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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

> I helped her tailor her LinkedIn profile and resume with a lot of attention to detail: adding metrics, keywords, results, etc.

FWIW, when I see a resume with metrics and keywords, I immediately filter it out.

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Same.

If it's something like "Refactored the apartment list service improving P99 Latency from 2s to 180ms", it definitely boosts the resumé in my mind. A good engineer would be measuring their impact and likely have numbers like that off the top of their head.

But if it's like "Increased revenue by $18.7M by reducing time-to-first-interaction latency from 2.3s to 117ms, increasing conversion by 47% and LTV by 28%," with the same fidelity on each bullet, I'm very skeptical.

I don't summarily reject AI-written resumés to be clear, as honestly, it's basically a necessity at this point to be competitive with others; it'd be putting yourself at a severe disadvantage on pure principles in a way that has no real positive net effect on society. Even if you disagree with AI resumé screeners, you're only hurting yourself — especially at a time that has the largest impact on your compensation (i.e. negotiating salary at job start is one of the most valuable ways to spend your time since it will pay you back every paycheck).

Though I _do_ tend to question resumés that look like they were written almost entirely by an LLM without the candidate providing significant context and refinement.

I wish it was at least normalized to submit two resumes - one for AI and one for humans. Threading the needle to please both audiences is such a crap-shoot.

im kinda thinking about adding an llm resume to my resume as like tiny clear text somewhere in the corner.

> If it's something like "Refactored the apartment list service improving P99 Latency from 2s to 180ms", it definitely boosts the resumé in my mind. A good engineer would be measuring their impact and likely have numbers like that off the top of their head.

> But if it's like "Increased revenue by $18.7M by reducing time-to-first-interaction latency from 2.3s to 117ms, increasing conversion by 47% and LTV by 28%," with the same fidelity on each bullet, I'm very skeptical.

Do you mind explaining why? The former doesn't indicate caring about business impact whatsoever (is this service in the critical path of any online process? Who knows!) while the latter does.

Because the latter's "business impact" is clearly made-up bull shit?

A couple issues I have with this in particular:

> "Increased revenue by $18.7M by reducing time-to-first-interaction latency from 2.3s to 117ms, increasing conversion by 47% and LTV by 28%,"

The first is that they're playing fast and loose with their numbers. Latency has before/after, conversion and LTV have percentages; revenue is just a single number. Did that double revenue? Or is that half a percent, and is it lost in the statistical noise?

The other is that there's nothing there to convince me that the technical work was was the full cause, instead of, say a new marketing promotion that launched at the same time, or another team redesigning the landing page flow, or another team re-doing all the product photography, or any other concurrent work.

Maybe all those questions have good answers, but I would at least want some nod in there to how they validated it. I find people who focus on "business impact" but don't know how to do the math to have confidence in it dangerous, because it's so easy to cherry-pick numbers that will make execs happy at a glance and prioritize for those things instead of actual long-term system or product or customer-facing improvements.

I'm not binning the resume for it, and maybe it helps get past the people who see it before I do, but I'm gonna dig in on it. And I'm usually disappointed by the answers.

Which is a very “HN” sentiment when the vast majority of recruiters and hiring managers are absolutely not doing the same. Especially for roles outside of tech.

Yeah I don’t know what others are doing, but I work in the valley and those elements signal checklist mentality. To wit, those keyword lists often include, in my experience, proficiency in specific tool use, rather than communicating skills that transcend tools, which tells me the person is likely not very dynamic or creative.

> those keyword lists often include, in my experience, proficiency in specific tool use

This used to be called "buzzword bingo" and was pretty much required. It was how you got past the initial automated filtering step before a human even saw your resume.

I don’t know whether it was ever effective strategy for candidates, but I will simply say that as a hiring manager for over 12 years, I have never been interested in anyone’s resume when I see that.

As someone who's been a hiring manager for around 7 years, I agree with you, but note that the people who screen resumés before they even _get to you_ very well may be looking for those references.

For my own resumé, I include the stack used at each job which I feel strikes a fair balance.

That's what I always did too. Then I removed it because I wanted to focus more on the kind of problems I solve rather than the languages I've worked in, and recruiters complained, so I put it back in.

Most HR departments have been filtering resumes (or LinkedIn) based on things like keywords for years before they got to you. So your reaction to resumes that heavily use those may be reactionary to being presented with tons of those (by whoever filtered them before you)

I once had an application rejected less than five minutes after submission. Hard to imagine that was anything but lacking a certain threshold keyword.

The problem is that the candidate doesn't know, its not even good proxy either way just like everything on the resume besides the list of companies the person worked on.

Most applicants have no idea about your internal HR procedures and what's the pipeline before the resume even gets from you so they might as well optimize for what generally seems the most "successful" approach. Maybe they actually think writing metrics and keywords is a good idea, maybe they think its stupid and resent it but can't get any interviews without it, its really impossible to tell without other variables..

No used to be. It still is standard. Large companies that do not use external recruiters still use keywords and skills matching to find candidates and it drives me nuts.

Please, do show us your resume so that we can judge the heck out of you as well. It is a fun game, apparently.

I’m giving advice that I judge to be useful.

I rewrote my resume in a way that sounds like exactly what you want: focus on skills that transcend tools instead of just the tools, and every recruiter asks me about tools.

And then during the screening call they ask questions like this: how many years of experience do you have with Jira?

What i have observed, which is the hard (unpredictable) part for candidates is, they can't tell which kind of hiring manager they'll get. Some reject resumes with metrics, others use software that won't let the resume through without them. Most (non-subject matter experts) would just look for whatever they think will get past the filter.

what i am researching right now is if you (hiring manager) got 2 resumes from the same candidate, one hand-written (metaphorically) and the other built by chat-GPT or AI, which one would you call ?

Same. I am well aware how the metrics game goes - even inside the company it can be hard to disprove the metrics claimed, and people count on that. Even managers coach you on putting metrics you cannot prove or disprove.

What counts as a keyword here? If you're hiring for a frontend developer and you see e.g. "Redux" do you just can it?

Knowing or having experience with Redux isn’t going to cause me to pick you over someone else who doesn’t list it for a job where I’m paying you hundreds of thousands of dollars. I look at other skills.

I would not can it in isolation, but if I see a comma-separated list like: “proficient in redux, react, html, JavaScript, sql, kubernetes, word and excel”… then yes, you don’t make the cut.

Or if you list your Microsoft qualifications or your MIT continuing education courses. These are all negative signals.

What would be an example of a positive signal?

Unfortunately many recruiters do look at that. I'm always a bit disappointed when someone wants me to rate my Java experience, or complains that my CV doesn't mention REST experience.

Metrics: I increased retention 2x; I reduced latency from X ms to Y ms; increased slo to 99.999… those are all meaningless. It was in fashion to put such numbers in cvs maybe 5-10 years ago. Not anymore

They were always lies because they’re imprecise. “I” didn’t do any of those things, you did other things together with other people leveraging company infrastructure to accomplish those things. Tell me about the SKILLS you excel in tha make those things happen.

Why would you not want to know a general idea of what specific technology someone is familiar with ? Someone could be an "infrastructure engineer" and be more proficient in specific tools vs others - don't you want to match that to the job your hiring for ?

In my case it's not a lie: I reduced the time for a complex import process from 1 hour to 3 minutes, a 20 fold improvement. I included it in my CV, but now I wonder if I should take it out.

Gigachad. Just don’t forget to signal somehow that you aren’t like everyone else, so that legitimate candidates can send their real resume instead of AI generated one.

You must be a pre 5.0 model so.

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