Should I include a skills section at the end? (It looks tacky, but I think a lot of places use automated searches?)
For each project I list should I include languages and tools used?
If I only have one publication is it worth having a publications section?
- Your resume should be no more then 1, if you must 2 pages (1 page per 10 yrs experience). I can't tell you how many 5-7 page resumes I receive that get a quick skim and thrown aside.
- Use the cover letter to address the company. Who ever is reading it is probably reading others as well. The same generic boring BS gets old. Every letter says "I would be a good fit for your company and my skills match your job description". That is obvious or you wouldnt be applying, or you didnt read the job description. Tell the company what you can do for them and not what they can do for you. Mention why you want to work there and what intrigues you about the company. Pretend you read the job description and researched the company. Be personal-able. You are trying to stand out amongst potentially hundreds of other candidates.
- A skills section is useful, especially for tech jobs. But you don't need to mention every tool you have ever used. No one cares that you still know win 3.1 (I see that on resumes sometimes). Give the highlights and worthwhile list. More is not always better.
- Definitely include your publications, speaking events anything that shows your community activity. They dont need to be more then a line or short description.
- Some people put what tools and languages are used for every project. It starts getting repetitive. I think those can be covered in your skills list. The projects should be short and sweet with a few bullet points. Tell the reader what the project is and what you contributed. You don't need to list everything you ever did at a company. Just need to give the reader a taste of your skill level and ability to perform the job they are filling. If they like you, you will get an interview or follow up questions.
The goal is not to digest your entire life story and work history into a resume. Old jobs and projects can fall off the list. I know its hard to part with some of those things, but it will better your chances that someone will actually read your whole resume. You want to impress them as quickly as possible. The goal is to get an interview.
Wasn't there even a study about it, that confirmed your finding?
After that, I'd go light on keywords if applying to a startup, but rather get into the tech details of what I'd done at each company. I'd be likely to describe how I'd deliver software that changed things for the better at each company.
For a day job, I'm prone to keyword stuffing. I hate to say that, but to get the resume past HR drones and third-party recruiters, some form of black hat resume SEO is needed. I have a section at the top that has the keyword and years of experience for all relevant experience. I also have a roundup of keywords I'd used at a particular employer. For a startup, I'd be likely to leave that section off. I only use it for regular jobs because it works. My resume gets through the filters and to the people who will interview me.
The extra-selling point for me is, that the use of LaTeX itself may people in the know to recognize me as the serious mathematician that I am. (Though that's no substitute for commercial experience.)
I think we hackers tend to underestimate the influence presentation has on perception. A LaTeX-formatted résumé adds a nice touch of professional style and a little boost of geek cred to academic résumé readers.
Or so I'd like to think…
I saw lots of nice and well-presented CV here, where just using LaTeX might have made them even better. Knuth got something right with TeX.
Along with making your resume stronger, specific points often help guide your interview predictably. I have 1-2 bullet points that everyone asks about, and it's great to have a few interview questions that you know you will ace.
Yes, add skill section, it will get you through most HR filters. Skills should be plausible and based on experience in job section. Otherwise skills look fishy to me.
The major tools for each project helps me cross check the skill section with the jobs. I'd say yes. But do not add all tools and all languages. The most important ones used are enough. PLEASE: Only add those you've used, not all tools used by others on a project. This is a warning sign for recruiting managers should they discover this during an interview. Clearly state your part of the project. It's too common that candidates describe projects in wonderful colors and then only have written XML files - which they did not state in the resume.
I'd drop the publications if you only have one. I do prefer shorter resumes.
Hope that helped.
If you proved P = NP* and that was your only publication, I'd still include it.
*-other than the joke "for P = 0 or N = 1"
I believe that a good resume is one that makes people look twice at you. It should lay out the facts in as compelling and concise a way as possible. Whenever possible you should demonstrate to prospective employers that you provide value, and you understand how much value you provide. Details about format, layout, and so on should be chosen to highlight your strengths in the most compelling way possible.
The first trick is that you must hook people fast. Yes, you need a bunch of keywords for the bots. But you don't want that to be the first thing the humans read. You want people to read something that can make them dream about what you could do for them.
The second trick is that a resume is not the time for modesty. When else is it socially acceptable to sit down and say the nice things about yourself? Don't hold back, have fun with it!
The third trick is that no matter how much work you put into your resume, you need your most honest friends to read it and give critical feedback. You don't want the friend who will say nice things. You want the one who will look at it, tear apart, let you know why it doesn't work and make you rewrite it. I don't know how many times I rewrote my resume, but I do know that it is a lot better for having been rewritten.
I'm starting to ramble now, so I'll stop. So in closing, good luck.
It helped a lot that I maintained connections and have an unusual combination of useful skills. Therefore people have things they want done which they know I can do, but don't know who else could.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=728863
I freely admit I'm unusual, but then again, so are you.
Here it is again:
If you apply for a job with me, I want to know why I should employ you. I want to know how you will add value to my company. I want to know that you will bring skills and abilities.
Do you know what I want? You should. You shouldn't just read the ad for the job - you should find out what my company does, then read the ad, and work out how your skills will help me meet my goal of making money. If you can't or won't do those things, I probably don't want you to work for me.
What skills do you have? How can I tell?
Can you work on your own? How can I tell?
Can you work in a team? How can I tell?
Will you get things done? How can I tell?
I don't really care about your education, or your recent jobs, unless they show me why you are the right person for me. And I want to read that on the first page, preferably in the first paragraph, and preferably without typos, grammatical errors, or anything else to distract me. I don't at this stage really care what your name is, or how to contact you, or whether you can typeset 16 different fonts on the same page.
Why should I employ you? What do you think I want, and why should I think you have it.
Keep your resume short, and tailor it for the specific job. If the job doesn't say anything about a specific skill, take it off your resume (unless its a general skill like UNIX) - include no more than 6-10 skills. I definitely include skills and don't think it's tacky in our applicants, but it is tacky to include a huge list of acronyms and makes people think you actually know less (less about more, instead of more about less). Cover letters are nice, but in my view they are just a paragraph to know how well the person speaks english (many hackers don't speak english well). I like short, casual, cover letters ('hi, saw the post on craigslist, heres 4 bullets why im good for the job, hope to hear from you soon, DONE.) Number one thing for me is to keep in concise, don't make the reader read through a giant paragraph description of your work, just bullet points and tailor the bullet points to the job (you're trying to say "heres my experience at abc123 corp. and heres why its relevant to you").
cover letter is exponentially more important if you aren't replying to a job posting, and less if you are (we use craigslist so get a ton of applicants and we weed people out based on bad english in the cover letter, but we dont really see many cover letters so good that they sway us positively)
2) ...which means you need to list your skills somewhere. I tend to categorize mine for easier scanning (languages, databases, frameworks, build infrastructure) but YMMV. If something sticks out there I'll ask about it -- "how did you find the experience of implementing a maven plugin?"
3) In the vein of not annoying people who read your resume, name the file you send "FirstName_LastName_resume.pdf" rather than "resume.pdf". Attention to detail matters, and people wind up dumping resumes into a directory with others.
The next step is for them to look at my resume. If that goes well, then the next step is a phone interview.
It's all a pipeline, and my resume's main job is to get the phone interview. That's it. While technically the resume is supposed to be a history of what you've done, that's what a resume is, not what it's used for. It's used for screening, therefore it should be good at surviving various screening processes.
It's all about showing capabilities. For full-timers, there might be more interest in "culture fit", but you can't really tell that from a resume.
Even Steve Jobs' resume is one page, so what makes you think that yours should be 4?
http://homepage.mac.com/steve/Resume.html
(this is an incorrect quote, but I cannot seem to find the original)
Having a concise resume is an exercise in good communication and editing skills. Give me the most important facts, not every single thing you've ever done.
However, as you gain experience, then the one pager can become an artificial limiter. As many people have explained above, tailor it to the job you are applying to. But in the hacker community it will be important to show things you work on for fun as opposed to things you do to pay the bills.
My resume is currently 3 pages. First page is what I love to do (projects I am working on and consider important). Page two is how I get paid. Page three is education, skills, references.
Three pages, with skills on the third page, is roughly as rude as walking into my office and unplugging my computer.
Not that you're wrong to feel the way you do, but this isn't a very good reason. I've been told a lot of things that turned out to be flat out wrong.
I've always just chosen to make it 2 pages. And I've gotten every job I've ever applied for (though this is only in part thanks to the resume of course).
Now this doesn't mean disregard the advice about making your resume 1 page. It just means that there are no hard-coded rules about your resume, interview, etc, that will make or break your chances.
I agree that resumes should be short, but accepting an arbitrary page limit of 1 is kind of dumb. If you have 2 pages worth of data that genuinely belongs on your resume, send in 2 pages. Most people won't have 2 pages worth of stuff to go on a resume, but don't trim out useful information just to make your resume 1 page if you do.
Other tips: - Avoid using italics, it apparently can cause problems if someone tries to scan your resume and have a machine read it. - Keep things left-aligned as much as possible, so someone quickly glancing down doesn't have to jump across the page on every line of the resume (this is actually similar to web design, in that you can assume the reader will spend a very minimal amount of time reading your resume unless they quickly find something they like)
I make sure that I tailor that summary for every position I apply to make sure I highlight my relevant skills/experience.
Another thing I do, rather than taking up space in your resume with a separate summary, is to simply make the important words/qualifications bold in your resume. That makes it easy to skim without using up more resume real estate.
Writing "basic knowledge of Java" adds a lot of credence to "expert in C++".
It sounds dumb to me to write: "helped build X". Any ideas?
Not all that dumb. But try to include concrete numbers about the value added to the company because of the team.
Rather than "helped build X", write "helped reduce operations costs (numbers if possible) by (whatever it was your team did)."
The goal of a resume is to get an interview, so you need to pique the interest of the reader. Showing that you were at least part of a process that made money or reduced costs suggests you can help do the same for someone else.
Also, pointing out how your contributions (if even via a team) affected the bottom line should indicate you have an important awareness of business needs.
Btw: he's the guy who created ArchLinux, though he's no longer the lead developer.
When I was trying to get my first job out of college, the fact that I'd graduated from a well-known school with a decent GPA was really important, and mentioned at the top. Ten years later, the fact that I went to school is just barely interesting enough to sneak in at the very bottom of the page, and my grades aren't worth mentioning at all.
It will still be recognized, but it also looks kind of pretty to the mere mortals.
Some characteristics of engaging interviews:
- They're with people with people who are smart. Show your smart on our resume either by listing academic achievements if you're just out of school, or by describing hard problems you've solved.
- The candidate has done something interesting in their previous experience. Your resume gives you the opportunity to tell me what the most interesting thing you've done is. If I agree, you'll get to tell me all about it.
- The candidate has enough experience to get through my technical questions in style. I think this is less about knowing specific buzzwords (at least for how I interview), and more about having solid fundamentals and good hands-on experience. This suggests it's probably better to talk about hard things you've worked on, rather than playing buzzword bingo.
Does anyone have good examples of a resume geared towards consulting?
(Are they even much different from regular resumes, do consultants need resumes?)
I'll second the "restate the job posting in the cover letter" thought, though.