4,539 karma · joined January 29, 2010
Founder, Leet Resumes, we write your professional resume for free (tips appreciated!) www.leetresumes.com
Founder, Ladders, www.theladders.com
Amazon #1 Bestselling author: ldd.rs/amzn
Author of America’s largest career advice newsletter: https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/author/marc-cenedella
Any standardized process will lack fidelity and excellence in specific cases. Or maybe even in all cases, when the company has made the trade off for cost or speed over quality.
But that’s what big company life is like, and that’s why they have standardized processes. Because even with the errors, in aggregate, it works out better for the business.
But none of the ATSs really collect great data on how many of their customers use them in their core processes. From observing actual, heavy duty recruiter and HR usage at Ladders, I suspect it is not very many.
These are people people after all, and they are not great at writing REGEX style queries to find only the precisely correct resumes they are looking for. You also need to remember that they are frequently working on novel searches each week, and wouldn’t have the confidence or the capability to craft such searches.
And for people who want to work in startup land, it’s an ideal.
Once a company gets past 40 or so people, though, ATS adoption increases. And 150+ employees without an ATS are rare. It’s just that the volume of candidates and interview processes that need to be managed require there be some software to manage the workflow.
Reduced latency by 350 ms Increased engagement by 18% Reduced AWS spending by 23% Scaled from 13 to over 300 virtual machines
That sort of specificity and numerical quantification is what makes a great resume stand out.
So I’ve thought about this a lot :)
Properly understood, a resume is an advertisement to your future boss to get you interview requests for a job you can succeed in.
Why isn’t there a single format to do this? At the core, the reason is a combination of personal expression and xkcd #927: https://xkcd.com/927/
We already know what is the most effective resume format for hiring managers. We’ve done the research, the focus groups, the AB tests, and longitudinal studies. The reverse chronological, one-column structure with black web standard fonts only, a single level of bullet points, and a simple professional summary and technology section, is, hands down, the most effective format. Google has studied it as well and came to the same conclusions: https://www.leetresumes.com/blog/what-google-recruiters-look...
Almost all of the top search results on Google vary from this format, however, because search results are based on what’s popular, not what’s effective.
Psychologically, professionals have only one document in their lives to sum up their careers. Even though the true purpose of the resume is to get you interview requests for a job you can succeed in, professionals can’t help writing their resume to satisfy their own aesthetic or narrative goals, rather than the hiring manager’s. There’s a desire to express oneself on a resume in ways that are irrelevant, or often actually harmful, to the goal of getting hired.
At Leet, when we launched on Hacker News last year, we had great conversations with many of you about why simplifying your format would be for the best. I recall one experienced engineer who had custom built something in LaTeX to automatically generate his resume as he incrementally updated it. I pointed out that ATSs were unable to read the document because of how it was encoded. Multiply that story times 90 million professionals, each of whom may bring just a few small extremely damaging customizations to the process, and you’ll see why a single standard hasn’t been adopted from the professional’s side.
From the hiring manager’s side, standardizing a resume format has largely followed the xkcd story line. A company or coalition tries to introduce a standard, which varies from other best practices, and the end result is an additional competing standard.
So the long answer is that standards would be excellent, except for the fact that users won’t adhere to them :).
Happy to answer questions!
Similar to this article - lots of claims of greatness, but never actually gets around to using facts to build the case.
“All hat and no cattle” as they might say.
I’ve learned (the hard way) about being very, very clear with deliverables and expectations. Based on the average response I get on Upwork, it would seem the median buyer is much more susceptible to contractors blowing smoke. So one has to be careful.
But overall, as several hundred thousand dollars client over the years, it’s been a godsend.
Interestingly: “ All of the used nuclear fuel produced by the U.S. nuclear energy industry over the last 60 years could fit on a football field at a depth of less than 10 yards!”
Use us, or use someone else, or write your own resume and host it on your own personal site. It's better to own your own presentation on the web than rely on a distant, and perhaps not friendly, corporation.
In every case, it’s a huge productivity boost.
The only challenges tend to be multi-function meetings, which require high-level support to move and consolidate. But it can be done!
Definitely follow this advice.
All examples are real resume formats but fake names and representative experiences.
We wouldn’t ever show a user’s resume publicly without permission.
As mentioned above, we're not selling your information, but hoping to use this as a means to grow into a trusted partner in dev's careers.
The answer is: the ones with the most compelling presentations of the user's capabilities, accomplishments, and skills on the job.
"The plan is to become a trusted partner to engineers and technologists - helping to update their resume yearly, produce better resumes by having a deeper insight into their performance. That trust and that relationship will be super valuable and I'm sure we'll find the business model.
As mentioned in FAQs -- "In the future, we will offer additional upgraded services for purchase such as resume distribution, hosting, tracking, salary negotiation, vetted job opportunities, recruiter outreach and cover letter writing." -- but at this moment we don't really know.
The core product today is writing resumes and building that trust. I think if we do that very well, we'll have a lot of opportunities to make a successful business out of it. If we do that poorly, we'll have nothing. "
That's why we need a fully paid-up worldwide license.
More useful information will be published on the blog regularly: https://leetresumes.com/blog
The question is "how many interview requests did I miss because of my bad resume?"
My company did the famous eye-tracking study that shows recruiters' first scan of your resume is 6 seconds long. In qualitative and quantitative research since then, we found what works best based on data.
I'm very sorry to say that it is an ineffective design. To understand why, you can see my interview with the CEOs and technical experts from the top 5 resume parsing companies here: https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/resume-parser-ceos-...
Thanks!