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Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

> * embellish your resume and work history. If you’ve read a tutorial on a technology, you list it.

This seems like not a great idea.

It works when you’re being filtered on keywords. A competent C# software engineer who has worked with web tech can list Blazor, ASP.NET MVC, or even PHP if they understand the fundamentals of web dev. Let’s not kid ourselves, most of these frameworks and web languages are very similar.

If you’re actually desperate for a job, you’ll take what you get and rise to the challenge.

Double edged sword. In every job I've had, there's always been at least one coworker who makes a point of probing items on a person's resume - even if it is irrelevant to the current job. If the person doesn't have more than a bare minimum knowledge of the topic they claim to have experience in, it is an automatic disqualification.

A lot of people really don't like resume embellishers.

I list anything I've completed more than a tiny amount of paying work in. Maybe leaving something off if I think it'll hurt my chances, comp-negotiation, or get me shunted to shitty projects. Otherwise, if I got paid to do it, and shipped, it goes on the list.

However, I can barely "hello world" without mistakes or consulting references in any language I've gone more than a week without writing. So if I only listed languages & such that I'm ready to take a quiz over at any given moment, the list would always be very short. I'd miss a lot of job opportunities. Guessing that'd get me DQ'd from your process, but taking the alternative approach of only listing the very-small set of things I'm ready to work in right this second at any given time would surely have had very bad consequences for my career.

We send a self assessment form (which is pretty much "here is list of techs we use, judge yourself on how good you are on them" before recruiting and ask candidates near-only of things they say they are good on the resume or that form.

Soooooooo many bullshiters

Do you make them type a number or is it free flowing text?

A scale of 1-5 is really not helpful. A 2 for me maybe a 3 for you, etc. I prefer being explicit and writing text to indicate what/how much I know.

You don't have to put in your resume though. Still dubious strategy, because you might be getting more irrelevant positions advertised to you because of that

Then you endup with 12 take home tests in a variety of frameworks that all require mental energy needed elsewhere

I think there is a careful balance that needs to be met between what HR wants to see and what hiring manager/peers want to see. I was mostly lucky enough lately that most of my recent positions were direct referrals to hiring manager, which meant I did not have to hunt for keywords or anything silly like that, so I could get away with my resume/linkedin looking understated.

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