3 ms·

I 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

I 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 ago
With 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    Google 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 ago
  So 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 ago
Have 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 ago
  The 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)

londons_explore 6y ago

With 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 ago
The 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 ago
  Google 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 ago
So 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 ago

Have 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 ago
The 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)