15 ms·

How to write a resume that converts

182 points by enigmatic02 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Jaygles 5y ago
How exactly can you attribute certain actions to broad results like boosting sales x% YoY? I feel like its rare for someone to be in the position to know that well enough to say that without stretching the truth. Maybe the secret sauce is that it's impossible to verify?
- stephen_greet 5y ago
  I don't think you need to get the attribution exactly correct. Rather, you need to be able to defend how you arrived at a metric. You can walk through the assumptions you made then build up the components of those assumptions to arrive at an estimated impact.
- waheoo 5y ago
  Not everything needs to be sales based or even numbers based. The lesson here is fact based, not baseless claims. I write high quality code. Vague statement, nothing backing it, don't even want to ask how or why you think you do because its pure fluff. I leverage code review and unit testing to ensure my code is modular and resilient to change. Fact based and easily verifiable with an interview question: Tell me about your code review and testing practices, do you use ci?
- busterarm 5y ago
  Everyone owes it to themselves to understand directly how their contributions create value for their comapny. It will help you enormously in compensation negotiations. If you aren't creating value for the business, you're on an eventual path to downsizing and should look for another job.
  - varajelle 5y ago
    I am a developer. I mainly fix bugs reported by customers and I implement some features asked by PM. But I have no idea how to quantify this value. I'm paid X$, so I assume it is > X$. Maybe PM knows, but they don't tell me the value of each features. Am I on the path to downsizing? Or what should I put on my resume?
    - busterarm 5y ago
      Based on the description I would say that yeah, your business probably views you as a cost rather than a source of value. If financial circumstances for the company were to change, your position would be insecure. (aka, sales people get fired last). Your negotiating power for higher salaries is also probably limited. There's plenty of jobs that are like this and if you're comfortable than I can't really tell you what to do, but I always position myself to be a source of value to my company rather than a cost. The salaries are much higher here. I'm also a developer, but deep on the IC track (architect). I create platforms that give my company whole capabilities that it wouldn't have otherwise. I can directly measure the value in what I do.
    - chrononaut 5y ago
      Late here as I was brought in through another HN thread so hopefully you have a chance to catch this. If I was in your position I would be looking to understand from other business stakeholders how many customers my bug fixes have impacted, both from those that asked and those that would naturally benefit from them if they use the same product. If you know the total customer base, you now the % of the customer base that you have helped (1) improve the actual or perceived probability of retention, (2) directly influence the customer satisfaction of your product(s), (3) improved the chance that the customer continues to subscribes, buys other products / features that your company sells, or recommends your organization to their peers. This can be expressed as contributing to achieve retention goals, improving / meeting targets of NPS scores or other satisfaction measurements, and influencing quarterly or yearly upsell / expansion targets, which you might be able to get explicitly from those other business stakeholders. Likewise I disagree with the sibling comment that you might be considered a cost to that organization (the organization might actually perceive you that way, but in reality that's actually not the case otherwise there would be no one fixing bugs and implementing features) as are a fundamental core to an organization's strategy of maintaining or achieving retention targets and influence its upsell potential.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  There are a few times I’ve been told an approximate dollar value of my work, but they were at very tiny companies and never enough to impress.
mdorazio 5y ago
This isn't bad advice, it just glosses over the reality for most people applying to jobs where their role isn't in massive demand (i.e. not a SV dev/prod mgr). I routinely screen dozens of resumes a month for a wide variety of semi-technical roles and have been through the ringer on the other side more times than I care to think about. The #1 thing* that will get you to a phone screen is keywords that match what the hiring manager (and usually the screening software) is looking for. Those keywords are usually a combination of technologies, skills, responsibilities, and companies. Yes, where you worked previously is important, and yes that makes it a vicious cycle for a lot of people. The #2 thing that most hiring managers look for is directly relevant experience matching the responsibilities of the role in question. Yes, that sucks because it means if you haven't yet gotten to the level of doing the work in the new role then you're at a disadvantage. The way around this is to ask for responsibilities at your current job that you want to do at your next job. The advice in this article tends to come into play after those two factors are met. *excluding an internal referral.
- waheoo 5y ago
  Best advice for cv writing: if you're not modifying your cv and cover letter for every job ad, you're doing it wrong. Generic, and vague links to my job ad are the worst cvs to read. I don't know how you can help me. Why does your three years at telecorp relate to my e-commerce business?
  - speeder 5y ago
    When you are sending hundreds of resumes, how you manage that? For example I've been looking for a job for eight months now. I did create multiple resumes for different industries (and languages, I have portuguese and english versions) but still, I've been sending resumes in mass, and got invited in these eight months to only two interviews... and one of them was kinda a scam (the guy looked like he wanted an employee, but in fact he was a publisher looking for people that will shoulder most of the risk)
    - hiharryhere 5y ago
paxys 5y ago
The importance of resumes has been overstated for many years now, and I look forward to the day they are phased out entirely. Minor grammar changes are not what is making the difference between getting an interview or not. Years' worth of work cannot be distilled down to 2 lines on a piece of paper, and recruiters/hiring managers already know this. Employers are looking at your education, companies you worked at, years of experience, and maybe a vague idea of what your work area was before this. Just this info is enough to make a decision for whether to call you for an interview, and after that the resume is useless.
- benrbray 5y ago
  > after that the resume is useless Literally! I can count on one hand the number of interviewers who have asked me about my past work experience. The most important thing seems to be whether I can regurgitate various tree operations on a whiteboard. It's only a matter of time before they cut out the middle man and start hiring candidates by (university_ranking, hackerrank_ranking) in lexical order without as much as an interview.
  - baoluofu 5y ago
    That seems crazy to me! Whenever I conduct interviews questions about specific situations from their past experience are most of what I ask. "Tell me about a time when..." I find they can very quickly uncover potential red flags. They can also lead to interesting discussions that leave both me and the candidate enthused about progressing to the next stage.
- xx789 5y ago
  > Employers are looking at your education, companies you worked at, years of experience, and maybe a vague idea of what your work area was before this. Isn't this what a resume is? Just the list of those things that Employers want to look at.
  - jsemrau 5y ago
    Doesn't it also give you an overview of someone's life-choices?
chiefalchemist 5y ago
Rule #1 - Realize and embrace that your resume / CV has one purpose and one purpose only...to get an interview. Full stop.
- chiefalchemist 5y ago
  Rule #2 - Once you get an interview, realize and lean in...you're interviewing them as much as they're interviewing you. It's a date. Be thorough. Your future, career, health and satisfaction might depend on it.
  - rhodozelia 5y ago
    Like a relationship jobs seem to be easier for to get in to than out of. Definitely need to choose wisely as 1 year can turn in to 10!
    - worker767424 5y ago
      In a way. It's also pretty easy to send your manager an email saying "My last date at mega/micro-corp will be X." Or ghost them. Don't, because it's not professional, but ghosting is one way to quit.
wombatpm 5y ago
To Quote Dave Barry: A resume is not just a piece of paper, it is a piece of paper with lies on it. And it can mean difference between not getting a job, and not even coming close.
Waterluvian 5y ago
After screening thousands of résumés I have one piece of advice for what I (maybe not others) want: One page. Single sided. Plenty of whitespace for legibility. I want to know in 20 seconds if I want to short stack you for a quick call.
- amitport 5y ago
  Depends on the job. Yes, your advice is generally good for a software engineer with less than 10y experience. For senior ML researcher, for example, you are expected to list the many things you did and know. You still are going to be filtered on arbitrary things, but HR is expecting a thicker doc.
  - Der_Einzige 5y ago
    I use a 1 page resume as an ML engineer. I have a section dedicated to keywords called "Skills". Seems to work quite well for me and I firmly believe that a longer resume would have hurt more than it would help.
    - amitport 5y ago
      I used the term "ML researcher". I'm also talking from experience and generally agree that less is better for engineering jobs. For research jobs it is very very common to list tons of things (papers, committee positions, awards, etc.,) and when your first filter is an HR person you ARE often going to be screened by volume (stupid as that may sound). Sure, there are exceptions, if your resume starts with "PhD from Standford, advised by Prof. Hinton" you are probably going to be OK. Otherwise, you just want to play the game that is being played in the field, which, unfortunately, does often include the volume of work a proxy for success.
- shagie 5y ago
  ... when I open it up in Word, I don't want to see lots of red squiggles form misspelled words. If JavaScript is spelled three different ways, that's a problem. The care and attention to the resume (which the candidate has time to prepare and consider) is used as a proxy for the care and attention that a potential employee will pay to the code base.
hbcondo714 5y ago
> Quantify wherever possible Google's former HR head describes this as: "Accomplished [X] as measured by [Y], by doing [Z]." This and other useful resume tips by him: https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/google-recruiters-say-these-5-resume-tips-including-x-y-z-formula-will-improve-your-odds-of-getting-hired-at-google.html https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/google-recruiters-say-the...
Dannymetconan 5y ago
After having to read through about 50 resumes today, so we could interview a max of 4 people for 1 position it's really hard to tell who's is good / bad. I found the easiest thing to look for was some portfolio of work to try and differenciate the candidates
- thrwaeasddsaf 5y ago
  How do you tell from a portfolio who is good or bad?
mooze 5y ago
Having been on both ends of the hiring process (in tech): 1. You don't have to be 100% qualified. Just show me that the skills you have are transferrable. 2. Tailor your CV & cover letter to the vacancy and company. List at least one work/life/volunteering experience (preferably a project with end results) that is linked to each of the requirements. 3. Keep it short and to the point. A quick glance and relevant keywords should jump out and pique my interest. 4. If you go "but..." to any of the 3 points above, you're probably wasting everyone's time.
- porker 5y ago
  I'm going to "but... " point 2, having been there last week. There were 10 requirements. It was a niche job that I was skilled at. For 1 I had life experience with end results (do ppl have life/volunteering experience that applies to job requirements? I'm nearly 40 and don't). For the other 9 I could link them to exact work matches - except all are under NDAs with different clients, so had to be described vaguely. The company I was interviewing with weren't impressed, which was ironic as I'd had to sign a NDA prior to the interview. They also wanted to inspect code I'd written - can they see a project? Well no, because it's written for a commercial client. What can I show them on GitHub? Nothing helpful as I develop in private repositories and what is public is experimental code doodles. How do you handle strict NDAs and private projects?
  - mooze 5y ago
    If it's under NDA then don't talk specifics, but during the interview you can talk about difficulties you overcame or lessons you learned during the process. The key is to show that you are equipped to solve their problems. If they're pushing for you to break NDA, then you probably don't want to work there anyway.
vorhemus 5y ago
I find statements like "boosted sales by x%" completely out of place on a resume. Imagine you are an account/sales manager at AWS - cloud sales will still go for a while, no matter what you do. So you are basically just riding the wave of booming cloud which is completely independent of your personal sales skills.
- busterarm 5y ago
  You're nitpicking the details of what the created value was. The absolute best candidates I talk to almost always detail the value that they created. These people also negotiate better salaries for themselves. 99% of everyone just lists their responsibilities on their resumes and it makes them almost useless. The difference is that of that 1% of people, I will interview 100% of them. From the general pool of 99% I am looking for mistakes in your resume to not talk to you.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bedobi 5y ago
Critique my resume? https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xKLSoiRCl5eJbUR6-seefyGJXT1H6bVE0IJQ_fLvt8Y https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xKLSoiRCl5eJbUR6-seefyGJ... I'm sure there are people who think it's the worst ever, but I'm pretty happy with it. It has served me well over the years, and (maybe) even helped some friends who adopted a similar format and style to get their jobs. Some things I strive for: * No redundant labeling like "Name: <your name>, Education: <your degree>" etc. It should be obvious what's what. (and it saves space) * Summary at the top (most people won't even read the resume, a summary at the top enables them to shortlist after a quick glance) * Examples of tech used (mostly to trigger keywords) * Plain English. Can't stress this enough - I hate resumes full of vague business sounding fluff. Eg (I'm just making this up but) "streamlined collaborative efforts and alignment between multiple business critical priorities" <-- wtf does stuff like this even mean? Doesn't pass a bs smell test. * No bullshit. Eg no "improved x by y %" - you can list duties and actual accomplishments without resorting to that style. * Comfortably fits on one page. That said, improvements always welcome :P
- c7DJTLrn 5y ago
  C'est bon. I'd change Current to Present though.
  - bedobi 5y ago
    Good point, thanks!
- pulse7 5y ago
  Add your (formal) education.
- bbojan 5y ago
  I wouldn't disambiguate AWS (should be pretty obvious what it is to people reading the resume), but if you feel it's needed, you can do it only once in the document. Otherwise a very clean, short resume - I would say in the 80th percentile :-)
  - 5y ago
austincheney 5y ago
The difference between the preferences of posted job requirements and recruiters is stunning. From reading hundreds of job requirements you get the strongest indication it’s a keyword game and nothing else matters, but recruiters who are actively and manually sifting through resumes are clearly looking for something different. Example: according to most job postings for web developer the new hot title is Fullstack Senior Engineer which consists primarily of React on the front end with a fallback to Angular and Java with a fallback to Python on the backend. Everything else reads as insignificant filler. I don’t want to blindly dick around with your framework insanity like a junior so I am sure to omit this from my resume and recruiters still contact me about TypeScript and Node.
robbrown451 5y ago
They say don't use annoying buzzwords, but personally I find "convert" to be a particularly grating buzzword. What's wrong with saying "gets you hired"?
- walrus01 5y ago
  Let's drill down on that for a while. I'll circle back with you next week.
- vianneychevalie 5y ago
  It gets you less clicks
- mosselman 5y ago
  To be fair, they are saying you shouldn't use buzzwords in a resume, not everywhere. I agree with you that the phrase 'gets you hired' is a lot stronger though.
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  For titles, shorter is typically better. In this case, it's nowhere near the character count limit for HN, but limits of that sort are another good reason to err on the side of "shorter is better." But it boils down to cognitive load. Attention spans are limited and it's a busy world full of distractions. You need to grab someone's attention with the least burden on their limited resources -- mental bandwidth, attention, time, etc -- and get them to click. A good title can be the difference between a successful article and a flop and titles are hard.
  - robbrown451 5y ago
    "Gets you hired" would be far less cognitive load than "convert" to me. Maybe its just me, but I haven't seen it used like that previously, I've seen it mostly with ad clicks converting to them signing up or buying something (which is only slightly less grating, but I can understand the need for a shorter expression when it is industry jargon)
RalfWausE 5y ago
Its just an anecdote from my personal experience, but perhaps it shows how little an resume influences the decision if you get a job or not: About 7 years ago i was unemployed and a little depressed because every single application for a job i wrote got rejected... at one saturday night i returned from some good time with a few friends and perhaps a few beer (..and whisky, and whatever else) too much and had the "wise" idea to check a few job websites. I found an offer for a sysop job and wrote the (obviously) most drunken and horrible application ever... at monday morning i got a call, the next friday i signed the contract. Morale of the story: The boss got curious if i really was just an drunk idiot and invited me to see for himself. I still work at this company and i am reasonable happy here. But... perhaps this is something which will work only with smaller companies.
- josephg 5y ago
  A few years ago I was working as a video game programming teacher. My boss showed me a resume asking if I thought we should bring the guy in. His resume was a 8ish page affair in the Japanese style. I flipped through not that impressed, until in the middle of his resume somewhere he mentioned working on Japanese dating sim games with ridiculous names like “How to date a hot girl II”. I figured we needed to interview him after that, if only to hear that story. Anyway, we ended up hiring him. Really nice guy - and his students adored him. I’m not sure what the takeaway is. Maybe, just like a dating profile, don’t be afraid to be interesting in your resume. The point isn’t to get you hired. It’s to give whoever reads it reason enough to interview you.
wiz21c 5y ago
a joke : I take the pile of resumes, cut in two and throw one of the halves into the bin. I don't work with people who are not lucky.
kleiba 5y ago
The problem with resume guidelines is that there are too many factors that you cannot control. What makes a good resume is widely dependent on culture, and that includes the place you live, the company culture, and even the personal preferences of the HR folks. Any tips, even along the lines of "you should not even need a resume" are just that: tips. They might be valuable tips in one situation and completely miss the mark in another. It's probably easier to compile a list of things to avoid in a resume than with a positive list of things to do. But the first of the two would likely be so trivial as to be of little use. I'm thinking about "insights" such as "avoid typos". But the further you move away from such low hanging fruits, the more you enter the territory of "it depends". The purpose of a resume is to introduce yourself to the hiring company as a contender. It's a sales pitch in a way, sent to people who are very experienced in receiving sales pitches. But you're not a snake oil salesman, the goal is not to get them to buy something they don't really need. The goal is to transmit the most complete picture of the relevant aspects of yourself. My personal thinking has always been that HR folks have seen it all. There's no point trying to impress through style - referring to both your great visual layout as well as your choice of wording. Sure, you should not suck at both: if you cannot even align your indentation, perhaps I'm less inclined to buy the 20+ years of experience in the office. But other than that, all the bells and whistles will probably do little to impress.
rheffern 5y ago
If any HNers out there are game, I'd love a critique of my CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18QwC-ra6p_3Nnjmajn9gLK3w77Z7Eyux/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/18QwC-ra6p_3Nnjmajn9gLK3w77Z... It's a bit old, as I've been working a job for a bit, but any help on it would very much be appreciated!
ghall 5y ago
Hi all -- founder of RezScore, free automated scoring tool. Have spent about a decade studying the subject. 1. Brevity: Keep it concise, under 800 words. Every extra word is a bullet they can kill you with if they're on the fence. 2. Impact: Use a readability score (ie Fleisch-Kincaid, any built into Word) to keep the reading score equivalent of ~11th grade. They're smart but not geniuses. 3. Depth: Keep your sentences short, under 20 words per sentence is good rule of thumb. Reward their laziness. Other useful tips... * Use a large professional headline (ie LinkedIn), swap out just this part for each job you're applying * Prune out responsibilities, only talk about achievements * Lots of numbers * Pay attention to aesthetics/formatting Don't obsess about perfection -- devise a system to crank out 10 copies a day and you'll iterate it into a job in no time. At any rate, if you're applying resume first you're doing it wrong, everybody getting the plum jobs networks their way in, resume is a formality. Always happy to hear about your job search and provide specific resume feedback, email us at hey AT rezscore.com

182 points by enigmatic02 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

How exactly can you attribute certain actions to broad results like boosting sales x% YoY? I feel like its rare for someone to be in the position to know that well enough to say that without stretching the truth. Maybe the secret sauce is that it's impossible to verify?

stephen_greet 5y ago
I don't think you need to get the attribution exactly correct. Rather, you need to be able to defend how you arrived at a metric. You can walk through the assumptions you made then build up the components of those assumptions to arrive at an estimated impact.
waheoo 5y ago
Not everything needs to be sales based or even numbers based. The lesson here is fact based, not baseless claims. I write high quality code. Vague statement, nothing backing it, don't even want to ask how or why you think you do because its pure fluff. I leverage code review and unit testing to ensure my code is modular and resilient to change. Fact based and easily verifiable with an interview question: Tell me about your code review and testing practices, do you use ci?
busterarm 5y ago
Everyone owes it to themselves to understand directly how their contributions create value for their comapny. It will help you enormously in compensation negotiations. If you aren't creating value for the business, you're on an eventual path to downsizing and should look for another job.
- varajelle 5y ago
  I am a developer. I mainly fix bugs reported by customers and I implement some features asked by PM. But I have no idea how to quantify this value. I'm paid X$, so I assume it is > X$. Maybe PM knows, but they don't tell me the value of each features. Am I on the path to downsizing? Or what should I put on my resume?
  - busterarm 5y ago
    Based on the description I would say that yeah, your business probably views you as a cost rather than a source of value. If financial circumstances for the company were to change, your position would be insecure. (aka, sales people get fired last). Your negotiating power for higher salaries is also probably limited. There's plenty of jobs that are like this and if you're comfortable than I can't really tell you what to do, but I always position myself to be a source of value to my company rather than a cost. The salaries are much higher here. I'm also a developer, but deep on the IC track (architect). I create platforms that give my company whole capabilities that it wouldn't have otherwise. I can directly measure the value in what I do.
  - chrononaut 5y ago
    Late here as I was brought in through another HN thread so hopefully you have a chance to catch this. If I was in your position I would be looking to understand from other business stakeholders how many customers my bug fixes have impacted, both from those that asked and those that would naturally benefit from them if they use the same product. If you know the total customer base, you now the % of the customer base that you have helped (1) improve the actual or perceived probability of retention, (2) directly influence the customer satisfaction of your product(s), (3) improved the chance that the customer continues to subscribes, buys other products / features that your company sells, or recommends your organization to their peers. This can be expressed as contributing to achieve retention goals, improving / meeting targets of NPS scores or other satisfaction measurements, and influencing quarterly or yearly upsell / expansion targets, which you might be able to get explicitly from those other business stakeholders. Likewise I disagree with the sibling comment that you might be considered a cost to that organization (the organization might actually perceive you that way, but in reality that's actually not the case otherwise there would be no one fixing bugs and implementing features) as are a fundamental core to an organization's strategy of maintaining or achieving retention targets and influence its upsell potential.
the_only_law 5y ago
There are a few times I’ve been told an approximate dollar value of my work, but they were at very tiny companies and never enough to impress.

mdorazio 5y ago

This isn't bad advice, it just glosses over the reality for most people applying to jobs where their role isn't in massive demand (i.e. not a SV dev/prod mgr). I routinely screen dozens of resumes a month for a wide variety of semi-technical roles and have been through the ringer on the other side more times than I care to think about. The #1 thing* that will get you to a phone screen is keywords that match what the hiring manager (and usually the screening software) is looking for. Those keywords are usually a combination of technologies, skills, responsibilities, and companies. Yes, where you worked previously is important, and yes that makes it a vicious cycle for a lot of people. The #2 thing that most hiring managers look for is directly relevant experience matching the responsibilities of the role in question. Yes, that sucks because it means if you haven't yet gotten to the level of doing the work in the new role then you're at a disadvantage. The way around this is to ask for responsibilities at your current job that you want to do at your next job. The advice in this article tends to come into play after those two factors are met. *excluding an internal referral.

waheoo 5y ago
Best advice for cv writing: if you're not modifying your cv and cover letter for every job ad, you're doing it wrong. Generic, and vague links to my job ad are the worst cvs to read. I don't know how you can help me. Why does your three years at telecorp relate to my e-commerce business?
- speeder 5y ago
  When you are sending hundreds of resumes, how you manage that? For example I've been looking for a job for eight months now. I did create multiple resumes for different industries (and languages, I have portuguese and english versions) but still, I've been sending resumes in mass, and got invited in these eight months to only two interviews... and one of them was kinda a scam (the guy looked like he wanted an employee, but in fact he was a publisher looking for people that will shoulder most of the risk)
  - hiharryhere 5y ago

paxys 5y ago

The importance of resumes has been overstated for many years now, and I look forward to the day they are phased out entirely. Minor grammar changes are not what is making the difference between getting an interview or not. Years' worth of work cannot be distilled down to 2 lines on a piece of paper, and recruiters/hiring managers already know this. Employers are looking at your education, companies you worked at, years of experience, and maybe a vague idea of what your work area was before this. Just this info is enough to make a decision for whether to call you for an interview, and after that the resume is useless.

benrbray 5y ago
> after that the resume is useless Literally! I can count on one hand the number of interviewers who have asked me about my past work experience. The most important thing seems to be whether I can regurgitate various tree operations on a whiteboard. It's only a matter of time before they cut out the middle man and start hiring candidates by (university_ranking, hackerrank_ranking) in lexical order without as much as an interview.
- baoluofu 5y ago
  That seems crazy to me! Whenever I conduct interviews questions about specific situations from their past experience are most of what I ask. "Tell me about a time when..." I find they can very quickly uncover potential red flags. They can also lead to interesting discussions that leave both me and the candidate enthused about progressing to the next stage.
xx789 5y ago
> Employers are looking at your education, companies you worked at, years of experience, and maybe a vague idea of what your work area was before this. Isn't this what a resume is? Just the list of those things that Employers want to look at.
- jsemrau 5y ago
  Doesn't it also give you an overview of someone's life-choices?

chiefalchemist 5y ago

Rule #1 - Realize and embrace that your resume / CV has one purpose and one purpose only...to get an interview. Full stop.

chiefalchemist 5y ago
Rule #2 - Once you get an interview, realize and lean in...you're interviewing them as much as they're interviewing you. It's a date. Be thorough. Your future, career, health and satisfaction might depend on it.
- rhodozelia 5y ago
  Like a relationship jobs seem to be easier for to get in to than out of. Definitely need to choose wisely as 1 year can turn in to 10!
  - worker767424 5y ago
    In a way. It's also pretty easy to send your manager an email saying "My last date at mega/micro-corp will be X." Or ghost them. Don't, because it's not professional, but ghosting is one way to quit.

wombatpm 5y ago

To Quote Dave Barry: A resume is not just a piece of paper, it is a piece of paper with lies on it. And it can mean difference between not getting a job, and not even coming close.

Waterluvian 5y ago

After screening thousands of résumés I have one piece of advice for what I (maybe not others) want: One page. Single sided. Plenty of whitespace for legibility. I want to know in 20 seconds if I want to short stack you for a quick call.

amitport 5y ago
Depends on the job. Yes, your advice is generally good for a software engineer with less than 10y experience. For senior ML researcher, for example, you are expected to list the many things you did and know. You still are going to be filtered on arbitrary things, but HR is expecting a thicker doc.
- Der_Einzige 5y ago
  I use a 1 page resume as an ML engineer. I have a section dedicated to keywords called "Skills". Seems to work quite well for me and I firmly believe that a longer resume would have hurt more than it would help.
  - amitport 5y ago
    I used the term "ML researcher". I'm also talking from experience and generally agree that less is better for engineering jobs. For research jobs it is very very common to list tons of things (papers, committee positions, awards, etc.,) and when your first filter is an HR person you ARE often going to be screened by volume (stupid as that may sound). Sure, there are exceptions, if your resume starts with "PhD from Standford, advised by Prof. Hinton" you are probably going to be OK. Otherwise, you just want to play the game that is being played in the field, which, unfortunately, does often include the volume of work a proxy for success.
shagie 5y ago
... when I open it up in Word, I don't want to see lots of red squiggles form misspelled words. If JavaScript is spelled three different ways, that's a problem. The care and attention to the resume (which the candidate has time to prepare and consider) is used as a proxy for the care and attention that a potential employee will pay to the code base.

hbcondo714 5y ago

> Quantify wherever possible Google's former HR head describes this as: "Accomplished [X] as measured by [Y], by doing [Z]." This and other useful resume tips by him: https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/google-recruiters-say-these-5-resume-tips-including-x-y-z-formula-will-improve-your-odds-of-getting-hired-at-google.html https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/google-recruiters-say-the...

Dannymetconan 5y ago

After having to read through about 50 resumes today, so we could interview a max of 4 people for 1 position it's really hard to tell who's is good / bad. I found the easiest thing to look for was some portfolio of work to try and differenciate the candidates

thrwaeasddsaf 5y ago
How do you tell from a portfolio who is good or bad?

mooze 5y ago

Having been on both ends of the hiring process (in tech): 1. You don't have to be 100% qualified. Just show me that the skills you have are transferrable. 2. Tailor your CV & cover letter to the vacancy and company. List at least one work/life/volunteering experience (preferably a project with end results) that is linked to each of the requirements. 3. Keep it short and to the point. A quick glance and relevant keywords should jump out and pique my interest. 4. If you go "but..." to any of the 3 points above, you're probably wasting everyone's time.

porker 5y ago
I'm going to "but... " point 2, having been there last week. There were 10 requirements. It was a niche job that I was skilled at. For 1 I had life experience with end results (do ppl have life/volunteering experience that applies to job requirements? I'm nearly 40 and don't). For the other 9 I could link them to exact work matches - except all are under NDAs with different clients, so had to be described vaguely. The company I was interviewing with weren't impressed, which was ironic as I'd had to sign a NDA prior to the interview. They also wanted to inspect code I'd written - can they see a project? Well no, because it's written for a commercial client. What can I show them on GitHub? Nothing helpful as I develop in private repositories and what is public is experimental code doodles. How do you handle strict NDAs and private projects?
- mooze 5y ago
  If it's under NDA then don't talk specifics, but during the interview you can talk about difficulties you overcame or lessons you learned during the process. The key is to show that you are equipped to solve their problems. If they're pushing for you to break NDA, then you probably don't want to work there anyway.

vorhemus 5y ago

I find statements like "boosted sales by x%" completely out of place on a resume. Imagine you are an account/sales manager at AWS - cloud sales will still go for a while, no matter what you do. So you are basically just riding the wave of booming cloud which is completely independent of your personal sales skills.

busterarm 5y ago
You're nitpicking the details of what the created value was. The absolute best candidates I talk to almost always detail the value that they created. These people also negotiate better salaries for themselves. 99% of everyone just lists their responsibilities on their resumes and it makes them almost useless. The difference is that of that 1% of people, I will interview 100% of them. From the general pool of 99% I am looking for mistakes in your resume to not talk to you.

deleted 5y ago

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bedobi 5y ago

Critique my resume? https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xKLSoiRCl5eJbUR6-seefyGJXT1H6bVE0IJQ_fLvt8Y https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xKLSoiRCl5eJbUR6-seefyGJ... I'm sure there are people who think it's the worst ever, but I'm pretty happy with it. It has served me well over the years, and (maybe) even helped some friends who adopted a similar format and style to get their jobs. Some things I strive for: * No redundant labeling like "Name: <your name>, Education: <your degree>" etc. It should be obvious what's what. (and it saves space) * Summary at the top (most people won't even read the resume, a summary at the top enables them to shortlist after a quick glance) * Examples of tech used (mostly to trigger keywords) * Plain English. Can't stress this enough - I hate resumes full of vague business sounding fluff. Eg (I'm just making this up but) "streamlined collaborative efforts and alignment between multiple business critical priorities" <-- wtf does stuff like this even mean? Doesn't pass a bs smell test. * No bullshit. Eg no "improved x by y %" - you can list duties and actual accomplishments without resorting to that style. * Comfortably fits on one page. That said, improvements always welcome :P

c7DJTLrn 5y ago
C'est bon. I'd change Current to Present though.
- bedobi 5y ago
  Good point, thanks!
pulse7 5y ago
Add your (formal) education.
bbojan 5y ago
I wouldn't disambiguate AWS (should be pretty obvious what it is to people reading the resume), but if you feel it's needed, you can do it only once in the document. Otherwise a very clean, short resume - I would say in the 80th percentile :-)
- 5y ago

austincheney 5y ago

The difference between the preferences of posted job requirements and recruiters is stunning. From reading hundreds of job requirements you get the strongest indication it’s a keyword game and nothing else matters, but recruiters who are actively and manually sifting through resumes are clearly looking for something different. Example: according to most job postings for web developer the new hot title is Fullstack Senior Engineer which consists primarily of React on the front end with a fallback to Angular and Java with a fallback to Python on the backend. Everything else reads as insignificant filler. I don’t want to blindly dick around with your framework insanity like a junior so I am sure to omit this from my resume and recruiters still contact me about TypeScript and Node.

robbrown451 5y ago

They say don't use annoying buzzwords, but personally I find "convert" to be a particularly grating buzzword. What's wrong with saying "gets you hired"?

walrus01 5y ago
Let's drill down on that for a while. I'll circle back with you next week.
vianneychevalie 5y ago
It gets you less clicks
mosselman 5y ago
To be fair, they are saying you shouldn't use buzzwords in a resume, not everywhere. I agree with you that the phrase 'gets you hired' is a lot stronger though.
DoreenMichele 5y ago
For titles, shorter is typically better. In this case, it's nowhere near the character count limit for HN, but limits of that sort are another good reason to err on the side of "shorter is better." But it boils down to cognitive load. Attention spans are limited and it's a busy world full of distractions. You need to grab someone's attention with the least burden on their limited resources -- mental bandwidth, attention, time, etc -- and get them to click. A good title can be the difference between a successful article and a flop and titles are hard.
- robbrown451 5y ago
  "Gets you hired" would be far less cognitive load than "convert" to me. Maybe its just me, but I haven't seen it used like that previously, I've seen it mostly with ad clicks converting to them signing up or buying something (which is only slightly less grating, but I can understand the need for a shorter expression when it is industry jargon)

RalfWausE 5y ago

Its just an anecdote from my personal experience, but perhaps it shows how little an resume influences the decision if you get a job or not: About 7 years ago i was unemployed and a little depressed because every single application for a job i wrote got rejected... at one saturday night i returned from some good time with a few friends and perhaps a few beer (..and whisky, and whatever else) too much and had the "wise" idea to check a few job websites. I found an offer for a sysop job and wrote the (obviously) most drunken and horrible application ever... at monday morning i got a call, the next friday i signed the contract. Morale of the story: The boss got curious if i really was just an drunk idiot and invited me to see for himself. I still work at this company and i am reasonable happy here. But... perhaps this is something which will work only with smaller companies.

josephg 5y ago
A few years ago I was working as a video game programming teacher. My boss showed me a resume asking if I thought we should bring the guy in. His resume was a 8ish page affair in the Japanese style. I flipped through not that impressed, until in the middle of his resume somewhere he mentioned working on Japanese dating sim games with ridiculous names like “How to date a hot girl II”. I figured we needed to interview him after that, if only to hear that story. Anyway, we ended up hiring him. Really nice guy - and his students adored him. I’m not sure what the takeaway is. Maybe, just like a dating profile, don’t be afraid to be interesting in your resume. The point isn’t to get you hired. It’s to give whoever reads it reason enough to interview you.

wiz21c 5y ago

a joke : I take the pile of resumes, cut in two and throw one of the halves into the bin. I don't work with people who are not lucky.

kleiba 5y ago

The problem with resume guidelines is that there are too many factors that you cannot control. What makes a good resume is widely dependent on culture, and that includes the place you live, the company culture, and even the personal preferences of the HR folks. Any tips, even along the lines of "you should not even need a resume" are just that: tips. They might be valuable tips in one situation and completely miss the mark in another. It's probably easier to compile a list of things to avoid in a resume than with a positive list of things to do. But the first of the two would likely be so trivial as to be of little use. I'm thinking about "insights" such as "avoid typos". But the further you move away from such low hanging fruits, the more you enter the territory of "it depends". The purpose of a resume is to introduce yourself to the hiring company as a contender. It's a sales pitch in a way, sent to people who are very experienced in receiving sales pitches. But you're not a snake oil salesman, the goal is not to get them to buy something they don't really need. The goal is to transmit the most complete picture of the relevant aspects of yourself. My personal thinking has always been that HR folks have seen it all. There's no point trying to impress through style - referring to both your great visual layout as well as your choice of wording. Sure, you should not suck at both: if you cannot even align your indentation, perhaps I'm less inclined to buy the 20+ years of experience in the office. But other than that, all the bells and whistles will probably do little to impress.

rheffern 5y ago

If any HNers out there are game, I'd love a critique of my CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18QwC-ra6p_3Nnjmajn9gLK3w77Z7Eyux/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/18QwC-ra6p_3Nnjmajn9gLK3w77Z... It's a bit old, as I've been working a job for a bit, but any help on it would very much be appreciated!

ghall 5y ago

Hi all -- founder of RezScore, free automated scoring tool. Have spent about a decade studying the subject. 1. Brevity: Keep it concise, under 800 words. Every extra word is a bullet they can kill you with if they're on the fence. 2. Impact: Use a readability score (ie Fleisch-Kincaid, any built into Word) to keep the reading score equivalent of ~11th grade. They're smart but not geniuses. 3. Depth: Keep your sentences short, under 20 words per sentence is good rule of thumb. Reward their laziness. Other useful tips... * Use a large professional headline (ie LinkedIn), swap out just this part for each job you're applying * Prune out responsibilities, only talk about achievements * Lots of numbers * Pay attention to aesthetics/formatting Don't obsess about perfection -- devise a system to crank out 10 copies a day and you'll iterate it into a job in no time. At any rate, if you're applying resume first you're doing it wrong, everybody getting the plum jobs networks their way in, resume is a formality. Always happy to hear about your job search and provide specific resume feedback, email us at hey AT rezscore.com