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[Wouldn't] companies would do better throwing darts at resumes? Or perhaps by actually reading resumes instead of keyword-filtering them. Really, it's not tha

[Wouldn't] companies would do better throwing darts at resumes? Or perhaps by actually reading resumes instead of keyword-filtering them. Really, it's not that hard. "Throwing darts at resumes", OTOH, is exactly what many companies seem to be doing right now. Specifically, the practice of setting up a "chat" with an internal recruiter (who inevitably tells you that they think you'll be a "wonderful fit") before passing the resume over to the tech side (which is when you find out whether they really think you're a potential fit or not) comes to mind.

fecak 10y ago
>Or perhaps by actually reading resumes instead of keyword-filtering them This one is a two-way street. I launched a resume writing side-business a couple years ago (resumeraiders.com) because I saw how poor many developer resumes were and how they were getting ripped off by resume writers who had no experience in hiring or in tech. Most were just failed writers. If you expect a recruiter to read a poorly-written 5 page resume when the yes/no interview decision could have easily been made based on a summary and a few decent bullet points, that's not on the recruiter. If you think the 5 page resume is some kind of anomaly, ask the recruiters at your company how common they are.
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  By all means -- skim the resumes first, and pull out all 5-pagers and other immediate fail cases (which are generally easy to spot). And save your reading skills for the 15% or so which might have something worth your time. That's what I meant.
- ACow_Adonis 10y ago
  This is fascinating to me. I recently did a resume swap with an American lady I know (I'm Australian). We're both around mid thirties. She's in SF. Her resume was 1 page. It's the first time I've ever seen a 1 page resume in my life except for someone out of highschool with no history or experience. Mine is 4 pages. I've worked really hard to cut it down to that while including relevant things and nice formatting/readability/white space. Compared to some of the 10 to 15 page resumes we get here for people who have done so little, it's positively succinct. We had a chat, and we just had to agree that it was a cultural difference. But still, I admit, if anyone asked me here, I'd say "you can't have a one page resume, unless you are literally applying for McDonald's and have done nothing with your life, this isn't twitter"
  - flamedoge 10y ago
    wtf... do ppl write essays on resumes? even 4 pages is too long nowadays. need to tl;dr.
    - ACow_Adonis 10y ago
      Well, understand that it is not uncommon where I live to draft a cover letter at least. For government jobs it's even worse, there you basically do have to write essays against the "selection criteria" (don't get me started on what it actually achieves, again, I'm not trying to advocate). The general rationale is often on several grounds: -to create a "merit" based document trail - to create a basic barrier to entry that has to be crossed for all but the most basic positions. Think of it like a spam filter/ensuring candidates who want THAT job as opposed to just A job. The very thing you don't want is to have hundreds of 1 page dot point resumes coming in. How would you possibly find the time to go through them? You want to stop people applying just by sending in a generic summary resume and clicking a button. You want people who are willing to put a bit of work in to apply specifically to the job you're advertising. It is not uncommon for me, for instance, to write a cover letter for each job, and craft a specific version of my resume for each position, emphasising and exposing those parts of my experience most applicable to that particular position. You can only really do one or two of these well per week, but that's kinda the point.
  - morgante 10y ago
    Honestly, I'm incredibly skeptical that you need 4 pages. Almost anyone can fit their entire experience onto a single page. You don't need to write an essay for each position—just highlight a few bullet points.
    - ACow_Adonis 10y ago
      To this and some other comments saying essentially "you can cut it down". Oh sure! I can cut it down to 1 word if I want: awesome :p One of my points is, I have literally not seen a 1 page resume before outside of fast food/janitorial work. Before chatting with her, I would have advised her to fix that up, because no one will take her seriously with a dot point resume that looks like it was put together to hit some automated text search and no natural human reading. I admit after some discussion, I fell back to "wow...they're not even pretending they're nothing but a keyword search meat grinder", because I do respect her so I thought she was telling the truth. And now I've got additional corroboration from HN. I think there are arguments for longer/shorter resumes. In my, and my jobs/culture defence, I need to see you can write in plain English, have some sense of aesthetics, prioritisation, presentation. By that age I expect you've worked in several jobs (about which your summary might be my first impression/knowledge) and dot points aren't going to cut it, because your job titles, product names and keywords are meaningless noise to me: I joke my grandmother is an entrepreneur/CEO and has worked with everything. Your dot point resume looks like an indian from mechanical Turk put it together by amalgamation of keywords from job ads and pop culture. I want personal details, but summaries, on your projects, products, papers, in plain communicable error free English. 1 page screams kid/unprofessional to me. 2 - 4 pages unless you're 50 - 60 and have written 100 books, done something truly remarkable. Now I'm not saying its right, I'm just saying that's my world.
elcct 10y ago
> "Throwing darts at resumes" That reminds me of another technique - that is you select roughly half of the resumes from the stack and bin it. Nobody wants to work with unlucky people ;)
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  That's kind of what a lot of companies seem to do these days, by default: "Eh, I don't have time for this. Let's get the junior people to filter resumes and do phone screens. Especially when trying to hire senior people... Too many resumes? Just make them do a 3-hour HackerRank session first. It's what all the other places are doing..."

fecak 10y ago

>Or perhaps by actually reading resumes instead of keyword-filtering them This one is a two-way street. I launched a resume writing side-business a couple years ago (resumeraiders.com) because I saw how poor many developer resumes were and how they were getting ripped off by resume writers who had no experience in hiring or in tech. Most were just failed writers. If you expect a recruiter to read a poorly-written 5 page resume when the yes/no interview decision could have easily been made based on a summary and a few decent bullet points, that's not on the recruiter. If you think the 5 page resume is some kind of anomaly, ask the recruiters at your company how common they are.

kafkaesq 10y ago
By all means -- skim the resumes first, and pull out all 5-pagers and other immediate fail cases (which are generally easy to spot). And save your reading skills for the 15% or so which might have something worth your time. That's what I meant.
ACow_Adonis 10y ago
This is fascinating to me. I recently did a resume swap with an American lady I know (I'm Australian). We're both around mid thirties. She's in SF. Her resume was 1 page. It's the first time I've ever seen a 1 page resume in my life except for someone out of highschool with no history or experience. Mine is 4 pages. I've worked really hard to cut it down to that while including relevant things and nice formatting/readability/white space. Compared to some of the 10 to 15 page resumes we get here for people who have done so little, it's positively succinct. We had a chat, and we just had to agree that it was a cultural difference. But still, I admit, if anyone asked me here, I'd say "you can't have a one page resume, unless you are literally applying for McDonald's and have done nothing with your life, this isn't twitter"
- flamedoge 10y ago
  wtf... do ppl write essays on resumes? even 4 pages is too long nowadays. need to tl;dr.
  - ACow_Adonis 10y ago
    Well, understand that it is not uncommon where I live to draft a cover letter at least. For government jobs it's even worse, there you basically do have to write essays against the "selection criteria" (don't get me started on what it actually achieves, again, I'm not trying to advocate). The general rationale is often on several grounds: -to create a "merit" based document trail - to create a basic barrier to entry that has to be crossed for all but the most basic positions. Think of it like a spam filter/ensuring candidates who want THAT job as opposed to just A job. The very thing you don't want is to have hundreds of 1 page dot point resumes coming in. How would you possibly find the time to go through them? You want to stop people applying just by sending in a generic summary resume and clicking a button. You want people who are willing to put a bit of work in to apply specifically to the job you're advertising. It is not uncommon for me, for instance, to write a cover letter for each job, and craft a specific version of my resume for each position, emphasising and exposing those parts of my experience most applicable to that particular position. You can only really do one or two of these well per week, but that's kinda the point.
- morgante 10y ago
  Honestly, I'm incredibly skeptical that you need 4 pages. Almost anyone can fit their entire experience onto a single page. You don't need to write an essay for each position—just highlight a few bullet points.
  - ACow_Adonis 10y ago
    To this and some other comments saying essentially "you can cut it down". Oh sure! I can cut it down to 1 word if I want: awesome :p One of my points is, I have literally not seen a 1 page resume before outside of fast food/janitorial work. Before chatting with her, I would have advised her to fix that up, because no one will take her seriously with a dot point resume that looks like it was put together to hit some automated text search and no natural human reading. I admit after some discussion, I fell back to "wow...they're not even pretending they're nothing but a keyword search meat grinder", because I do respect her so I thought she was telling the truth. And now I've got additional corroboration from HN. I think there are arguments for longer/shorter resumes. In my, and my jobs/culture defence, I need to see you can write in plain English, have some sense of aesthetics, prioritisation, presentation. By that age I expect you've worked in several jobs (about which your summary might be my first impression/knowledge) and dot points aren't going to cut it, because your job titles, product names and keywords are meaningless noise to me: I joke my grandmother is an entrepreneur/CEO and has worked with everything. Your dot point resume looks like an indian from mechanical Turk put it together by amalgamation of keywords from job ads and pop culture. I want personal details, but summaries, on your projects, products, papers, in plain communicable error free English. 1 page screams kid/unprofessional to me. 2 - 4 pages unless you're 50 - 60 and have written 100 books, done something truly remarkable. Now I'm not saying its right, I'm just saying that's my world.

elcct 10y ago

> "Throwing darts at resumes" That reminds me of another technique - that is you select roughly half of the resumes from the stack and bin it. Nobody wants to work with unlucky people ;)

kafkaesq 10y ago
That's kind of what a lot of companies seem to do these days, by default: "Eh, I don't have time for this. Let's get the junior people to filter resumes and do phone screens. Especially when trying to hire senior people... Too many resumes? Just make them do a 3-hour HackerRank session first. It's what all the other places are doing..."