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CV Compiler is a robot that fixes your resume to make you more competitive
- zimpenfish 8y agoTried it with my current PDF. Didn't really manage much other than "use more keywords that employers like!"
- komali2 8y agoAre you comfortable sharing your resume so we can compare this report with the output? I'm gonna give it a shot and will do a write-up after my 9am.
- zimpenfish 8y agoSure - https://rjp.is/resume.pdf https://rjp.is/resume.pdf
- komali2 8y agoHuh, looks clear on the keywords for me. I wonder if it's mad because you don't list hot button things like Javascript or React or whatever. This is a great format, by the way. Very clear, yet still fairly non-traditional. Good use of horizontal space!
- nimblerabit 8y agoShouldn't the period go outside the parens? > Capable of understanding business requirements and working with the team to achieve the best solution (technologically or pragmatically.)
- jimsmart 8y agoI'm no expert. I've no idea with regards to parens, but with quotes, this is definitely a UK/US difference. In the US, a terminating/trailing period or comma goes inside the quote, "like this." — Whereas in the UK we do it "like this". Personally, and as a programmer, parsing the UK usage makes more sense to me logically, and I find the other way to be mentally jarring. Just my 2p.
- zimpenfish 8y agoHmm, I think you're right, thanks! Found a couple more (although "..., etc.)" seems to me that it requires the full stop inside the brackets because that ends the sentence. Maybe.)
- Aissen 8y agoThis seems to be the crux of the product (I'm exagerating, there are paid levels that might eventually provide value). It might be better served by a static page saying: these are the keywords/verbs you need on your resume, than a full-blown product.
- olegious 8y agoIf you're still sending in resumes cold you're doing it wrong. You need to either apply through connections or turn "cold" job postings into warm leads by finding someone in the company to refer you. How? You can find people on Twitter, LinkedIn, I've even found employees of companies I'm interested in on HN and reached out to them to establish rapport and get interviews. Get creative. I've also written blog posts about companies I'm interested in that lead to job opportunities.
- seiferteric 8y agoEven jobs I got through connections I still had to send in a resume.
- superhuzza 8y agoIn my experience, if you're coming in through a contact, the resume is just a formality at that point. Make sure that you tick all the boxes, basically due diligence.
- BMorearty 8y agoIt's not that black & white. It's fine to use both paths to a job. 26 of my 30 years in software were at jobs I applied to cold, with no leads or connections.
- nikhizzle 8y agoStrongly disagree. I got my first job at apple, and a job at another unicorn by cold submission. I find as an engineer, cold submission on a website will often get me in contact with a recruiter quicker than any other method.
- hunglee2 8y agolovely looking website. Interested to see what segment of the engineering community this service will prove greatest value to. Likely a lot of connected, visible, high profile engineers won't need this, but they are the 'conspicuous minority'....suspect a lot of folks will find this useful
- ricardoreis 8y agoTODO: write a counter-compiler that recognizes resumes based on the stylistic "improvements" suggested by this tool - and mark them for rejection accordingly.
- LeonM 8y agoSo the more successful this company gets, the less effective it becomes?
- komali2 8y agoWait, I don't get it, why?
- nameless912 8y agoBecause as resumes coalesce around their (admittedly, really fucking terrible) conception of what a good resume looks like, they all start becoming completely indistinguishable from each other, which makes them worse. As someone who's sat on both sides of the table (screening resumes, interviewing, hiring, and applying/being interviewed) a lot recently, the worst thing you can be isn't being inexperienced, it's being boring.
- LeonM 8y agoYou use this service so your resume stands out from the others. The more people use the service, the less likely your CV will stand out. Basically this is like SEO, but for resumes. There is only so much attention there is to divide, and everybody is fighting for a slice of the pie.
- quotemstr 8y agoGreat. Now everyone will juice his resume with something like this and we'll all end up in the same relative positions we were before, except 1) actual resume information density will be lower, as we'll have decreased the SNR through keyword juicing, and 2) anyone not paying attention to these tools (and focusing on work instead) will be unfairly penalized in early-stage hiring filter. This is the best timeline.
- ianai 8y agoYou’re assuming it works well. But less tongue in cheek, this is pretty close to the current market, as it is. Things like this might help close some of the arbitrary gaps. I agree with your sentiment regarding the timeline. We really could manage scarce resources more socially appropriately.
- guitarbill 8y agoI don't think this follows. To a degree, it's already true, because a lot of tech interviews just boil down to "have you learned all the pet CS questions in Cracking the Coding Interview?". A CV just gets you the interview. Of course you're right, some companies have software to filter CVs by keywords, and often it's as dumb as if the ad says "experience with Puppet", you need to say "experience with Chef, which is like Puppet". This is just playing the game, like everything is. Why do they do this? If you've been involved with hiring, you know the number of terrible CVs even a small company will get is shocking, so I'm sympathetic to automating things a bit. A lot of them are minimal effort, but that's the best case. Worst case is a flat out lie, because it takes more effort to catch - usually during the interview. So if we accept that CVs aren't just useful for raw information, but also convey some kind of measure of diligence (e.g. spelling), which you want in a programmer, then knowing about tools is also a useful measure. So I don't think it's going to be as bad as you make it sound.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mattnewton 8y agoNext episode of Silicon Valley: we find out that they are literally using “machine learning” - adding those words to resumes to get them picked up by recruiters. In all seriousness I think it would be interesting to explore the latent space of their model, and try to explain it- what does it think the magic words are?
- Reason077 8y agoThis seems like a great way to harvest lots of resumes to sell to recruiters. If you're working on your resume, you're probably open to a new job, right?
- dooglius 8y ago“We found that many job applications were being rejected without even an interview, because of the resumes. Apparently, 10 seconds is long enough for a recruiter to eliminate many candidates" What exactly does he think the purpose of a resume is? If someone does not have the necessary background or experience for a job, moving forward to an interview is a waste of time for all parties involved.
- maxxxxx 8y agoIt's not that simple. You may have the necessary background and experience but if your resume that doesn't show it clearly you get filtered out. Writing a resume that gets noticed is a very important skill. When we hire most resumes are really bad but there are some that stand out because they are well-written, concise and convey a clear message. It's rare though.
- komali2 8y agoWhen I was an engineering recruiter, 10 seconds hit the nose. If anybody wants to writeup a ruleset that mirrors the (definitely fallable) process I used to use, here's the rules: 1. Candidate probably local? {check address, if listed, else check location of previous roles} (required by our clients) 2. Candidate doesn't need sponsorship, probably? {check address, if listed, else check location of previous roles to ensure >5 years working in US, compare against university location} (required by our clients, and saturated market anyway. didn't like this one but that was the job) 3. Candidate has proper job title? {check last job title, ensure it's not >1 year ago, check previous job titles, ensure has had job title for some required amount of time} 4. Candidate has clean work history? {check for gaps between roles, or length of each individual role, look for big gaps or many short jobs} (not necessarily a disqualifier, but will be asked about) 5. Candidate has specific keywords required by position? {scan each job in earliest->oldest chronological order, ensuring recent and decent time spent on {{TECHNOLOGY}}} If I've gotten to bullet point 5 I'm probably already tapping their phone number into my phone, and doing a final scan for 6. Red flag? {look for political opinions on the resume, opinions of their previous bosses, proudly listed membership of organizations like the KKK (it's happened), too many spelling errors, rants about the job hunting process, odd demands surrounding salary or compensation or work style, or just general signs of weirdness/assholeness/difficult-to-deal-with-ness}
- yks 8y agoSlightly tangential but I believe the resume situation is another part of the "broken hiring in tech": 1. There is a whole cottage industry of resume writers. My CV got me mostly where I wanted and then some, but of course the professional "resume reviewers" told me it's awful and I need to pay them $50 to make it noticeable at all. 2. The "importance of results" makes people willing to bend the truth and then resumes start looking very sleazy. I saw CVs of interns from Silicon Valley darling companies who claim in every line how they saved millions of dollars here and there. Hard to believe frankly. 3. And what do those results even give us? If resume A says "Implemented ETL tool that improved customer acquisition 420%" and resume B says "Implemented ETL tool to work with customer data in Java", there is no reason to believe candidate A is at all better than candidate B. Well, they are better at resume writing or hiring resume writers. Or maybe they are good at office politics and were able to put themselves on impactful projects. But will they pass the FizzBuzz?
- hnuser355 8y agoRe:3 Frankly, I think a lot of managers in some places (maybe places you wouldn’t like to work) would care more about their employee being good at inflating their accomplishments and engaging in low-scale office warfare with people outside the group than having really good technical skills. At one of my employers I was hired at a probably bad time in my life where I was quite unskilled technically (spend a whole day or something to write a fairly simply SQL query), but I would start small office fights (and contribute to office fights of my manager) over any perceived slight, and always view anything my team, me, or my manager did as delusionally impactful and important and loudly proclaim it to everyone around. They bent over backwards to keep me on board. But the technical level of this group was extremely low, so if this was in a group where someone else could verify that I wasn’t that good it may have played out in a more normal manner. As I invested a lot in my technical skills and got a lot better/more efficient at my actual work (while caring less about fighting office people about their choice of wording in an email or something) they all began to hate me, with my manager wondering aloud to me why I had become so much worse of an employee after a great start.
- pmiller2 8y agoThat’s funny, because although the 420% statement seems more appealing, it doesn’t give any idea whether things improved drastically or just from terrible to slightly less terrible.
- Balgair 8y agoI took the dive and let them hack away at my LI. No telling what kind of spam I'm going to get now. That said, wow! This is terrible. The first thing that they say I should improve on is: Must-Have-Words. Here is their list of those words: Deployment Security API Scalability OOP Continuous Integration (CI) Availability Docker SOLID NoSQL Configuration Management (CM) Robust Tuning Algorithm Web services Networking Design Patterns Unit testing Open Source AWS Hadoop Continuous Deployment (CD) REST Big Data Agile TDD Machine Learning Microservices Artificial Intelligence GitHub. They also say that after I pay for the service I'll get access to the other fields of things I am missing. Those include: Niche IT Skills, Numbers, Online Presence, Technological Proficiency, Typos, Soft Skills, Your Old Projects, URLs. They do say that I have a good amount of 'Action Verbs'. But that I need more of them and give the examples of: Devised Debugged Utilized Upgraded Assembled Overhauled Redesigned Coded Rebuilt Maintained Initiated Solved Investigated Developed Architected Trained. Again, once I pay, I'll unlock a few more categories, which are listed here: Resume Size, Accomplishments, Your Most Recent Roles, Abbreviations, Outdated Tech, File Format, Summary/Objective, Employment History, Short-Term Jobs, Marital Status, Religion, Broken Links, References, Teams In case you haven't really read through that list I'll highlight the 2 most INSANE items there that should make any HR department dive for the pepto-bismol: Marital Status, Religion. Now, I don't know if they are warning AGAINST including those fields or encouraging including them. However, that they are items that are there at all speaks to the 'demographic' that they are targeting: complete numbskulls. Not a single person that can fog a mirror would ever include those 2 fields in a CV in the English speaking world.
- isoskeles 8y ago> Utilized lol One of the only people I've ever interviewed where I cut it short was a guy who admitted he lied and put "MongoDB" on his resume to get it past any robots that were screening. Anyway, that massive list of must-have-words reminds me of the old days on the internet where web pages would have a block of content near the bottom that contained many keywords written in the same color as the background. Now I am wondering if that's the direction resumes go for some short period of time.
- 8y ago
- samfisher83 8y agoSo seo for resumes?
- komali2 8y agoOk, I gave it a shot. For reference, here's my resume (google doc link so I don't have to PDF bomb people, and because I never bothered to transfer this thing to HTML): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A3Ns93sbE8v70hCt7yWJigoiL0sQZNTtMPr9zVtkoqM/ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A3Ns93sbE8v70hCt7yWJigoi... Apparently I have only 7 of 30 "Must Have Words." I have TDD, Open Source, API, AWS, GitHub, REST. I should include, according to this site: , Security , Scalability , OOP , Continuous Integration (CI) , Availability , Docker , SOLID , NoSQL , Configuration Management (CM), Robust, Tuning, Algorithm, Web services, Networking, Design Patterns, Unit testing, Hadoop, Continuous Deployment (CD), Big Data, Agile, Machine Learning, Microservices, Artificial Intelligence. I use "enough" action verbs that "emphasize my tech skills": engineer develop architected engineered code built But I could add some more: Debugged Upgraded Assembled Rebuilt Investigated Trained Devised Programmed Maintained Designed Redesigned Applied Utilized Overhauled Initiated Solved Reduced Now it's got some freaky little pie chart thing that I don't understand, but it says that to applicant tracking software, I look like a "Other 16%, Back-end (Javascript), QA, Cloud Computing, Front-end" guy. Looks like I have to pay to unlock some other things, like it says it found typos, something about soft skills, something about resume size, dunno. Mildly interesting, though I find this fairly useless compared to just having someone professional look at your resume. I'm not sure adding the word "Unit Testing" to my resume increases my chances at getting into netflix, I already list my unit testing frameworks and my testing experience at electric imp, though I suppose it will be missed by a non-programming recruiter just scanning for keywords, so that keyword stuff is probably the best advice this thing gives.
- rddedpythondev 8y agoImproving your resume is a nice tag for also getting competitive intelligence.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- stilley2 8y agoDoes it drive anybody else crazy when resume and CV are used interchangeably?
- chrisseaton 8y agoIn the British English 'CV' and 'resume' are interchangeable. I know in US English 'CV' means something more in the academic community, but it doesn't here.
- turbografx16 8y agoGiven how this thread is going I thought I'd mention a resume review robot I actually like. I use Novoresume.com to build my resumes and I find it's resume suggestions to be pretty useful. It's free for one page resumes too. I am not associated with novoresume in any way, I just like the product.
- shadowtree 8y agoMicrosoft Office just added this capability via LinkedIn, fully automated. Open a resume in Word, an assistant pops up. Good luck agains that.
- jimsmart 8y ago"Hey, it looks like you're writing a CV"
- fecak 8y agoProfessional resume writer here that comes with 20 years of experience in recruiting and hiring for tech startups. I have no fear of being replaced by AI anytime soon, and I don't have any knowledge of this company but can certainly vouch for their statement about other resume firms trying to upsell a service based on a shoddy review. I often have clients that come to me with perfectly good resumes that tell me some online rating system said it was terrible. A resume can be somewhat accurately 'scored' for fit based on matching keywords, but the tech isn't mature enough yet to say if something is simply good or bad. Not to mention the different tastes from different companies. I write a bit differently depending on who the target audience is for a resume. I don't know if these review companies account for that at all, but they don't seem to.
- larrik 8y ago"allowing you to shine to recruiters at Google, Yahoo and Facebook" Wait, Yahoo? People still try to get hired there?
- rohanm93 8y agoThought I'd shout out my product, https://resumeworded.com/score https://resumeworded.com/score, here. Gives a similar, but much more detailed analysis of a resume.
- Aeolun 8y agoI do not care about signing up until I see the value your product would bring.
- perpetualcrayon 8y agoEver since I had a run in with an extremely "motivated" team of head hunters my belief has been that resumes are almost useless. I was responsible for hiring a team a while back and, in retrospect, believe I put way too much faith into my practice of filtering candidates by resume content.
- ravenstine 8y agoWe're gradually getting to a point where the hiring process is merely about bots outsmarting other bots.
- Bedon292 8y agoIt seems like they just analyzed a million resumes and then try and make your resume match theirs. Doubt they graded all million of them thoroughly, so whats to say the quality was good? Why should you want to match those million resumes? Also, if you are using ML to try and make your resume closer to the ones that are analyzed, aren't you making the resume more average, not making it stand out more? If everyone uses the service, and adds all these keywords to it, then how are they of any value?
- Carpetsmoker 8y agoMore importantly, every job posting or resume may mention stuff like "git", "CI", "Docker", "OOP", and whatnot. But I would argue that for many roles it's hardly an important thing to list on your resume. Just because it's mentioned doesn't mean it's important.
- PavlovsCat 8y agoI once made a buzzword generator thingy, so here's some suggestions, use them wisely.... and by wisely I mean in the form "I like to $A $B $C of $D, $A $B $D $C and use $D to $A $B $C", if you want to refer to past positions simply add a "d" to the verb. But before you do, put on a seatbelt, your career might just go vertical! (up, I mean vertical in the upwards direction) $A: appropriately, assertively, authoritatively, collaboratively, compellingly, coherently, competently, completely, continually, conveniently, credibly, distinctively, dynamically, efficiently, generally, holistically, horizontally, interactively, literally, objectively, organically, practically, professionally, progressively, provably, quickly, radically, rapidly, seamlessly, strategically, synergistically, theoretically, totally, uniquely, vertically, sequentially, non-sequentially $B: actualize, administrate, aggregate, architect, benchmark, brand, build, communicate, conceptualize, contextualize, coordinate, create, cross-pollinate, cultivate, curate, customize, deliver, deploy, develop, disintermediate, disrupt, disseminate, drive, e-enable, embrace, empower, enable, engage, engineer, enhance, envisioneer, evisculate, evolve, expedite, exploit, extend, fabricate, facilitate, formulate, foster, generate, grow, impact, implement, incentivize, incubate, initiate, innovate, integrate, iterate, leverage, maintain, maximize, monetize, negotiate, network, optimize, orchestrate, pontificate, position, productivate, productize, productivize, promote, pursue, re-engineer, recaptiualize, reconceptualize, recontextualize, redefine, reinvent, repurpose, restore, revolutionize, scale, seize, strategize, streamline, syndicate, synergize, synthesize, target, transform, transition, utilize, visualize, whiteboard, ideate, update $C: abstraction, analysis, application, aquisition, archival, assessment, benchmarking, certification, clustering, computation, computing, convergence, conversion, correction, counting, debugging, decentralization, definition, demonstration, deployment, development, diffusion, discovery, display, distribution, enforcement, engineering, enhancement, exploitation, extension, fusion, identification, indexing, integration, interaction, interfacing, marketing, processing, production, protection, recognition, redefinition, research, response, separation, solution, support, tracking, transaction, transfer, transportation, updating, visualization $D: addiction, advice, alignment, authority, bandwidth, big data, bullshit, certificate, change, chemicals, clients, coherence, communication, confusion, content, convergence, data, deniability, e-business, e-commerce, education, encryption, energy, entertainment, estimation, eyeballs, equity, exposure, fear, feedback, greed, health, ideas, information, intelligence, knowledge, mindshare, music, networks, partnership, plausability, privacy, productivity, public relations, quality, quality assurance, reduction, relaxation, research, sales, security, software, space, speculation, stability, standards, storage, sustainability, synergy, technology, traction, traffic, transparency, trust, vacation, visibility, warfare
- rs86 8y agoTech Crunch looks like advertising.