4 ms·

When writing LinkedIn profiles for my resume and coaching clients, I advise them to turn endorsements "off". Under the Skills section is a "Adjust Endorsement S

by fecak 10y ago

When writing LinkedIn profiles for my resume and coaching clients, I advise them to turn endorsements "off". Under the Skills section is a "Adjust Endorsement Settings" listing that you can click to turn it off. Endorsements tend to be just extra noise with all those pictures, and on many profiles there is rather important information (education, projects, etc.) below the skills section. You don't want your reader getting lost in the endorsements before getting to some useful info.

kchoudhu 10y ago
Serious question: what exactly does a resume coach do? Do they just maintain a good resume for me?
- amorphid 10y ago
  Having previously spent 8 years as a technical recruiter, and now working as a Sr. Software Engineer, I can say generally speaking that dev resume should be general enough that anyone in the recruitment pipeline should be able to look at it, and make enough sense of the information that they could make a reasonable decision about whether interviewing you for a given position would feel like a good use of time. I'd hope a resume coach would help work towards selling yourself to all parties involved in considering you for a position you'd actually want.
- handedness 10y ago
  BLUF: A good one will help your résumé navigate the often opaque and misaligned fiefdom that is corporate HR. Long version: If they have significant and current experience with hiring processes (especially in your industry), they'll be able to help you with everything from how to word and structure it to maximize your odds of getting through the automated filters nearly every big company uses these days, to figuring out (based on job postings) what the hiring company's HR department is going to care about. Which is often different from what the person doing the actual hiring will care about, but you need to satisfy both. They also have visibility into other aspects (salary, titles, mobility) that recruiters often can be helpful with, too, but I've found recruiters sometimes have their incentives somewhat misaligned with those of their clients (e.g., like a real estate agent who makes more money if they focus on turnover over deal size, so the homeowner isn't happy to get $15K less for their house than they could, recruiters make their cut when someone gets hired for anything, at any salary, and a small percentage of a salary that's 10% lower is less of a concern to them than being 10% underpaid is to you), whereas a résumé consultant's job is to do their part to ensure you get the interview. I run a couple businesses and therefore don't really have a résumé myself, but I've probably referred a total of a half people (friends, relatives, and people moving on from my employ to better things) to a close friend who is a résumé consultant, and they in turn have referred many multiples of that, given how happy they were with the results. Virtually all got interviews with the companies they wanted to. (Of course, a good résumé consultant will also tell you when you're completely on-paper-unqualified to enter that job via traditional means.) I consider myself a fairly capable person, but seeing the work of a highly talented résumé consultant made me realize that that's just not an area I (or the vast majority of most people) are adept at navigating. It's sort of like hiring an attorney to handle a legal matter one could technically handle without being an attorney. Sure, if you already have a talent for that kind of thing, and are willing to spend at least hundreds of hours working in that field, you'd probably be able to take care of that one task fairly easily, but anything short of that and it's far better to pay an expert. A few hundred bucks to put one's résumé into the top few-percent of applications is money very well spent.
  - fecak 10y ago
    As my background is in recruiting (which is quite helpful in resume writing), this is well put overall. A resume writers is just trying to position you as best as possible to get in the door, whereas a recruiter typically is just trying to get everyone in the door. The thing I like about resume writing and coaching is that it's 100% focused on helping an individual job seeker, and there are no misaligned incentives.
- fecak 10y ago
  To clarify "resume and coaching clients", I'm a resume writer, and I also do quite a bit of coaching/consulting one-on-one for people (mostly software engineers) on career topics. Job search strategies, how to position themselves for a next level in a career, etc. I'm not a "resume coach", and I'm also not sure what one would do if they exist. I'm a resume writer, and I also coach.

by fecak 10y ago

kchoudhu 10y ago

Serious question: what exactly does a resume coach do? Do they just maintain a good resume for me?

amorphid 10y ago
Having previously spent 8 years as a technical recruiter, and now working as a Sr. Software Engineer, I can say generally speaking that dev resume should be general enough that anyone in the recruitment pipeline should be able to look at it, and make enough sense of the information that they could make a reasonable decision about whether interviewing you for a given position would feel like a good use of time. I'd hope a resume coach would help work towards selling yourself to all parties involved in considering you for a position you'd actually want.
handedness 10y ago
BLUF: A good one will help your résumé navigate the often opaque and misaligned fiefdom that is corporate HR. Long version: If they have significant and current experience with hiring processes (especially in your industry), they'll be able to help you with everything from how to word and structure it to maximize your odds of getting through the automated filters nearly every big company uses these days, to figuring out (based on job postings) what the hiring company's HR department is going to care about. Which is often different from what the person doing the actual hiring will care about, but you need to satisfy both. They also have visibility into other aspects (salary, titles, mobility) that recruiters often can be helpful with, too, but I've found recruiters sometimes have their incentives somewhat misaligned with those of their clients (e.g., like a real estate agent who makes more money if they focus on turnover over deal size, so the homeowner isn't happy to get $15K less for their house than they could, recruiters make their cut when someone gets hired for anything, at any salary, and a small percentage of a salary that's 10% lower is less of a concern to them than being 10% underpaid is to you), whereas a résumé consultant's job is to do their part to ensure you get the interview. I run a couple businesses and therefore don't really have a résumé myself, but I've probably referred a total of a half people (friends, relatives, and people moving on from my employ to better things) to a close friend who is a résumé consultant, and they in turn have referred many multiples of that, given how happy they were with the results. Virtually all got interviews with the companies they wanted to. (Of course, a good résumé consultant will also tell you when you're completely on-paper-unqualified to enter that job via traditional means.) I consider myself a fairly capable person, but seeing the work of a highly talented résumé consultant made me realize that that's just not an area I (or the vast majority of most people) are adept at navigating. It's sort of like hiring an attorney to handle a legal matter one could technically handle without being an attorney. Sure, if you already have a talent for that kind of thing, and are willing to spend at least hundreds of hours working in that field, you'd probably be able to take care of that one task fairly easily, but anything short of that and it's far better to pay an expert. A few hundred bucks to put one's résumé into the top few-percent of applications is money very well spent.
- fecak 10y ago
  As my background is in recruiting (which is quite helpful in resume writing), this is well put overall. A resume writers is just trying to position you as best as possible to get in the door, whereas a recruiter typically is just trying to get everyone in the door. The thing I like about resume writing and coaching is that it's 100% focused on helping an individual job seeker, and there are no misaligned incentives.
fecak 10y ago
To clarify "resume and coaching clients", I'm a resume writer, and I also do quite a bit of coaching/consulting one-on-one for people (mostly software engineers) on career topics. Job search strategies, how to position themselves for a next level in a career, etc. I'm not a "resume coach", and I'm also not sure what one would do if they exist. I'm a resume writer, and I also coach.