Ask HN: What's a good resume format? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's a good resume format?

Need to redo refresh my tired resume. What has worked for you in terms of layout and what sections it contains?

It depends on your industry. I work on hiring engineers at a startup, so I can only speak to the kinds of things I look for in an eng resume, and my comments probably don't apply to more creative fields like design (where layout is much more important).

For engineering resumes, content trumps layout. As long as your resume is legible and is in a common format (pdf, doc, txt), it should be fine. Before I go on to talk about content, here are a few legibility fails I've encountered:

   - 3+ pages (unless you invented the lightbulb; otherwise STFU)

   - Poor use of endlines.

OK, now onto content. You should have the following sections:

   - Contact info (email, phone, and [GitHub, your website, StackOverflow, etc])

   - Education

   - Jobs

   - Personal projects, if any (NOT CLASS PROJECTS)

   - Skills (optional, see below)

That's it. No objective (in 99% of resumes this is bullshit fluff), no summary (see the part about bullshit fluff), no "references available upon request".

The last thing I'll say about content is that you should try your best to explain what you actually worked on at each of your jobs. I don't care about how you used Hibernate to accomplish Object Relational Mapping. That's what Hibernate does. That's not what you did. Similarly, please try not to pepper your resume with a bunch of buzzwords. I know that you my need buzzwords to get past the HR filter, but if so, please list the languages you know and all the frameworks you've used in one "Skills" section at the end. Use common sense when trying to decide how many languages to drop in in a job description -- if you were explaining to your friend what you did, would you mention the language? If so, include it. If not, don't.

If you found this helpful and have further questions or want me to take a look, please feel free to email me (see my HN user info).

- Personal projects, if any (NOT CLASS PROJECTS)

When I was going through resume workshops at the end of college, they recommended putting class projects, so long as they're actually worth a damn. CS 101 fish tank in java? No. Senior design project for a nonprofit? Yes.

Of course, my resume format for those was:

+Info

+Education

+Experience

+Skills | Projects

+Misc

So with that, I didn't actually list out what I did in each class, like some people seem to do.

The problem is that most of the projects that people list are not worth a damn, so at this point, my strategy is to ignore unless you specifically draw attention to a project and prove that it's something that required some amount of initiative/originality.

Senior design project for a nonprofit, assuming it's something you had ownership over, definitely sounds like it's worth listing, but projects like this, unfortunately, are in the minority.

I think it is industry/point in career dependent, but some good rules of thumb:

Do not use MS word templates Start with education if you are a fresh grad Start with last place you worked, or are currently working Use bullets to denote major things you were responsible for… And did.

There are lots of resources on the internet for this. Go to your school and ask them for a sample resume. Email me (my email is my hn name at gmail) and I’ll send you an example. I was hired by Intel Corp (finance) and currently work at a prestigious finance company.

I recently took part in the hiring process at a large company.

I think the main purpose of the resume is to get you on to the shortlist. You basically need to look at the requirements and try to match their keywords. When the HR guy is looking at 100+ resumes and need to whittle it down to 5~10 for interviews, you know they're not reading it in depth. Make your resume scannable, and eliminate fluff as much as possible.

After that, it's all about the written/phone tests and the interview process.

I use LaTeX to design my layout and it has worked pretty well for me. I have an education section, skills and a set of projects that I have worked on. Obviously the most emphasis is on the projects, languages I have used, team work etc. I have seen resumes with hobbies, references etc which IMO are irrelevant. If we get to the stage where I have to ask you culture fit questions, I would rather ask them in person rather than read them of a resume.

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