Ask HN: I'm confused, bigger or smaller resumes? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I'm confused, bigger or smaller resumes?

5 pointsalcom8 comments

I was browsing HN and I found one of the biggest complaints I see is the tremendous amount of time and effort it takes to interview prospective job candidates. There's only so much interview time and a bad hire can destroy a team.

One obvious solution to this is send more information about what kind of person I am beforehand. Basically, a bigger resume package. A package which shows off what kind of person I am.

Then another thread appeared where a lot of people were complaining about these long resumes candidates were sending them. They mentioned how much time it took to read them.

I'm confused, what are we suppose to do as candidates to give the hiring company a better idea of what we are so we don't waste time during the interviewing process? What are we suppose to send?

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Go with a Short one. A Resume is a way of giving a basic idea about who you are and where possibly could you fit within their company/environment. Longer Resumes are hard to read. Employers do not want to sit through pages of a Resume that you might think is worth reading. They want "instant gratification" which means "is this candidate good enough to call for an interview" and nothing more than that. A long Resume would be great if it could decide whether you should be hired or not but that is not the case (barring some exceptions). So keep it short and simple. The bigger (read bloated) your Resume is, the more chance of the employer passing on it because they cannot find the bottomline.

"There's only so much interview time and a bad hire can destroy a team."

You can write anything on a Resume to sell yourself initially. A bad hire is not due to resume filtering capability but it is due to bad interviewing in person and depends on the judgement of the interviewer(s) at the time.

As you gain more experience, your prior experience becomes outdated, and doesn't show an accurate picture of your up to date skills. You want to be efficient in showing the employer the most relevant details of your experience, so they can make their decision faster. The stuff you did 10 years ago may just be a distraction, and may make you look worse than you are today. A page or two should be sufficient in painting a convincing picture of your expertise, even if it isn't comprehensive.

After you pass the resume screening, you may want to follow up with a full CV. The difference between a CV and a resume, at least in the US, is that the CV is the unabridged version of your resume, containing all your experience. The resume should be a condensed version of it showing just the most impressive and enticing parts.

For starters, do not use online threads where people are complaining about annoyances as a guide to finding the best practices for a given area. :)

But when it comes to resumes (in America), 1-2 pages is the conventional wisdom, short and sweet as opposed to exhaustive. Highlight your big-win accomplishments and ability to get stuff done. Don't worry about tiny details that you're only putting there for completeness. Benefits, not features!

Treat it like a landing page: the goal of each header/paragraph is to keep the reviewer reading, and ultimately, to want to contact you because you are awesome.

Here's the bug, equating size with effectiveness: "a bigger resume package. A package which shows off what kind of person I am."

You have, by the way, deftly identified the fix: shorter yet better. Twas Pascal who said, "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."

Take the time. Talk about your accomplishments clearly eschewing all buzzspeak. Make clear what you did. Too often I find myself reading resumes desperately panning for actual contributions.

hth

I went through the same thing recently. I have mine boiled down to a single page. When talking to a recruiter they said I should make it longer to match more keywords that HR people are looking for. My response was that I don't want to work for any company with that as a hiring practice. Tailor your resume to whatever company you are looking to work for.

When on the other side of the table I have always preferred a single page. The resume is just an indicator of if you get an interview or not.

For a start-up or small company, I agree with the previous comment - shorter resume with links is the way to go. But for larger companies, especially those that use scanners for initial screening, it may be better - or at least okay - to go longer. The scanners will probably ignore the links. Or. . .I'm aware of a couple of companies that include certain links in their keyword counting/weighting algorithm, but I'm not aware of the extent.

The goal should be to customize as per the company or person you are sending it it. Its after all a way of learning more about you, in the appropriate context.

I think a short resume that goes exactly in what experience they are looking for would be best. Saves time, and at least shows your focus.

- Personally, I think resumes should be shorter but links (whether Apps/GitHub-Code/Websites) should be longer. I tend to focus more on people's work than what they tend to brag about themselves.

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