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What Google recruiters look for in a technical resume
- londons_explore 6y agoThe unsaid subtext of all this... Google receives multiple job applications per second all day long. The recruiters want to get the key information to fill in their webform, from your CV, in as few seconds as possible. Nobody is going to read every word, even on a one-pager.
- BoorishBears 6y agoI intentionally redesigned my resume to counter this a few years ago (or well, I guess several years ago now) It's 3 very dense pages, has skills in the margin, images to represent some things, goes extremely in depth about my background - I apply to jobs thoughtfully, I want the places hiring me to have taken the time to look at my resume. Specifically, I wanted to discourage recruiters who scan for skill "X for years Y" and immediately pick up the phone. I've been told I got an interview because my resume goes so in depth into who I am and what I want out of a position more than once, but of course ymmv as this article shows. It also helps if you're the one getting recruiters and not the other way around
- londons_explore 6y agoWith most big companies, the trick is either to have a CV which is amenable to fast and easy classification by human recruiters and sorts well against other candidates in a spreadsheet... Or to have a referral from an existing employee, which typically bypasses the CV-filter step. Your dense-CV approach isn't going to work for any company with a pile of tens of thousands of CV's to sort through...
- mathattack 6y agoThe referral is more important than anything else. That way the recruiter isn’t to blame if the interview goes bad. “Oh, sorry, that was Dave’s friend”
- username90 6y agoGoogle doesn't care much about referrals though. I referred a friend of mine to Google and he was rejected without them even talking to him, then he sent the application normally and got an interview without the referral. I know he was rejected since they told me as well that sadly my referral wasn't needed. I still got the referral bonus so it wasn't that they tried to trick me, but most would have given up after that first rejection but I'm glad he didn't.
- BoorishBears 6y agoSo I work at a large-ish company, not FAANG large but public company, ~50B market cap, ~5k employees And their recruiter reached out to me without issue. And recruiters from FAANG companies regularly reach out to me, I'm pretty sure at this point they reach out to anyone with certain companies listed on their LinkedIn profiles - I mentioned this below, but it's not like I turned my whole resume into a JPG or something, it's still searchable/indexable It's just not optimized for skimming, which I like. The thing is once they index and find the person with experience and the tech they want, I also want them to be willing to give a resume that looks different a chance.
- est31 6y agoHave you used it to apply at big companies or at smaller ones? At big companies the process is likely more "industrialized" where the reader of your CV can't even put a checkmark equating "has deep resume" because the designers of their tool haven't thought of it, while at smaller ones the process is condensed to a single person maybe, who can apply human reason to your CV.
- BoorishBears 6y agoThe thing is I don't want to work at a place that's just giving people with the right keyword soup interviews anyways. My resume is still using human language, if they're just searching for a certain tech it will show up. But from there, if the recruiter is looking for easiest resumes to parse... they'll immediately recoil and move on For me that's a feature not a bug. I'm at the point in my career where it's generally assumed I'll be capable of giving technical interviews, and nothing sucks more than being on the receiving end a recruitment funnel that's more focused on cookie cutter applications than the actual applicant... I also don't want to work on a team that passed up capable people who just happen to have missed the resume meta - And fwiw, I work at fairly large company, not FAANG large, but ~5k employees, market cap ~50B, and TC is also about in line with FAANG I'd say, at least at my level. We have a ton of ex-FAANG coincidentally... I was contacted by a recruiter of theirs who recognized a previous company I worked at and wanted to chat (very small company, tiny, so I was surprised that was what got them to bite)
- awat 6y ago“It's also critical you list your GitHub profile or other prominent open source work that shows us you're contributing to the open source community, passionate about the work you're doing, and looking to improve your skills.” Is this still top advice?
- londons_explore 6y agoIf you have done opensource work, it's totally worth listing it. People who code in their free time have a higher chance of success at places like Google. If you haven't, it isn't a dealbreaker.
- peruvian 6y agoIf you have something to show, sure. In my experience most engineers, even "Big Four" ones, have empty Github profiles.
- awat 6y agoThat's why I was asking. For the most part my experience and anecdotes matched up with almost everything in the article expect that piece. Just wanted to get some other opinions.
- bigwavedave 6y agoYMMV but when I was still in school about 6 years ago, I was told my github was why I was chosen over candidates with degrees for my first industry position.
- ndr 6y agoIncreased server query response time by 15% by restructuring API ... is that a good example?
- londons_explore 6y agoNo, and it really shows quite how detached from the tech these recruiters are... Source: I invented the flux capacitor equivalent of the retro encabulator, so should know a thing or two about this!
- treis 6y agoWell, you probably want to decrease response time but otherwise yes. It's good to give objective metrics for your accomplishments. Also helps to frame the interview. "I see here you improved the response time of an API by 15%, tell me about that".
- aksx 6y agoEven if your current employer let's you talk about specific numbers, without context they don't tell the recruiter anything. "The API latency was 10 seconds, now it's 8.5 seconds." or "I reduced the p99.9 latency from 1 sec to 400ms" (by removing input validation)
- treis 6y agoIf the best thing you did was take an API from 10 to 8.5 it's probably best to tell the recruiter as little as possible. Your second line is improvement for sure. But it follows the same basic advice to give numbers
- username90 6y agoA recruiter doesn't understand technical terms, to them that is an as good explanation as any other. And the interviewers later typically don't care about your resume, so it doesn't matter there either. However the people deciding if you get hired and what level you get hired at, and the engineering managers who decide if they want you on their team, they understand that it is a bad explanation and care about it. Now there is such a lack of candidates passing the interviews that you will probably get a position anyway, but the position you get might be shit.
- sbazerque 6y agoIs Google still a coveted place to work in the US? Sounds kind of implausible, I was reminded of the excellent "are we the baddies?" video posted here a few weeks ago :)
- forgotmysn 6y agovery, very, very much so. their salaries are among the highest in a high paid industry. additionally, they are among the best employers to have on a resume if you want to approach vc investors about a project of your own.
- cosmotic 6y agoGiven their product grave yard, why would google being on your resume be a good indicator of success for vc investors?
- forgotmysn 6y agoi think people tend to remember google's successes more than their failures, because google's successes massively, overwhelmingly outweigh their failures. [edit] as an example, people don't think of the Fire Phone with they think of Jeff Bezos.
- owyn 6y agoA VC isn't going to give you a coding test so they use "worked at google" as a proxy. Also presumably the developer/founder made enough money at google that they could probably stretch out whatever seed money you give them a lot further.
- ISL 6y agoTotally agreed. Google is known to have a more-reliable-and-thoughtful-than-many hiring process. It is a powerful credential.
- SimonPStevens 6y agoBecause they are picky and hard to get in to. To a VC who has very few other ways to asses you, having something in you past that singles you out as someone who has already cleared a highly selective process means you are more likely to be the kind of person who succeeds. Nothing to do with Google's own products. Any other club similar difficult to get into will convey the same signal. It's a crude signal, but it's a signal.
- Traster 6y ago>Typos might seem like a small matter, but many engineering managers have learned that engineers who aren’t careful with their resumes, also aren’t careful with their code. Be smart about it and check very carefully. Ugh. What even is this. Name me a compiler that is going to put up with a typo? Verilog, maybe. It'll just be like "Oh yeah this could be a wire". As long as you have no linting. But really, no. This is the sort of advice you get from people who know so little your field of expertise that the best they can do is spell check it. That may well be the first line of Google's recruitment team, but that tells you more about Google's requirements than anything else- put at the top of your checklist - inovation? No. creativity? No. Spelling! Yes! I mispelled innovation just there.... did it prevent you understanding me?
- bspammer 6y agoYou're taking the comparison too literally because writing a resume and writing code both involve text. Having a typo on your resume (not a random internet comment) is a strong signal that you can't be bothered do the bare minimum, which isn't a great trait for any job. Spell checkers are a solved problem for decades now, there's literally no excuse to leave typos in important documents.
- vulcan01 6y agoIt's not that literal. A developer not passing their resume through a spellchecker to catch typos shows that they are careless. Yes, every decent compiler and all linters are going to catch typos. What happens when that developer has to design a new API and doesn't even double-check their work?
- Traster 6y agoThat is quite literally unimaginable at a company like Google.
- passivate 6y agoThe problem with giving advice on such matters is that human psychology doesn't work by strict rules of logic and reason, and repeatable experiments are often not possible. Even if you can "prove" (if there is such a thing) certain traits of a candidate are more valuable than others, you can't prevent others from judging you on trivial things - especially in a highly competitive scenario. To cover your bases, I think it is good advice to focus on spelling. You can fight the system, or just accept that all humans are flawed :)
- exhilaration 6y agoDoes anyone know what the remote work situation is these days with Google? Specifically, is this a good time for folks in flyover states like myself to apply to these SV companies and land remote positions?
- silentsea90 6y agoGoogle isn't as welcoming of remote work as a model, but other tech companies are. Go for it!
- indus 6y agoi remember a similar 2001 article on what google crawlers look for in a website -- and today the web is a littered with space debris.
- swiley 6y agoSometimes I feel like just letting go of all this and trying to live out of my kayak.
- barbacoa 6y agoSomething else that is never mentioned in these resume resources is the role diversity plays in hiring decisions at big companies like google. If you are a minority or female include something in your resume such as "member of women in tech club" or "latinx student union vise president". Having those kind of key words in your resume can be as significant as having a PHD in ML. There is significant pressure at those companies to hit diversity goals. Not exaggerating this is what google recruiters I know have told me .
- londons_explore 6y agoSo true.
- aetherane 6y agoThat's pretty sad though if that is more important than a PhD
- forgotmysn 6y agohonestly, its harder to recruit technical women than it is men with PhD's
- arenaninja 6y agoDamn I need to start making my ethnicity working for me. But I suppose there's no point since I can't pass their leetcode style interviews :)
- common_crow 6y agoIt's really staggering how different my job search process is from my male friends, especially since I work in an ultra-male dominated niche. For them, it's like begging in the street for an offer. For me, it's like strolling through the supermarket and selecting which one I want. I have literally only once interviewed and not gotten an offer. People get upset when I speak about this, because it's taboo to say women have it easier (in some aspects) in the tech world. But I try to be vocal about my experiences, in an effort to encourage more girls to go into tech. After all, what better incentive is there than fantastic pay that's easy to get?
- dumpHero2 6y agoThis tweet highlights what they look for in a Junior Dev's resume: https://twitter.com/shaft/status/1355696154990628864?s=19 https://twitter.com/shaft/status/1355696154990628864?s=19
- est31 6y agoDoes someone know what "top 10% ER referral" means in this context? What does ER stand for?
- logicslave 6y agoALL. THAT. MATTERS. IS. LEETCODE. Forget everything on every blog about working in tech. All that matters is leetcode.
- lostmsu 6y agoL5+ (E5+ in FB) requires strong system design interviews for engineers.
- gofreddygo 6y ago100% agree. Wrap your head around leetcode first. Once you feel comfortable (memorize?), pramp or similar. Resume just needs 3 things experience (each point needs to invite questions. i.e. a conversation starter), accomplishments(optionl) and education.
- twblalock 6y agoLeetcode matters for junior roles. Interviews for senior roles generally include system design questions and you won't learn how to answer those well from Leetcode.