Your Résumé Won't Get You Hired | Hacker News Reader

Your Résumé Won't Get You Hired

hicks-wright.net

57 pointstghw55 comments

In my experience in hiring, this is the opposite: we don't get may cover letters (if any), and never require one. There are not too many reason a candidate wants the job: more money, bad work environment at the previous/current company, or unemployed (or soon to be).

That is the point of the article. A good cover letter will do more for you than a resume alone. If you aren't getting cover letters that means candidates will benefit from writing one.

If some specific company's hiring process isn't set up to extract useful info from a cover letter, though, the value will be muted at best.

It can never hurt. If there's a company where the opinion and feelings of the person reading the resumes doesn't count for anything then I don't want to work there anyway.

The article is right. The cover letter gives you a chance to jump out from the resume format and do some marketing for yourself. I accidentally did A/B testing on my cover letter a few years back. I wasnt getting much response with a dry cover letter, so I rewrote it with a more informal upbeat tone adding humor and even threw in snippets of song lyrics (I kid you not). Immediately the response doubled. One thing it did was engage the front line screeners and HR types. If you dont get by them you dont get anywhere. It also gave me a personality that people could remember.

I couldn't agree more.

Presenting your personality is precisely why I carefully write a friendly, intriguing and upbeat cover letter for each and every job.

You can't present a culture fit better than by presenting your personality.

I once went to Dublin for a weekend with the sole intention of eating a banana. I returned with a girl to whom I proposed whilst in Dublin and who has now been my wife for over five years.

That says more about me, outside of my skill set and experience, than my CV ever could and works wonders for making me stand out, as well as intriguing whoever may be reading my application.

"I once went to Dublin for a weekend with the sole intention of eating a banana. I returned with a girl to whom I proposed whilst in Dublin and who has now been my wife for over five years."

That is the best thing I have heard in a long time. I can't stop laughing.

A cover letter can be more than just why you want the job.

Really, just demonstrating that you've taken the time to read our website and try to understand what we do scores you a few points in my book. It's one thing to say you're "detail oriented," but quite another to actually demonstrate it by paying attenting to details.

You might get that if you worked at some place I wanted to work more than the average place, but for the average firm, why bother?

If you don't want to spend 5 or 10 minutes writing a cover letter for the job, why are you bothering to apply at all? And why should anyone bother to spend the 5 minutes to read your resume?

I've hired a couple of people recently, and personally I use cover letters to see how people write.

Not every hiring manager cares about this, but I will not hire somebody who can't write half a page of text without making egregious spelling, grammar and punctuation errors. I've seen cover letters that, when opened in Word, become a sea of red and green squiggles. It demonstrates a total lack of attention to detail, among other unflattering characteristics.

Sadly, I rule out a LOT of applicants this way.

Cover letters are often used to weed people out, so it's not always a good idea to create one. IMO, if you have a great cover letter include it, but if average or below skip it.

Of course not, that's why I send a complimentary desk calendar.

It has color pictures of me in various worldwide locales (thank you, Photoshop) and notes important days, like my birthday and when HR should schedule an interview with me.

Then there's always the inflatable sword with my name on it. Nobody can resist an inflatable sword!

Counterpoint: In my experience as an interviewer (for peer positions) there's no benefit. It's vaguely amusing to read people imagine what the position might be like and try to spin it to sound like what they want to do, or to hear them talk about changing the world or getting all excited about our industry.

It seems like if you're not a principal in a business (i.e. a YC hacker) you're a cog in a business: your primary task is to do what your boss wants you to do. I'd rather see professionalism that results in being good at your job (and going home at the end of the day) than hell bent on some quest to find life satisfaction at work.

This topic has blown through a couple times in the past few weeks and there's definitely been a lot of "YOU MUST DO THIS", "it doesn't matter", but I still don't have a feel for how as an candidate it might help me, and I find rationalizing my desire to do geek stuff as a passion for working at a specific company very disingenuous. If I'm finding positions on monster.com, I'm looking because I want a different job, not because I'm passionate about improving peoples lives with $company_brand widgets. Maybe employers that are expecting these are getting their resumes from elsewhere?

If you're handing your resume to an HR person, cover letters are good to differentiate yourself from everyone else. If it's a tech person, cover letters can be good if they talk about amazing stuff you've done that doesn't fit into a Resume. (I want to work for your company because your line of software is similar to many of my projects [list])

While I agree with you about cover letters and HR people, I think most amazing stuff should fit in a resume. I’ve definitely included relevant academic projects in my resume and have gotten great traction from them.

Generally speaking, if it’s important and relevant to your career, and you can express the subject in a concise bullet-point way, I say put it in.

You still have to remember to keep the resume short, but including unconventional yet amazing stuff isn’t half bad.

Computer people hate cover letters because they're redundant, and so they annoy people like us. But this can't be stressed enough: HR people aren't computer people, even at software companies.

Anecdotal evidence: just last week a friend in HR at RedHat told me very matter-of-factly, "our intranet is a wiki!" She's a sweet girl, and very smart in her own field, but is nothing like your potential co-workers.

tghw works at Fog Creek, as do I. We're both software developers.

Here's the thing: your cover letter (hopefully) isn't redundant. If you want to think of it in computer terms: your résumé is data; your cover letter is the function through which to view the data. Your résumé may say that you only have experience working with VBScript. Your cover may tell us that you do that, but you hate it, so secretly, in your spare time, you pretend to be a fellow named _why, and write your own languages. Conversely, your résumé may be a shotgun approach to skills, but your cover letter sounds about as excited about coding as I personally am about doing my taxes. In neither case is the cover truly redundant; even if, in terms of raw data, your cover letter is redundant, it tells me more about you than your résumé ever could hope to.

I'd challenge you that, if there's a redundancy, it's the opposite of what you're positing: the résumé is for HR to tick crap off in a spreadsheet; the cover letter is for me as a person to learn who the hell you actually are.

Well put. FWIW, I actually agreed with the article, and intended my comment to be adding another reason why you should write a cover letter. "Because they seem redundant" would have been a better phrasing.

I think many people think that the time to express their personality is in the interview, and the resume stage is about screening candidates to interview based on data points. As such, they feel they will please the HR person most by being as succinct as possible, and so the cover letter like deadwood.

I say "I think" because I have never applied for or held a "real job" at any company that I didn't own, and my startup is just my co-founder and I. That said, I've helped a number of friends with their resumes, and have heard this sentiment frequently. But I think you guys have made a very strong case not only for including one, but what the goal of the cover letter should be, and I'll make sure to pass it along.

Cheers!

Wouldn't the interview traditionally fulfill those criteria?

The problem is, interviews cost money. We fly every candidate in for a day of interviews and put them up in a nice Manhattan hotel. And that's the cheap part. The expensive part is taking developers' time to actually do the interview.

So while the interview most certainly looks at those sorts of things, we try to interview only when we're confident that a candidate has the potential to actually get the job.

In my experience the resume has been more of a formality than anything else. I've always been able to get jobs by being referred by a mutual friend/work associate.

That's all very well if you are being headhunted into a company with no formal HR rules. We, for example, are a reasonably cool place to work at but our paymaster is an Equal Opportunities employer. That means we have to be very very strict about the hiring process and even in situations where we know and have solicited an applicant, s/he still has to be graded according to fair and consistent rules like all other applicants.

The original article was correct: an employer typically asks for 6-9 things in a job ad; some will be obvious directly from your resume (eg. "10 years experience in C"); all others should be dealt with in a cover letter. For example if the employer asks for "MacOS X experience" and you haven't got any in your resume, a cover letter that says "while I do not have much direct experience with MacOS X, I have programmed for many years on similar POSIX compliant environments such as FreeBSD and I am confident I would quickly be productive in the MacOS X environment".

Cover letters are really only useful when you're acquainted with the company well enough to actually want to work with them (but not well enough to just call up and say hi). It's more commonly just fluff:

> I want to work for Acme Corp because RocketSled 2.0 is exciting...

Blah, blah, blah. If you're hiring for acme corp, just accept the acme resumes. If you're hiring for somewhere neat, then why not dig into your network and make the cover letter AND the resume unnecessary?

Why would you apply to a company you didn't know well enough to want to work at? You should have some reason you're applying to the company. Think about it this way: if you're already an employee of the company and someone applies who doesn't really want to work there, and HR lets them through, would you want to work with them? I wouldn't.

But even if you can't write a good "I want to work and Foobar Inc." paragraph, the cover letter gives you a chance to talk about all the stuff you do on the side, to show how much you love making software.

Personally, I would much rather work for a company that hires people who love working there than one that hires people just because they know a guy who knows a guy.

Using this as the policy at your company does mean that you probably need to be marketing your company as a great place to work. If no one knows why your company would be a great place to work, it's a bit unfair to expect them to write about why they want to work there and be honest.

I don't know why you're being downmodded for that comment. You're quite right about people just applying to anything and anywhere without a forethought or research.

It happens all the time. People apply for jobs because they need the money, full stop. If that's the kind of shop it is, then the hiring manager should just embrace it.

Reasons why I'm currently looking for a new job:

1) I'm looking to change locations, half way across the USA

2) I've been in my current position for nearly five years, and am ready for a change:

2a) In my chosen trade (being a unix sysadmin) you often get tremendous latitude in selecting tech, tools, and tasks, but cross pollinating with the technology stack at other companies gives you answers to questions you didn't even know you had and makes you a better employee for it.

2b) I'm a disbeliever in the "you've got to get out by the time you're forty" age discrimination stuff. I have, however, seen a lot of people, both young and old, that have spent long enough in one industry that they were not hireable for a position in mine because they'd spent so long in a single frame of mind that they fell flat on their face after several attempts to coax them through design/architecture questions.

Think about it this way: if you're already an employee of the company and someone applies who doesn't really want to work there, and HR lets them through, would you want to work with them? I wouldn't.

Sure, if someone actively doesn't want the position they applied for they should have told the recruiter "thanks but no thanks", but, frankly, if I find a job I'm interested in, the interview is mutual: while you're determining if I can reboot routers with style and grace, I'm determining if you're a sweat shop, if my potential teammates are idiots, and if my future boss is a jerk. In my opinion it's the employer's job to sell me on why I want to work in that industry, rather than the other way around.

Ever tried dropping your age from your resume? There is no requirement to put it on. If you get into the interview and the interviewer has an, "Oh, you're not what we're after" moment you know why. In this country that is grounds alone to sue so most companies will give you a decent interview, at the very least.

The approximate age of the candidate is going to be glaringly obvious even without a date of birth. It's easy to infer that they're over 40 from things like graduating college in 1975, having 20 years work experience, etc.

Actually I'm currently in the prime of my hiring age, and it's not listed at all, but it's very easy to infer, particularly if an individual has dated their college history (I honestly don't recall if I did or not).

And if you don't 'date' it, it's a flag to the person who reads your resume anyway, that you're old (which is why you would do that). It's tough.

You get a job because you want to make money. Whether you write Java stuff for bigcorp a or bigcorp b doesn't matter, they are going to require the same skills so they are "commodity" work places. You get a job there because you love to code and would like to make money. In short, you love to work.

Now, there are a few exceptions, of course, such as Frog Creek or your dream job, where you get a job because you love to work there.

bad article. talks about 7 criteria, and has lots of numbers, but doesn't tell us what they are. lacking meat.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/SortingResumes.html

Criteria linked

Same goes for contract gigs/sales/partnership inquiries. I noticed more than 60% of professionals you approach with a short (under 8 lines including salutations), tailored email with or without a portfolio/resume will email back and ask for more information. Throw a resume alone and you are not very likely to capture the guy/gal's attention. Be different.

I just focus on phone screening really heavily. Anyone with relevant experience on their resume gets called. Any of those that seem really good are asked to come in. The best person is made an offer, if they decline, the second best is made an offer. Very few "bad" candidates make it passed the phone screen, so little time is wasted.

Works great.

I agree, it's much faster. When hiring for a developer position I usually ask "what's the most recent scientific paper you have read" and ask them to discuss it. Extra credit is given if it's in a different field than computer science.

I have found this a very reliable way to weed out candidates who can talk the talk but really are just winging it.

It would be more relevant if everyone here commenting would indicate whether they are personally involved in the hiring process, and in what role.

Otherwise, we may as well be discussing the purchase of a new car with folks who have never and will never buy one. Their perspective must be discounted accordingly.

I am not involved in hiring. But I sure wish the companies I apply to were like Fog Creek; openly publishing their hiring philosophy and requirements check-list.

I have seen my coworkers viewing applications... many were discarded outright because of stupid spelling errors or poor grammar, or no letter at all. Applicants whose work and homepage weren't available or were scarce lead to the (inductive) conclusion that the applicant was crap.

My last two job interviews lead to being hired, and my approach is generally:

(1) be very picky about which company I apply to; (2) go the company's web site to get a history, which is important for: (3) write an interesting letter saying what you like about the company, and give attachments and links to things that they can go take a look at, and (4) to actually provide some critique of the work the company has done, and provide solutions. Anyone can point out mistakes; we need someone who solves problems, like The Wolf.

Also, in reference to language skills, I like a quote by Dijkstra:

“Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.”

Yes, yes it will. The job I hold now, the interview process went as such:

* Phone interview with resource manager. "So, are you interested in working at such and such doing Coldfusion and .NET?"

* Phone interview with hiring manager. "Do you know Coldfusion and Perl? What have you worked on?"

* Had an open interview session with another part of the company. Explained this to the hiring manager. I was told I would hear something the following week.

* Offer letter arrived on Monday.

It really doesn't get much smoother than that. Not once did I have to defend things on my resume, make up answers to crazy questions, or jump through silly hoops. They wanted someone who could do the job, and I could. So they hired me.

As programmer, something that might help more than a cover letter or a résumé is open source code you wrote.

I want to believe that, but assume that the number of applicants is a hundred-fold more than the number of interesting positions available.

You need to survive that first sift through the pile, especially if it's done by non-techies.

If I'm looking through 100 emailed resumes, your cover letter (which should be in the body of the email) is an advertisement for you. It should give me a reason to bother opening your resume.

You have 100 resumes to read and you're reading the long-form bodies of emails? Why? I've always had the benefit of a HR department to do that screening but I'd think I'd read the resumes first and then go back and follow up and read the emails they sent.

HR department? At a startup?

i do think cover letters are important, but would emphasize they should employ a less is more approach. just enough to show a "voice", a persona -- humanizing the interaction. perhaps pointing out 1 or 2 key things that might show in an understated way that you "get" something that might be of value to the employer, or highlights something about your unique value. but don't overdo it. too much about why you want to work at this company is gonna start to smell a bit.

Resumes are pretty useless, half the stuff people write is made up on the spot, the other half is exaggerated beyond belief.

I don't care about a resume or a cover letter. Show me an interesting github profile and I'll recommend you for hire.

I always thought the point of a resume was to get you an interview. Then it's your job to get yourself hired.

Hiring is Obsolete http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html

I thought a cover letter was a prerequisite. Anyone can put a CV together and email it to 1000 companies, but to write a cover letter for each company just shows you actually know what you are applying for to start with.

If you email your resume to 1000 companies, you've already lost the game before it starts!

This is no way to find a good job. Plus, you already know it intuititvely, when it happens to you, you call it spam.

As a hiring manager for many years, I barely took notice of all the e-mails sent to jobs@mycompany.com. But the ones sent personally to me, from someone who has some connection (works for a competitor, uses our products, etc...) would get first class treatment.

I know it's tought out there for new grads though, because what I describe kind of requires some experience (read http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/05/13/being-a-new-cs-grad-... for more advice on that topic)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com