the system to deploy it, someone made available all the data, someone else made the dashboard library which you built upon. Making these kind of claims are at best selfish and at worst stealing credit.

To a German such boasting would sound like you are an embellishing loudmouth who at best likes to sniff his own farts and at worst makes stories up. Would you want a Zapp Brannigan as a colleague? Such stories can be better told in the personal interview, where the recruiter can judge the validity better.

Cultural norms around tooting one's own horn vary widely, but the United States is a far end of the "toot away" spectrum (with Israel and some parts of Central America)

From a UK perspective rather than German, but it's basically impossible to verify and almost certainly a team effort if it's real. We tend to frown on people claiming credit for things that they didn't actually do themselves. We can be quite cynical.

It's braggy and reeks of narcissism. It's also probably not true.

Why would you expect advice to graduates of an American University presumably about the American job market to have any relevance in Germany? I wouldn't expect job market advice from TU Berlin to have relevance in Ohio.

Most HN people should refrain from soliciting with (conservative, years behind) German firms anyhow. Not only do they pay shit compared to other countries, their taxation rate is also among the highest. Beggers/Germans can't be choosers.

You pay into a social system that generally works. Now please backpedal into your Ayn Rand corner and just re-read Atlas Shrugged for the 100th time.

Are we talking career or politics ? I don't like these facts either. Note that even a java certificate can buy you entry in most countries.

One unanswered question that I have around resumes is how to represent work done as a contractor or consultant for another company. I've seen everything from making it look like you were employed by the customer directly (obviously bad) to intentionally vague descriptions of the company such as "fortune 500 defense contractor" and every variation in between.

My favorite was a candidate that described consulting with "large internet search engine company based in Mountain View, CA".

Even when I worked at a consulting firm, there were huge variances in how folks would represent themselves on both internal and external resumes.

I think it's a reasonable thing to think about. I list the client if that's what seems reasonable. If prompted, I'd say "Technically I worked for an agency that provided next to zero value and I don't consider them relevant for the purpose of my CV"

If I was consulting through a company on more of a short-term basis for multiple clients, and that consulting company played a more significant role in employing me, than ya they'd get recognition. As it stands, I list the client I worked for, and in my current case I use the name of the one client I work for rather than the proxy company I technically work for.

There's a number of valid situations to be in, I usually do list "contract" if it was truly a contract, but otherwise I just do what seems reasonable, and if someone thinks that's deceptive, then I guess that's reasonable too.

One way I've liked seeing it as a hiring manager is to treat it as one large block ("self-employed" or "contract work") and then list individual projects as paragraphs in the description. That can help you avoid looking like a job-hopper.

ha I thought about doing this, but after 14 years of freelancing you accumulate - a lot - of those entries. Also nobody really cares beyond let's say 5 years. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You don't have to list all the entries! Just put in the fun ones, with a bit at the top. "A variety of successful web-based projects, including:"

[role] at Company A, through Company B

Lol of course "hardvard" resume templates would have education listed above work experience, unlike almost every other resume I've ever seen.

New grads typically put school above internships in my experience.

Interesting - from what I've seen when hiring for FT from undergrad, most people put internships above education.

But end up doing Java / .NET gigs like the gen pop.

I wish everybody would follow this format. It's so easy to read, everything is in a predictable place. I've seen so many poorly formatted resumes with things like

* Soft skills listed above all work and education

* Multiple columns of information

* Inconsistent formatting. Past/present tense inconsistent within a job, extra spacing between sections, and typos.

* Files submitted as "Resume 1.pdf" and similar. Not a huge deal individually, but it's tedious to download 10 resumes like that from the hiring platform then rename as they're reviewed.

> Not a huge deal individually, but it's tedious to download 10 resumes like that from the hiring platform then rename as they're reviewed

What kind of shit platform preserves uploaded filenames? At worst they should turn into opaque IDs. Ideally into an easily indexable, sortable, consistent, human readable filename format.

> What kind of shit platform preserves uploaded filenames?

You're coming in pretty strong for design space that has plenty of room for differences and isn't even that dramatic or extreme? And you're on the weird side of it?

You don't want your email attachments to preserve filenames both in platform and when you download them? Dropbox? Flashdrives?!?

If you're responding to the candidate eventually it'll be nice to be able to respond with "You send me Resume_ABC_V1.pdf" for whatever reason it comes up.

If you're preserving file contents like this for later retrieval you want the filename too like, atleast 90% of the time.

I've been on both sides of this argument. Return files as originally named vs return files based on a filenaming rule. I think both have merit, but there's an asterisk next to each with a list of caveats. GIGO is always fun.

The reason this exists is because even highly qualified graduates (Harvard included) suck at writing CV's/Resumes. How do i know? I went to a similar kind of college.

All of us go through the same 16-20 year education grind (K-12 + University). At the end of it we are made to differentiate ourselves through our CV's/Resumes.

A simple rule of thumb: A CV/Resume should be strictly-one-page and honest. Not sure if anyone needs cover letters anymore.

> A CV/Resume should be strictly-one-page

How many years have you been working? 1 page is tough at 15 years unless you leave details out.

You absolutely will have to leave details out - the HR person scanning through 30+ CVs doesn’t have the time or interest in reading through 3 pages of your work history to see if you tick the boxes they’re trying to match. You don’t have to list every job you’ve had, just list the relevant recent ones for the job you’re applying for. The ones you’ll talk about in your interview.

If HR is reading the resume you’re applying to the wrong companies anyway.

Totally.

How can HR know if my experience is relevant for the position? Do they even understand what my CV says? I know people in HR that could do it. But most likely no.

That’s a very interesting point, who receives the job applications in the right companies?

The engineering manager or someone trained or trusted by the engineering manager to properly evaluate resumes.

Perhaps at a < 100 person company or start-up, but having recruited at dozens of tech companies, this isn't the case 99% of places.

In my previous company, resumes were forwarded to us, the tech team. After all we’re the one recruiting, and we’re the one who will maybe work with this person. We were also the ones giving technical interviews, and also did a team interview.

HR should not be in charge of recruiting for the teams.

Perhaps this can succeed at a low growth company, not making many hires. Did you conduct your own sourcing as well, proactively engaging 'cold leads' you found on linkedin, twitter, github, etc? Most hires don't come from job postings - they are recruited, and its a laborious task, esp if its a specialized niche or skillset. You need the recruiting team if you plan on growing quickly.

Anecdotally, majority of resumes are more than 1 page. 2 pages probably the most common.

> the HR person scanning through 30+ CVs doesn’t have the time or interest in reading through 3 pages of your work history to see if you tick the boxes they’re trying to match.

I thought they had software for that now.

Totally.

I've 25 years experience. Listing only the last 10 or 15 would leave important details out. Cluttering all in one page would be awful. Even if I write a "one line" for the positions in the first years of employment, I cannot put it on one page.

Like coding rules: you cannot make hard rules that apply always. It depends.

And the same if you’re in academia, we have lists of papers and conferences we need to fit in

Depending on the role, resume readers typically don't care about where or what you worked on more than 2 jobs ago or 5 years ago, unless it is uniquely germane to the job being applied for.

15 years in tech is a good time to start rounding down your age.

Lol. Yeah just go to the SVP-and-up offsites of any tech company and you’ll see nothing but people in their 20’s…

It’s not 1995 anymore, tech is run by old people, the youth are the expendable labor just like any other industry.

Tons and tons of employers will still require or expect a cover letter. At least in the US.

Résumé guidance is all over the place and I think largely comes down to the reader's preferences, which are wildly inconsistent, so there's no such thing as the One Best Résumé layout and/or length. See a sibling post claiming that a one-pager is a "red flag".

None of this is scientific and every single thing you do during an application and interview process can easily be one hiring manager's "best practice" and another's "red flag". It's a minefield, because it's all basically arbitrary but many people in the hiring process will have strong feelings about various unimportant details, regardless, because they're just casting about for some signal in all the noise, such that they end up taking a lot of the noise as signal.

Most effective cover letter I ever experimented with was a simple preamble expressing interest in the company and the particular position (2-3 sentences, just enough to demonstrate basic eloquence), followed by "In the sake of brevity, here's a T-chart matching my qualifications to your requirements:" where I put in a T-chart pairing most of the bullet points in the job posting with a description of the skills I had. Since most of the requirements were similar between multiple job postings, I had LaTeX shortcuts to reference a pre-made pile of qualification statements. Took me about 5 minutes to hammer out, and definitely improved my rate of receiving responses by about a factor of 2.

> A CV/Resume should be strictly-one-page and honest.

Yeah, no. I was an advocate for this until recently. I realized it's not fitting anymore. Maybe I should do a dumbed-down version in the first page and fill the position details on the second.

I always stick to 2 pages (25 years ~10 jobs) but include the URL of the HTML version of my CV/resume which has the full details of each role. You may need to be creative about how you include the URL... as some recruiters will edit it out if you put it in the header or footer.

If your resume is a single page, you send the message that most of what you did isn't relevant, isn't important or doesn't matter. I see this as a red flag.

Or they basically only need cover letters with a pro forma resume because they’re going through their network which has been my case for 25 years or so.

I question if these guidelines mean anything. My strategy, if I had a degree from Harvard (or associated, in this case), I would be to put "I have a degree from Harvard" & a Harvard logo on the resume, plus some level of indirection to make it look less blunt. Harvard-educated students are possibly the pool of people with the least competitive pressure to come up with a good resume.

Go find a management consultant with 10 years experience and ask them for advice to get a good resume written. It won't look like this.

Depending on your field, Harvard grads could be applying for jobs against other Harvard grads and applicants with prestigious work experience.

FWIW, this is from Harvard Extension School, not Harvard.

Wondering why you think like this? Harvard has 12 schools, extension being one of them. They all grant a Harvard degree. I've been very pleased with it, very challenging course work. Several of those courses shared with what you consider "real" Harvard students, the only difference being they had to be in person at the lecture hall.

Of course such guides are completely specific to the customs of one specific culture. In other words, this is more or less useless if you don't live in North America. Okay, well, maybe not quite useless but one should certainly take the outlined recommendations with a big grain of salt if you live somewhere else.

What else would you expect from a US university helping students in the US job market?

Does anyone write cover letters anymore when applying for jobs online?

I’ve been applying to a few roles and getting a good amount of callbacks without submitting a cover letter or anything.

My friend is a FAANG recruiter and basically says he doesn’t have time to read them so they don’t matter to him personally.

Are they still a good use of time to write?

My default approach is write a cover letter if it comes from the heart (yes, really).

I got all my recent jobs without a cover letter. I didn't feel any connection to the jobs or people knew me already well and wanted to hire me. I never felt like copying 5 paragraphs of bs just to check a box.

The last time I wrote a cover letter I really wanted the position and I really felt that I'm an excellent match for their requirements. It was a forming team, where the technical person was my friend, but the decision was up to a business person higher up. I wanted him to know already before the interview that I'm serious about this position. The interview went well, they both mentioned at a later point my cover letter, and I enjoyed working there.

I have just been through the Google interviews, and all the googler acquaintances told me, "don't bother with the cover letter, either your CV is good enough to get to the technical phone screening or not". One even said that the only reason to write a cover letter "if it makes you feel better", because it will make zero difference throughout the whole process. YMMV.

> Are they still a good use of time to write?

No. If someone that matters reviews your resume, they won't care about the letter. It is something people write when they expect they'll be read by HR. In that case, you should write a single cover letter and have a few templated bits (the company, some parts of the industry they work in, maybe an anecdote related to those industries) that you swap out. Even that is IMO too much effort for something that won't benefit anyone but people not qualified to evaluate you.

For a straight-ahead technical role in an organization that will likely get a stack of candidates and sort them by qualification, then probably not. For any job that requires interpersonal nuance or lots of cooperative teamwork or artistic creativity, the cover letter could be more important than the resume. I've evaluated candidates for both types of roles.

They’re useful in certain situations, for example when your skill/experience set does not completely match the role requirements, but you still want to make a case for yourself. As a person involved in hiring process at a small, but established company, I can say they’re definitely read, when submitted.

Depends a lot on the hiring process. And on the cover letter.

For my process, resume spammers are a problem; I want people actually interested in the job. So I'll have some sort of turing test. One way to pass that is to write enough of a job-specific cover letter. Especially valuable to me is a few sentences on why you personally are a match for the specific role.

I think it's also valuable for people whose resume doesn't totally tell the story of why they're the right person. E.g., I recall a cover letter from somebody who had been out of the industry for a few years; it was good that they recognized the issue and had thought about how to overcome it. It's similarly good for people who are changing tracks a bit.

But yeah, I'm sure a lot of places pay little attention to the humans they're hiring, so if you're happy working at a place like that, they're fine to skip.

Your cover letter should be reaching out to someone on the team you want to work on to say you're applying and why you're interested.

For academic jobs, I guess.

This document's typography and layout are all over the place. Normally I wouldn't particularly care, but the goal here is to give advice on the resume/CV.

If you want the best template for a cover letter you should take example of that guy named Leonardo da Vinci. [1] Quite a smart guy!

The idea is it’s not a summary of what you did and what you can do. But it’s all about what value you can offer to them and how you can solve ~their~ most critical problems. It’s like you pitching yourself as a business.

Now go say no to a guy like that and that can demonstrate these skills for free if necessary.

[1] https://lettersofnote.com/2012/03/28/the-skills-of-leonardo-...

That was fantastic. Definitely going to tell my next employer about my convenient and portable siege weaponry.

Ya it’s quite a read! Glad it can help your employer! :)

The dark side is you can see where his money came from so he could continue to do research in stuff he loved. It’s like if you are a dev and you get to code stuff for the army (missiles, planes, software to manage C&C…). Like you pitch how good you can improve the thermal detection of a missile thanks to the cutting edge models in machine learning.

Or like Google and the contract they tried to have. Things are different now. But still at the same time not so much!

They forgot the most important part, make sure you have a “white” sounding name.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-29/job-appli...

Step 1: Put that you went to Harvard on your cover letter.

And try to obfuscate that it is Harvard Extension School that you actually went to.

Those of you that review resumes. Do you like seeing a summary at the top? What do you look for in a summary?

s/hardvard/harvard

s/hardvard/Harvard/g

submitted with the best of intentions.

The regex affected the hardvard. The effect was emending.

(Extension)

Every time I see this type of comment I imagine a freshly minted Harvard undergrad walking up to the Colombian President[1] and saying "yes, but you're Extension so not REAL Harvard".

---

[1] Now ex-president, but President Uribe is a Harvard Extension alumni.

https://www.alumni.hbs.edu/careers/job-search/Pages/resumes-...

HBS templates and examples for comparison (the sections that say login required apparently do not actually require a login; fyi)

It's pretty much the exact same as their standard undergrad resume guide with a lot more examples for the extension programs https://hwpi.harvard.edu/files/ocs/files/undergrad_resumes_a...

Good cover letter seems to be similar to Nigerian scam letter, in structure, style and content.

Way better 'n resumes coming from Softvard grads, anyways.

EDIT: this was a hilarious comment until a mod corrected the title.

Title still reads "hardvard" for me.

Just trying to anticipate the inevitable. Gotta get up pretty early to pull one over on us Hardvard grads.

I always found Standford alumni to be superior.

It's a mere Junior University, after all.

Like Stan Ford from Standford CS?

Submitted title was "Hardvard Resumes and cover letters guide [pdf]"

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