19 ms·

What we look for in a resume

376 points by sebg 4y ago

rekabis 4y ago
This company sounds like an extreme outlier. About the only companies I still see doing it this way are the ones whose employee count can be done with two hands, and without re-using fingers. As in, single-digit employee count, maybe low double digits at most. Don’t get me wrong, this is the way it SHOULD be done. But my cynicism at the employment market makes me very dubious that anyone other than a micro-handful of companies beyond the sub-10-employee startups are still doing this. Even small startups can leverage third-party HR services that will automate most of the hiring process. And for busy founders, that is a godsend that they eagerly reach for.
time_to_smile 4y ago
> These articles claim that at large companies that receive an influx of resumes, recruiters set rules to surface resumes that contain certain keywords... That is a bad strategy for applying at startups like ours. We’re not looking for keywords. We look for demonstrated expertise. Here are a couple of ways to demonstrate your expertise. I'm always a bit surprised when startups, whose leadership doesn't even seem to understand the dominant hiring patterns for large, mainstream corporations, expect candidates to cater specifically to them. If you're trying to get me to work for an "AI/ML platform" startup in this market right now, you'd better spend more time convincing me that you'll still exist in 2 years than telling me how I can tweak my resume for this specific company. Honestly, a startup looking to hire founding positions should probably be searching their own networks rather than screening hundreds of resumes a month.
- stackbutterflow 4y ago
  Startups and inflated ego go hand in hand.
ye-olde-sysrq 4y ago
I think the well is really poisoned here. Resumes either hardly matter, or are just for SEO. - If you're shooting resumes off into the void of companies "apply now!" pages, it's HIGHLY unusual for them to be looked at by a human. And when they are, they'll probably be considering more data points (looking at your LinkedIn and GitHub). So here it's best to make them "machine readable, human-tolerable". - If you're handing out resumes at an event, you are going to want to make it terse and punchy. Sell your impact and skills. I think this is the least degenerate form of resume. Also, I've never done this outside of my career fair in college, where your resume is basically just your GPA and expected graduation year. - If you're being referred, your resume is mostly for talking points when you're chatting with someone. So making it like a powerpoint is best for this. Plus, for the first one, most of the time you just get ghosted. So forget overly tailoring your resume to the company, unless it's one you really really want into. In which case you're probably better off poking around and trying to either find a recruiter or find a referral even if it's just a "I talked to this person once and they didn't punch me in the face at all, you should interview them" referral. I'm honestly kind of passionate about resumes, in theory? "Here is a 1-pager of my professional career" is an interesting problem. Unfortunately, that's typically not the problem you actually need to solve when you're sitting down at your doc titled "Resume".
- zwieback 4y ago
  Not sure about the first one. I work for a big company and when we hire we definitely human-read lots of resumes, which isn't to say that machine readable is not a plus. I agree that tailoring may not be worth it. I'm surprised nobody mentions hobbies etc. Maybe I'm just an old fart but I like to get an idea of the person as well.
  - ye-olde-sysrq 4y ago
    The main problem of hobbies is that I typically don't think they matter enough to deserve space on the single page of your resume. I'm not even a decade into my career and I'm already considering cutting my college stuff down to "COLLEGE NAME YEARS ATTENDED DEGREE GPA HONORS" in a single crammed line. I think I'd put down my in-major GPA and emphasis courses before I'd put down that I like video games and my cats (.....which let's be real, you can probably just assume is in the hobbies for software engineers).
    - pertique 4y ago
      It'd depend on the field (and region), I imagine, but after the first job or two I feel like all that matters with respect to schooling is that you went. Five or ten years into a career I'd be surprised if coursework that hadn't been used on the job was relevant, and GPA wouldn't even be considered. Hobbies are probably not that useful either, but I could see them catching a hiring manager's eye. Coursework probably won't have the same effect, although I suppose it could help you get through ATS.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        Not that I think anyone's really looked at my resume for over 20 years (jobs through network), but I think the idea of a hobbies line is that it can be a conversation ice-breaker. That said, I don't think I have one on mine. If theey Google me they'll turn up more than enough to talk about.
    - TheCleric 4y ago
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
That's a great write-up! I'm not sure that it's representative of the industry, as a whole, but it's excellent. For myself, I read every résumé that I got; sometimes, not completely. If I saw that it wasn't a fit, early on, I'd abort the process. But, for the most part, I enjoyed long, complete résumés, and would have killed for things like GH repos (they weren't really a thing, when I was a hiring manager). I tended to look for "orthogonal thinking," and "diamonds in the rough." Very few folks would come in the door, with the skills we needed, so I expected to invest a lot of training.
jonathankoren 4y ago
There’s a lot of bad advice here. Like you can dismiss this article right when the author says they read every resume and don’t use a scanner. Unless this is a tiny shop with no recruiter anywhere in the process, this simply isnt true. The recruiter is going to screen some of them, even before the hiring manager gets to them. Now don’t get me wrong. Some of the stuff in the article is good, if tailored for new grads and junior people, but some is just bad and wrong. I’d say pretty much anything everything billeted in this article is trash. The insights in the prose. TL;DNR Don’t skip the keywords folks. No one gives a fuck about your social media (eg StackOverflow, GitHub, Kaggle, etc). I don’t have time to read some rando’s code, and all it does it show me that you don’t have a hobby outside of promoting yourself on social media.
- zwieback 4y ago
  Wow, so much venom. I wonder what your cover letter/resume looks like.
  - jonathankoren 4y ago
    I’m easy to find. :)
    - customaccount 4y ago
      Plot twist: He has worked at Yahoo, Microsoft, Linkedin, Facebook, Mozilla and Apple
- twitchard 4y ago
  Wrong. I've been a hiring manager at a place with >100 engineers and a recruiting team and - I still read every resume - I ignored the keywords - I pretty much valued exactly what the author does.
  - jonathankoren 4y ago
    If you're not using the recruiting team to screen the resumes what's the recruiting team even for? Or are you simply not getting resumes?
galoisscobi 4y ago
I don’t know how I feel about this post. On one hand, if I were running a company, I would want a hiring process similar to this. On the other hand, the company I work for has draconian publishing policies. I can’t have a technical blog, can’t have GitHub repos of hobby projects I work on my own time, can’t write about any of the work I do on my resume. If I want to contribute to other repos, I need an approval for legal which takes forever and if you’re lucky enough to get it, you have to write “not a contribution” in the submission. When asked about what to write in the resume, they say to copy the job posting (or parts of it) I was initially hired for. Aside from these crazy policies, I love working at my current workplace but sometimes I wonder if I’m hurting my future by staying on and letting my resume for these years spin into a black hole.
- bvirb 4y ago
  Maybe I missed it in the article but it looks to me like they're hiring more junior candidates. For more experienced candidates (which it sounds like you are) I think years of experience doing similar things in a similar field/organization would be the most likely thing to lead to a phone call.
smallerfish 4y ago
One very small tip - don't overdo it in selling your accomplishments. I see surprisingly many resumes with the words "vast experience", and they're usually obvious bullshit.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  OTOH I've got a close-ish relative who's had a very successful career in HR in multiple large orgs and now does some résumé consulting on the side, and she always re-writes things way beyond what I'm comfortable actually claiming and insists that's for-sure the right thing to do when applying to most bigcos—just part of playing the game, and if you don't play, you can't win. You'll tell her you did X and she'll be like "well it sounds to me like that was Y, so write that down" and you're like "well... kind of? But not really" and she's like "yes, it's Y, you're cutting yourself off at the kneecaps if you don't put Y". Where Y is usually something to do with leading or managing or "architecting" something, and it's maybe technically true but I'd never have characterized it that way and would be struggle to talk about it as if it were that.
  - smallerfish 4y ago
    That may be fine for getting past recruiters, but if you get to competent tech interviewers who decide to ask you about technical things you are "expert" in, and you flounder, then your credibility is shot.
karaterobot 4y ago
If you are applying to work at this company, this is probably good advice. If you're applying to work at most companies, ignore this advice. Everything he writes here makes sense, which is why you know that in our nonsensical industry, it is a waste of your time to put it into practice.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kube-system 4y ago
  It’s how things work at small companies or early stage startups that don’t have non-technical layers of bureaucracy reading your resume.
- pyb 4y ago
  I think "he"'s actually a "she".
- ThaDood 4y ago
  Any advice you would give for brushing up a resume? I'm not a dev but work in IT and do a lot of admin work, networking and a lot of security work. I am having a super hard time fitting all of the skills and tools I use on a one page resume. I had considered using like a GitHub Pages resume but haven't had a solid reason to do so.
- looping8 4y ago
  It's remarkable that, for an industry that prides itself on having individualist approaches and everyone doing things their own way, everyone somehow also keeps trying to give universally true advice. That said, the title is, explicitly, "What WE Look for in a Resume". The intro makes it clear this is about them and them only and is more of a transparency report, an encouragement for others to be more open too. So I wouldn't blame this particular post of trying to be too general.
- gwbas1c 4y ago
  Honestly, having spent half of my career at small companies and occasionally screening resumes... I'd say this is great advice for joining a small company. More importantly, if you're directly applying to a role, or you're applying through a recruiter, it's useful advice. I generally follow these practices, too, and I'm quite happy where I've landed.
waterfirezero 4y ago
This is just for this specific company or this person alone. Usually, they or HR only spend around 15-20 secs on each resume to decide. Github or others don't matter
aqme28 4y ago
> To get anything done, you need to start it. This is... not true? Also not necessarily something to even select for in a corporate environment (even if you want to tell yourself that it is).
suby 4y ago
> We read every resume. This means that a lot of tricks you’ve read about how to beat automated screening such as include certain phrases of job descriptions in your resume, repeat “hot” keywords, fill your resumes up with random metrics, etc. not only doesn’t work on us, but also hurts your chances. It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game and attempting to maximize their chances for success. It forces people to make a choice where they're effectively rolling the dice as to what the best course of action is -- either they optimize for the reality that resumes are largely computer screened, or they optimize for humans hoping that it's not. I don't think you should blame people for optimizing for what is likely the most common scenario.
- thomasahle 4y ago
  >> repeat “hot” keywords, fill your resumes up with random metrics, etc. not only doesn’t work on us, but also hurts your chances. > It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game Particularly when they started out by saying they're "looking for reasons to say yes", not for reasons to say no.
  - iamwpj 4y ago
    YES! I thought, well say "yes" to my list of technologies I'm familiar with. If you want to hear more about how I acquired those skills, you could ask...like with a process of engaging with applicants. Let's call it an interview.
- lolinder 4y ago
  > include certain phrases of job descriptions in your resume Especially this one, because I do that for the human reader, not just for the machines. The point of the resume is to show that you meet the requirements for the job—asking a candidate to rephrase the job requirements in their own words actually obfuscates the parallels between their work history and your requirements, creating more work for everyone involved.
- kube-system 4y ago
  > It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game and attempting to maximize their chances for success. If a resume just lists word soup, you’ve really given the reader no choice. What you should be doing (if you want to work somewhere where humans read resumes) is not keyword spamming, but using those key words in sentences that are also meaningful to humans.
ryandrake 4y ago
> I do care about metrics. I especially appreciate metrics that are presented with two components: > How they can be tied to business objectives. > Your contribution in achieving that metric. I think this one is often tough for junior ICs and even senior ICs in big companies. It's still tough for me after decades. A lot of us are far down on the totem pole, 8 managers away from anyone who knows anything about business objectives. If your job is to turn protobufs from one API into json on the other API, it's going to be difficult to turn this into a description of adding business value. Projects in tech companies are gigantic. "Impact" is always super hard to quantify. Down at the bottom of the totem pole, you're working on a tiny 0.01% piece of the product. That's my impact?! Not very impressive. Higher up on in management, or off to the side in product management / project management, you're not really physically doing any of the actual product, but are making architectural decisions, serving as tech lead, herding cats, submitting status reports and so on. How do you quantify that? Some people just punt and focus on the product's performance: say [PRODUCT] earned the company [$X] and won [Y] awards. But you're still not quantifying your own impact. I think for the last 10 years of my career at BigTech, I can't possibly quantify my impact in numeric terms because they were such small pieces of gargantuan projects.
- Existenceblinks 4y ago
  I think business process perf profiling is a thing but micro managing seems to be their debugging. It's going to be nice if they can profile any part of process without messing with us (hey how's going?)
- pwm 4y ago
  > I think for the last 10 years of my career at BigTech, I can't possibly quantify my impact in numeric terms because they were such small pieces of gargantuan projects. Honestly, this would make me depressed rather quickly. I can't imagine not knowing/experiencing my impact via the work I do. Maybe it is one of the personality differences between people choosing to work for startups/scaleups vs. big tech (no judgement either direction, just my conjecture).
  - malwrar 4y ago
NKosmatos 4y ago
Some good suggestions and tips in the post and if I may, I'd like to add a tip of my own: scan the CV/resume for spelling, grammar, formatting mistakes. I know it's not a very "scientific" and objective criterion, but it has never failed me :-)
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Do... you invite people who've made those mistakes in to interview, at least? Else I'm not sure how you could have even a fairly unscientific sense of whether applying this criterion has failed you or not.
  - NKosmatos 4y ago
    Definitely, and to be honest I’ve seen a few exceptions that confirm my unscientific rule. I try not to judge by the look, but in a CV for an engineering role I like a nice format without errors. Same goes for code reviews. I prefer clean & commented code over dirty/sloppy hacks.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Ah, cool. I definitely would expect some significant correlation there, but wouldn't be so sure without checking—looks like you're Doing It Right (well, as right as one can with hiring practices, short of running an actual study), sorry for implying you might not have been.
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
What im seeking in a company, i can datamine in a day from linked in. Your tech department churns through people? Dying from tech debt. People vannish from the job market after quitting you? Toxic culture and burnout stake. Why cant a company be expected to put in similar effort to background crawling? Why cant there recruiters be not expected to properly vet the jobs they contact me with? Why is the effort expected so low, from those who have the biggest ressource pool?
darth_avocado 4y ago
I would actually not apply to this company. All of the advice sounds great, but not at all practical for some of the best engineers in I’ve met. >Regular contibutions to personal GitHub for a year, well too bad I work 15 hours a day in this tech company that has private git repos > open source contributions, or stackoverflow answers Well too bad that I don’t want to work opensource or use stack overflow (I don’t for work because we have our own internal one for years) > show measurable impact Well too bad, whatever impact I have in the corner of a 50000 employee company is probably not going to be enough for you. How about just checking I know what I put on the resume and being done with it, instead of expecting me to cure cancer for a job position that has me change colors of a button every few days? Edit: to be clear, I do agree with some of the things said like “look for a reason to say yes”. This is generally good advice outside of hiring. It brings new opportunities and when it goes wrong, lessons.
- irrational 4y ago
  > well too bad I work 15 hours a day in this tech company that has private git repos Same. I've been in the industry for nearly 25 years and have written hundreds of thousands of lines of code and tens of thousands of sql queries, but I can't share any of it.
  - bastardoperator 4y ago
    If you want to play the game: https://github.com/artiebits/fake-git-history https://github.com/artiebits/fake-git-history
    - kube-system 4y ago
      If I am considering a candidate enough to look at their GitHub, I will actually look at the content. If someone was actually trying to pass this off as relevant work, I’d disqualify them for being dishonest. They’d be 1000x better off by having no GitHub history.
      - bastardoperator 4y ago
irrational 4y ago
The one thing I don't see mentioned here is spelling and grammar. Probably the single most important thing you will ever write that absolutely must not have any spelling or grammar errors is your resume. When I am reading resumes, as soon as I see a spelling or grammar error I toss the resume. To me it indicates that you don't have an attention to detail and you really don't care enough about getting a job to make sure your resume is flawless.
- IYasha 4y ago
  Especially in the age of spellcheckers... BUT! If a person clearly makes a typo, it indicates that he/she is not using one. And that's probably fine.
fatih-erikli 4y ago
Noone reads a resume. Linkedin page is enough.
- eertami 4y ago
  I have to review job applications but I don't have LinkedIn, and without an account it won't let me see your page.
rogers12 4y ago
This is an ad for a startup that is hiring a "founding engineer" with a "competitive compensation package". Are you so excited about the mission that you'll work toward it for free, anon?
exmadscientist 4y ago
Regarding resume length, I'm a huge fan of the "collapsible" approach: if when reviewing your resume I somehow print out only page 1, is it still great? Is everything I need to be interested in you there? If so then you can have all the pages you want. The origin of this test is that I do not actually want to read your resume. I'm not going to look at the other pages if page 1 is boring! So tell me who you are first and if I'm interested, I will follow along.
tester756 4y ago
>Metrics that we’d love to see ehh, metrics oriented CVs feel like bullshitting >If you’ve been working for 2+ years, remove your GPA and coursework. I care more about your work experience. I do believe in this too, yet I've been told a few times that in some countries or corpos people tend to care about this and I do wonder whether I should have "targeted CVs"
dysoco 4y ago
> if you consider common skills like Jupyter notebook and git your competitive advantage (the only reason to include them in your resume), I would automatically assume that you have no other competitive advantage I get this, yet, at the same time, I've been asked by recruiters if I was comfortable working with "git flow with Gitlab and Jira" since I did not name any of those in my Resume. I wonder if I've ever been filtered at first instance for small annoyances like this, it's hard to build a good resume when everyone is looking for something different so I would appreciate if things like adding keywords would not count as a deterrent.
- tonnydourado 4y ago
  Now I thinking how I can put that I've been the unofficial git guru in several jobs in the resume without sounding like I'm just playing the keyword game. Maybe under "Skills" I'll add something like "git is my bitch and I eat merges and shit rebases". Or is it too formal? XD
- plugin-baby 4y ago
  > I've been asked by recruiters if I was comfortable working with “...Jira" Great question - I might start asking this, and shitcanning anyone who claims to be both experienced and comfortable with the idea of working with Jira.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  You can optimize for this one guy who has something of an axe to grind, or you can optimize for the 99.99% of employers who look at education, relevant skills and employment history. It's almost definitely worth ignoring everything in this post.
reset2023 4y ago
Absolute bs. It's all about connections, the whole resume thing is bs. People in high positions are there because someone got them in. You need to be top 5% smart to make it there, and with SO MUCH effort and sacrifice to to achieve the same. Capitalism rewards entrepreneurship.
- lexarflash8g 4y ago
  Basically go to an Ivy League school and you are set for life? Please don't tell me society works like that -- its extremely cynical and it doesn't motivate people to work hard for opportunity-- life becomes based on nepotism or whate college/frat you went to as defining your life. Obviously not everyone has the capacity to do some jobs -- you can't turn an Amazon warehouse worker into a ML engineer in a year. Let's not forget that HN is a bubble of elite coders/educated thinkers in the top 10 percent of income, education, and intelligence distribution in society anyways. I feel you are inflating element of artificial scarcity without considering other perspectives.
stevev 4y ago
A resume should only be considered a template or an overview of the person’s experience and skills. Anyone can put keywords, metrics and effective processes. I’ve never found a comp sci undergrad to have any trouble learning. Lack of passion, yes but this doesn’t translate to poor work performance. Ultimately it boils down to how well the individual will work with the team and management. It’s more of a personality question. A great resume and the person could be a dick despite being technically able.
bastardoperator 4y ago
Sorry, I prefer a concise one page resume that tells me just enough that makes interested to want to learn more. Anyone can claim outcomes and metrics on a resume that can never be validated.
- kube-system 4y ago
  You don’t need to “validate” the outcomes and metrics on a resume. The usefulness of this content (or anything on a resume) is not in its utility as a test of character.
  - bastardoperator 4y ago
    Who said it was? I'm just saying I don't need a bunch of useless fluff on a resume.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      I like when people list outcomes and metrics. It gives me a starting point for something to ask questions about. Projects make for a lot better interview discussion topic than “skills: HTML, JavaScript, CSS […]”
- renewiltord 4y ago
  Right. We each have different candidate fit models. I think this article is well-written, but I think she should post this on her job listing as a note somewhere in the JD e.g. https://jobs.lever.co/claypot/9c6fedbf-3c91-4a48-98b9-467d00ae4afb https://jobs.lever.co/claypot/9c6fedbf-3c91-4a48-98b9-467d00... And it's good for people to post those things so you know what each group is looking for.
ddmichael 4y ago
We don't care.
oytis 4y ago
If every company provided such a guide for what they look for in a resume, job hunting would be a bit less frustrating
- Existenceblinks 4y ago
  I think the result is the same and thus same frustration. A lot of off-guide factors in consideration.
Existenceblinks 4y ago
I honestly don't like the tone of how our industry treat us. They are trying to find skilled workers to help companies or finding beggars who please them the most?
kilgnad 4y ago
>We read every resume The attitude that this post conveys is that the advice she presents is universal. No. It's just her company and for her circumstance only. If you tailor your resume to fit her advice you'd be tailoring it for her company. Many startups don't read resumes. For my company the resume is screened for buzz words by a recruiter. The candidate is fed into the interview pipeline before ANY interviewer reads it. I read the resume 10 minutes before the interview starts. My company IS a startup, her advice Does not Apply to My company.
physicsguy 4y ago
I interviewed about 40 people over the last year, and agree specifically with not listing every single possible technology you've touched in the last 10 years, especially things you're not comfortable talking about. Because I will pick ones we're using or that I have experience with, and will ask you questions about them, and if you can't answer really basic questions then I'm a lot less confident you're not bullshitting me about everything else you've written down.
- MayeulC 4y ago
  I think (I'll have to touch it up soon) that my CV bundles skills by degree of familiarity. I wonder if that's appropriate? For instance, I have used lisp dialects to build useful functionality, but I'm not that comfortable with it. Does that kind of thing have a place on a CV? Most CV advice I could get seemed to be from non-technical people. I guess I primarily want to showcase adaptability, and making a laundry list of languages I have "notions" of could work. As long as it can be reasonably explained, one can probably put it on a CV, though it depends on the recruiter.
  - physicsguy 4y ago
    I think it’s more important to focus on core skills. Put it this way - by far the best two candidates I interviewed this year had CVs that basically said they worked in Python and had for a number of years and told me a bit about projects they did with it. The worst interviews I had were with people who over-egged their ability on a huge range of things and couldn’t answer basics.
- wyclif 4y ago
  Expertise takes time to acquire. I’m skeptical of people who claim to be experts in too many things While I believe this is true, the problem with the statement is that these resumes and candidates are not claiming expertise; they are listing skills. Basically "I've used this in my work before." That information probably isn't very useful (that you used Jupyter or Git), but the resumes in question are trying to cover all the bases.
omgomgomgomg 4y ago
This is very interesting, it appears to be catering to devs who love to work on own project and see help on SO. It also helps a competent manager to see the code structure and such. Nothing wrong with that, but! ask yourself, if all the SO profile is all questions and no or no correct answers, what does this tell you? How would you know if the repos are not forks or copy paste jobs? And what kinda projects will be in the repos? For sure nothing proprietary, hence private projects. Have these projects been done during work time or during time off? Both are bad, if the dev worked on private projects during work or if they go and code 5 hrs a day after work, or any unhealthy amount. I used to do many projects outside of work,things like sign up, log in features from scratch in node because I thought I need to learn the next new thing, but once I moved positions into a more product ownerish role, ie, much more work, I had literally no time any more to spin up a personal project. But yes, all in all, this is much better than applying at the typical company where hr is writing nonsense job requirements like 15 years experience in golang and such.
revskill 4y ago
Wait, a ML expert should somehow have a AI bot to automate resume screening for her ? So what did really she teach at all ?
TrackerFF 4y ago
If we assume that S = Passing the software screening stage A = Concise and short CV, made to be read by humans. B = Bloated and keyword-riddled CV, made to be read by machines. I = successfully landing an interview To me, it seems that P(I | A) > P(I | A). That is, if a human reads CV "A", you have a greater probability of landing an interview, than using CV "B". But then, P(S | B) > P(S | A), because the screening software can filter out candidates that lack the correct keywords, etc. And in order to get to the interview stage, you need to pass the initial screening stage. You could have the best CV in the world, but if its rejected at step 0, then that doesn't help you. So it seems to me that its better to maximize your CV for S. This all of course assumed that there's no alternative ways around / bypassing the screening stage. I think the fundamental problem is that once a company crosse a certain threshold on the number of applicants, using humans goes out the window for the screening stage. 150 for one person seems tough, but what if the company gets 15000 applicants a month? And most of these are junk anyway?
activitypea 4y ago
On the topic of job hopping: I'm on my fourth job in four years. First company was a startup that went under, other two I immediately realized I wasn't a good fit but I stayed for about a year each, gave it my all, then resigned with peace of mind. Salary was never an issue. Now I'm at a startup again -- I'm happier than ever, wouldn't leave this job for the world, but we're on shaky ground and the recession might sink us despite our best efforts. So in 2023 that might be 5 jobs in 5 years. I don't think I'm the outlier. I've only met one person that does legitimate "job hopping", and you can tell from talking to them that something's off. Most of the time people switch jobs for good reason. Disqualifying someone based on that means you're either an Ivy League kid that never got their hands dirty, or you just think you're a rare enough exception that the rule still holds.
- JBlue42 4y ago
  I've been unlucky enough to have 'unintentional' job hopping, the gaps of which I think make me look like a poor candidate. If someone looked at my LinkedIn or resume, they might automatically move on because of a 4 month gap here or there. If I actually received an interview I could explain "Well, this was a small company and they couldn't pay me on time so let me go" or something similar. When you've been stuck towards the bottom end of the economy with companies that may not be run that well, it can make you look worse than you are vs circumstances beyond your control.
- rm445 4y ago
  I'm due to interview someone tomorrow who has had 20 jobs in 25 years... a few 6-month contract positions but mostly 12-18 months in 'permanent' roles. I'd estimate that most of the roles would have been on project-based work of >2yrs duration. I'm keeping an open mind - this person isn't ruled out but it's difficult not to read something into the possibility that they've never seen through a project.
jedberg 4y ago
I've read a lot of resumes in my time, and here is my advice: No one reads resumes. At best they skim them. They look at the shortest lines, which are usually where you worked and the job title. Name recognition makes a difference here, no matter how many people tell you otherwise. This applies to your college as well. But don't let it discourage you, it's more of a "if you have a big name there you get a boost but it's not a negative if you don't". They skim for key technologies and then read the text around them. They most likely will read the full text of the most recent job, so make sure that is the most detailed and interesting. Your resume should talk about results. Don't say "Created a new CMS for the company". Say "Created a new CMS for the company in Python that resulted in an ~70% reduction in website update times, from 1 hour to 18 minutes." If you do put a "skills cloud" on it, be ready to talk about them all. If someone had a skills cloud I would immediately look for the most esoteric skills and dive deep on it in the interview (after Googling it myself) to see if you were BSing or not. If you really know that skill, you should know more than what I learned in five minutes of searching. All this applies to your LinkedIn as well, which you should keep up to date, so that if there is a job you want but don't want to spend the time applying, you can just send them your LinkedIn. :) Edit: Forgot to mention, as pointed out below, that your resume also drives the interview, so while some of what you write won't be read to get the interview, you still want it there as a place to jump off during an interview. Always better if you can drive the conversation towards your most positive qualities, which is easier if they are in your resume and the interviewer asks about them.
- jwilber 4y ago
  At first you say: “No one reads resumes” Then follow up with the age-old advice: Your resume should talk about results. Don't say "Created a new CMS for the company". Say "Created a new CMS for the company in Python that resulted in an ~70% reduction in website update times, from 1 hour to 18 minutes." My take: I’m actually not convinced anyone cares too much about those numbers in a resume. Great topics to probe in an interview, but not much of a signal on a resume. Reason being: they’re easy to fluff and are almost always inflated bs. I do agree with all of your other points
  - 4y ago
bobobob420 4y ago
"Daily contribution to GitHub for one whole year" hahaha
Eleison23 4y ago
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snozolli 4y ago
For example, if you consider common skills like Jupyter notebook and git your competitive advantage (the only reason to include them in your resume), I would automatically assume that you have no other competitive advantage. What an insane take. Different teams use different tools, and a team may or may not have time to bring someone up to speed on a tool they haven't used. Listing git isn't a statement that it's your "competitive advantage". It's simply stating that you have experience with it.
- plaguepilled 4y ago
  Came here to post something similar. While I agree that if you're going for a senior position its probably less relevant, there are lots of junior and mid level riles that have various "hurdle requirements" like this. As a result, listing them on the resume is a way to say "yeah, I can do that"
memling 4y ago
I've had the luxury, perhaps outside of the first job, of looking for work while I have work. This makes it a bit easier to be targeted in my approach, so it might not work for everyone. But I use a resume to apply for a job, so every job gets a different resume. At the top of every resume is a job description: a table that lists the company needs and my skills with respect to the requirements--even if I don't have any. Typically it's one page for a hiring manager to compare against the JD and decide whether she wants to look at the canned bullets of my work experience. My current and prior jobs had a formal application process post offer: I did not go through an online application process or submit a resume to an electronic system until after we'd gone through interviews, etc. If I find a place I want to work, I make some effort to find out who the hiring manager is for a given position. If I can find an email address, I'll reach out; if not, I look for a mailing address. If I'm really motivated, I'll try to find a phone number. My experience with this approach has generally been positive: it helps identify good employers, makes, I think, a good impression, and ensures that we don't waste each others' time.
andrew_ 4y ago
> Show how you acquired and use that skill in your job This can be difficult to do especially as the years of experience add up. I have 20, and can only put so much on 1-2 pages. I typically limit short story telling to the most recent gig. > Share your expertise on public channels such as: StackOverflow answers, open source contributions, papers, blog posts I share stints and short responsibilities for the open source work/projects I'm involves in. Again, towards a reasonably-sized resume, listing any more than that could easily bump my resume to 3+ pages. > Daily contribution to GitHub for one whole year. Terrible metric. Perhaps this wasn't well-written. Consistent contribution is more important than vanity metrics like daily contribution. And even then, it doesn't represent what someone has been up to. A month's worth of work can be squashed into a single commit that is pushed. Not to mention this can be easily faked. This reflects poorly on the person writing this as a form of measure. > Having previously joined another early startup before and stuck around. Bad signal. Startups are fickle, and many don't last more than a few years. I've joined several that shut down a year or so after I started. And I get asked about it all the time during interviews. > I’m a bit hesitant when I see candidates who change jobs too frequently, e.g. 5 different companies in 5 years. I understand that not all jobs work out, so it’s okay, sometimes necessary, to move on. However, consistent job jumping can imply that you get bored or give up easily. A year at a job is hardly enough to get deep into a problem space and make significant contributions. I don't think the author fully understands the startup ecosystem, or hasn't considered the range of nuance that exists. > We look for people who can bring a unique perspective to the table. I like this, but they don't mention critical thinking, which goes hand in hand. > 5. We care about impact, not meaningless metrics Odd assertion, since they clearly care about meaningless metrics like github contribution frequency. > If you’re applying to a small startup, say, of less than 20 people, spend some time researching who works at that startup and email them directly. Careful here. This can quickly get you blocked if you're pasting the same message to multiple people. A better practice is to choose one person and reach out, wait, and try again. But write the message organically, don't just copy and paste. > Don’t include a link to your GitHub link if it’s empty. False. Include it with context. e.g. if contributions are hidden by a private project that you've been involved in. State why it may be sparse. A long-standing github account is a good signal. Another point of concern: The word "references" appears only once, at the top. References are under utilized, and I include a line at the end of my resume that states references are available upon request. As I don't provide them by default so their contact info cannot be farmed. Based on this article, I personally wouldn't bother submitting an application to this company.
rcurry 4y ago
You folks are probably going to skewer me for this, but here goes: I’ve been a hiring manager for many years and hired a lot of people. It starts with reviewing resumes just to see if someone has a few years of experience in similar technologies as what we are working with. If it looks good, I just pick up the phone and spend half an hour or so shooting the shit - an intelligent person will realize this is an opportunity to talk about their experience and they’ll do that. If that goes well, they come in for a face to face chat with me and maybe one or two of our developers, totally free form and absolutely no coding challenges or nothing. If they seem like they have their shit together, we hire them. I’d say I have about a 90% success rate with this model. Yea, sometimes you get a good bullshitter and it doesn’t work out, but that’s easily remedied… I have a lot of faith in casual conversational interviews and don’t worry about grilling people on whiteboards. I just go with my gut and that’s it.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Anyone who can bullshit so well they can survive this really ought to be in sales or something. They'd make way more money with their evidently incredibly good social skills, working in a field where it's directly applicable. I'm convinced most of the "bullshitters" people "catch" with programming puzzles, who "can't even write a for loop" are just choking under interview pressure, or are for-real bullshitters but never would have made it through the process you describe anyway, because they're not that good at bullshitting.
  - RandallBrown 4y ago
    We were interviewing someone that used to work with my manager... as his boss. My manager basically said "This guy is awesome, we'd be crazy not to hire him" but obviously my manager wasn't allowed to be a part of the interview. He BOMBED the interview, which was a pretty simple coding challenge. I could tell he was incredibly nervous (despite being a very experienced developer) and it felt obvious to me that he was only bombing because he was just so nervous. I could tell from talking to him that he probably knew what he was doing. We hired him and he was great. Some people are bad at interviewing (myself included.)
pojzon 4y ago
> Expertise takes time to acquire. I’m skeptical of people who claim to be experts in too many things. Someone does not like DevOps/Platform Engineers.
indymike 4y ago
The author is on to something here: "look for reasons to say yes" The default in hiring is no. Confirming the default is a lot of work, and often, you miss a lot of great talent. Here are some situations where I've seen this play out: NO because of degree requirement. YES candidate wrote the CMS our product was built with. (candidate didn't get job because we found out two years later he had applied and the recruiter never forwarded the resume on) NO because of 3 years out of industry. YES to candidate because he had the same job at competitor that went public 3 years ago and had a 3 year non-compete (was a CFO, so it was real). (recruiter had a policy of I talk to every applicant, and the candidate told her who he was and why he applied... hired) NO because of multiple 1 year gaps in employment. YES because candidate had managed multiple five year construction projects on time, on budget. Turns out the gaps were where they guy took one year off and volunteered, helping build schools in Africa. (recruiter sent to hiring manager, and hiring manager passed because he thought the guy was a "job hopper")
- blowski 4y ago
  Exactly. I don't want to spend weeks interviewing people, my boss doesn't want to pay me to interview people, and my PM wants someone who can work on their tickets ASAP. It will be much easier for me if I can just hire you. So "give me reasons to say yes" is great advice, along with "don't give me reasons to say no" (like lying or being an arrogant douchebag). Use things like degrees as a green flag, rather than the absence of one being a red flag.
  - throwaway12933 4y ago
    > Use things like degrees as a green flag, rather than the absence of one being a red flag. I don't quite get what you mean by degrees, university degrees? is being self-taught a red flag?
  - indymike 4y ago
    > So "give me reasons to say yes" is great advice, along with "don't give me reasons to say no" (like lying or being an arrogant douchebag). Ultimately, you have to decide if you actually want to work with the person you are hiring.
mbesto 4y ago
Friendly reminder: Resume's get you interviews and interviews get you jobs. Optimize as such.
hackan 4y ago
Yeah, it's always the same w/ this: there's absolutely no consensus whatsoever. I once removed "git" as keyword (as i.e. recommended at the beginning of the post), and got asked tirelessly by recruiters if I actually didn't know git, and why I wasn't mentioning it... So yeah, those skills list are meant for recruiters and machines alike...
tptacek 4y ago
As a data point: we've been hiring resume-blind for going on 2 years now. We tell candidates they don't have to send us resumes, and we generally don't read them.
- jedberg 4y ago
  How do you choose who to interview? I did resume blind hiring for a bit. I had a list of skills they would need and said “apply if you have them”. Then I asked them to submit a paragraph about how they will bring a unique perspective to the role. I got a lot of interesting applications but some of the interviews didn’t go very well. They didn’t have the skills.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    We don't interview. We do work-sample tests (WSTs). Anybody can get our first WST just by asking. Not submitting any WST response is our biggest downselect, followed by rejected first WSTs. I'll get on the phone with anybody who asks to, and we'll answer almost any question by email regardless of where people are in the process. The whole thing is calibrated to take less candidate time (from a suited candidate) than an interview loop would. You can see a warts-and-all experience report from a thread started earlier this week (amusingly, I only found it because I was searching for people shit-talking Chicago on HN): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34488427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34488427
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treya 4y ago
Looking for a very specific set of things or type of resume is a huge oversight. Very few people are going to know what you're looking for, and anyone competent doesn't value their time so little to micropolish their resume for exactly your company. If you're not scanning every resume to read between the lines of how the applicant has devised their resume to try to digest what skills and experience and personality they actually have, then you're basically overlooking a significant percentage of those who apply A corollary to this is if the company you're applying to isn't competent enough to figure out if you're right for the job, you probably don't want to work for them anyway
twobitshifter 4y ago
Reading the claypot.ai website doesn’t really attract any interest or give the idea that you’ll be working for a startup that’s going to be financially rewarding or with a purpose or even a product. My guess is the recruiting and hiring is mostly due to Stamford connections and not the type of place that’s attracting applicants outside of that sphere. This is the sale they make to candidates, would you “say yes”?: What makes Claypot AI special? A culture of transparency, collaboration, ownership, and learning (we're in a new space so there is a lot for us to learn!) An opportunity to win over a large, growing, yet untapped market for fast ML delivery A strong community Expertise in both distributed systems and machine learning A very high bar for engineering craftsmanship What will you get? Competitive compensation package Flexible remote-friendly culture with options for in-person collaboration Learn how to build a startup from the ground up Public speaking opportunities An environment for you to grow into the career you want
electrondood 4y ago
There was a radio ad on NPR for Indeed.com that said "We identify candidates for you whose resumes are an exact match for your job description," and I thought "NO YOU FOOLS! YOU'RE GIVING AWAY THE GAME!" It's literally as simple as using the exact phrases in the job description to (truthfully) describe your own accomplishments.
abatilo 4y ago
I interviewed with Claypot last summer for an infrastructure role. They responded about 5 weeks after I applied. My first conversation was with Chip herself, where she appeared to be checking Slack for our entire conversation. I did a technical interview where the interviewer asked me to do calculate some statistics over streams in a Jupyter notebook. I completely bombed the interview, let that be clear. But it was very odd to me that for an infra engineer role, at no point was I asked about any experience with ML infra, scaling, operationalizing models, storage, networking, etc.
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commandersaki 4y ago
I tailor my resume to almost every company where I seem like I could fit. Especially since I’ve had a lot of jobs and a subset is more interesting to an employer than a different subset, and I like to keep page count to 2-3 pages max even though I could probably do a 7 page resume. A major pain point in doing this is you lose track of what you said and to whom, especially if you include cover letters (which I also do). What I learned that is helpful is to save every version of your resume/cover letter including any sources (latex), and timestamp/date these resumes. Do this even if you didn’t tweak your resume, space is cheap. Anyway I found that to be real helpful to track what resume I’ve sent out and what it says.
psim1 4y ago
When I have been the one hiring, whether as a supervisor or as part of a hiring committee, my favorite part of the paperwork has always been the cover letter. I cannot agree with this article's advice saying it is not important. Are you kidding me? Write me a few nice paragraphs about yourself, why you think you're a great match for the position and why you want it. Highlight something from your resume that I am probably only going to otherwise skim. The cover letter is like the first couple minutes of sitting in the interview. We get to know each other a little, and importantly to me, I get to know whether you have half-decent writing skills.
5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
dance monkey, dance!
stuckkeys 4y ago
So, does anyone have the “perfect” resume template? I have been told many things by various recruiters. None of the answers are the same. If I apply, and some other person applies and has less experience than me, but they have an inside connection referral. They will most likely get the job. Sometimes I had gone through few rounds of interviews, and had very good vibes/result. In the end they say no. I have stated to lookup org reviews. If a recruiter reaches out to me they have my full attention, I expect the same. Often times something serious comes up and then they go MIA. Still learning the way these organizations operate when it comes to hiring. Have yet to master that.
throwaway23411 4y ago
Since it wasn't obvious to the OP, Skill clouds are for ATS filters, not human eyes. For the human eyes, emphasize job title, the company (basically a brand name), and key results at the position. Emphasize your education if you went to an Ivy school or top state school, otherwise it won't hold much weight. Ultimately it's a numbers game, if your resume gets in a stack with Ivy & FAANG holders, you are fucked, so apply more. Another option is to side-step this stupid process, and get tight with a recruiter and networking. More importantly, once getting into an interview, you will find the only thing they value is LC top 50, so practice those.
chinchilla2020 4y ago
> It can weaken your resume. For example, if you consider common skills like Jupyter notebook and git your competitive advantage (the only reason to include them in your resume), I would automatically assume that you have no other competitive advantage. Yes, but I am forced to include git to ensure that other companies won't throw my resume out for now listing git.
shantnutiwari 4y ago
Great article! And I note how, in the comments, people are taking a few lines out of context and going "Ha! Id never work here" I recommend you read the damn artice and make your own mind

376 points by sebg 4y ago

This company sounds like an extreme outlier. About the only companies I still see doing it this way are the ones whose employee count can be done with two hands, and without re-using fingers. As in, single-digit employee count, maybe low double digits at most. Don’t get me wrong, this is the way it SHOULD be done. But my cynicism at the employment market makes me very dubious that anyone other than a micro-handful of companies beyond the sub-10-employee startups are still doing this. Even small startups can leverage third-party HR services that will automate most of the hiring process. And for busy founders, that is a godsend that they eagerly reach for.

time_to_smile 4y ago

> These articles claim that at large companies that receive an influx of resumes, recruiters set rules to surface resumes that contain certain keywords... That is a bad strategy for applying at startups like ours. We’re not looking for keywords. We look for demonstrated expertise. Here are a couple of ways to demonstrate your expertise. I'm always a bit surprised when startups, whose leadership doesn't even seem to understand the dominant hiring patterns for large, mainstream corporations, expect candidates to cater specifically to them. If you're trying to get me to work for an "AI/ML platform" startup in this market right now, you'd better spend more time convincing me that you'll still exist in 2 years than telling me how I can tweak my resume for this specific company. Honestly, a startup looking to hire founding positions should probably be searching their own networks rather than screening hundreds of resumes a month.

stackbutterflow 4y ago
Startups and inflated ego go hand in hand.

ye-olde-sysrq 4y ago

I think the well is really poisoned here. Resumes either hardly matter, or are just for SEO. - If you're shooting resumes off into the void of companies "apply now!" pages, it's HIGHLY unusual for them to be looked at by a human. And when they are, they'll probably be considering more data points (looking at your LinkedIn and GitHub). So here it's best to make them "machine readable, human-tolerable". - If you're handing out resumes at an event, you are going to want to make it terse and punchy. Sell your impact and skills. I think this is the least degenerate form of resume. Also, I've never done this outside of my career fair in college, where your resume is basically just your GPA and expected graduation year. - If you're being referred, your resume is mostly for talking points when you're chatting with someone. So making it like a powerpoint is best for this. Plus, for the first one, most of the time you just get ghosted. So forget overly tailoring your resume to the company, unless it's one you really really want into. In which case you're probably better off poking around and trying to either find a recruiter or find a referral even if it's just a "I talked to this person once and they didn't punch me in the face at all, you should interview them" referral. I'm honestly kind of passionate about resumes, in theory? "Here is a 1-pager of my professional career" is an interesting problem. Unfortunately, that's typically not the problem you actually need to solve when you're sitting down at your doc titled "Resume".

zwieback 4y ago
Not sure about the first one. I work for a big company and when we hire we definitely human-read lots of resumes, which isn't to say that machine readable is not a plus. I agree that tailoring may not be worth it. I'm surprised nobody mentions hobbies etc. Maybe I'm just an old fart but I like to get an idea of the person as well.
- ye-olde-sysrq 4y ago
  The main problem of hobbies is that I typically don't think they matter enough to deserve space on the single page of your resume. I'm not even a decade into my career and I'm already considering cutting my college stuff down to "COLLEGE NAME YEARS ATTENDED DEGREE GPA HONORS" in a single crammed line. I think I'd put down my in-major GPA and emphasis courses before I'd put down that I like video games and my cats (.....which let's be real, you can probably just assume is in the hobbies for software engineers).
  - pertique 4y ago
    It'd depend on the field (and region), I imagine, but after the first job or two I feel like all that matters with respect to schooling is that you went. Five or ten years into a career I'd be surprised if coursework that hadn't been used on the job was relevant, and GPA wouldn't even be considered. Hobbies are probably not that useful either, but I could see them catching a hiring manager's eye. Coursework probably won't have the same effect, although I suppose it could help you get through ATS.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Not that I think anyone's really looked at my resume for over 20 years (jobs through network), but I think the idea of a hobbies line is that it can be a conversation ice-breaker. That said, I don't think I have one on mine. If theey Google me they'll turn up more than enough to talk about.
  - TheCleric 4y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

That's a great write-up! I'm not sure that it's representative of the industry, as a whole, but it's excellent. For myself, I read every résumé that I got; sometimes, not completely. If I saw that it wasn't a fit, early on, I'd abort the process. But, for the most part, I enjoyed long, complete résumés, and would have killed for things like GH repos (they weren't really a thing, when I was a hiring manager). I tended to look for "orthogonal thinking," and "diamonds in the rough." Very few folks would come in the door, with the skills we needed, so I expected to invest a lot of training.

jonathankoren 4y ago

There’s a lot of bad advice here. Like you can dismiss this article right when the author says they read every resume and don’t use a scanner. Unless this is a tiny shop with no recruiter anywhere in the process, this simply isnt true. The recruiter is going to screen some of them, even before the hiring manager gets to them. Now don’t get me wrong. Some of the stuff in the article is good, if tailored for new grads and junior people, but some is just bad and wrong. I’d say pretty much anything everything billeted in this article is trash. The insights in the prose. TL;DNR Don’t skip the keywords folks. No one gives a fuck about your social media (eg StackOverflow, GitHub, Kaggle, etc). I don’t have time to read some rando’s code, and all it does it show me that you don’t have a hobby outside of promoting yourself on social media.

zwieback 4y ago
Wow, so much venom. I wonder what your cover letter/resume looks like.
- jonathankoren 4y ago
  I’m easy to find. :)
  - customaccount 4y ago
    Plot twist: He has worked at Yahoo, Microsoft, Linkedin, Facebook, Mozilla and Apple
twitchard 4y ago
Wrong. I've been a hiring manager at a place with >100 engineers and a recruiting team and - I still read every resume - I ignored the keywords - I pretty much valued exactly what the author does.
- jonathankoren 4y ago
  If you're not using the recruiting team to screen the resumes what's the recruiting team even for? Or are you simply not getting resumes?

galoisscobi 4y ago

I don’t know how I feel about this post. On one hand, if I were running a company, I would want a hiring process similar to this. On the other hand, the company I work for has draconian publishing policies. I can’t have a technical blog, can’t have GitHub repos of hobby projects I work on my own time, can’t write about any of the work I do on my resume. If I want to contribute to other repos, I need an approval for legal which takes forever and if you’re lucky enough to get it, you have to write “not a contribution” in the submission. When asked about what to write in the resume, they say to copy the job posting (or parts of it) I was initially hired for. Aside from these crazy policies, I love working at my current workplace but sometimes I wonder if I’m hurting my future by staying on and letting my resume for these years spin into a black hole.

bvirb 4y ago
Maybe I missed it in the article but it looks to me like they're hiring more junior candidates. For more experienced candidates (which it sounds like you are) I think years of experience doing similar things in a similar field/organization would be the most likely thing to lead to a phone call.

smallerfish 4y ago

One very small tip - don't overdo it in selling your accomplishments. I see surprisingly many resumes with the words "vast experience", and they're usually obvious bullshit.

yamtaddle 4y ago
OTOH I've got a close-ish relative who's had a very successful career in HR in multiple large orgs and now does some résumé consulting on the side, and she always re-writes things way beyond what I'm comfortable actually claiming and insists that's for-sure the right thing to do when applying to most bigcos—just part of playing the game, and if you don't play, you can't win. You'll tell her you did X and she'll be like "well it sounds to me like that was Y, so write that down" and you're like "well... kind of? But not really" and she's like "yes, it's Y, you're cutting yourself off at the kneecaps if you don't put Y". Where Y is usually something to do with leading or managing or "architecting" something, and it's maybe technically true but I'd never have characterized it that way and would be struggle to talk about it as if it were that.
- smallerfish 4y ago
  That may be fine for getting past recruiters, but if you get to competent tech interviewers who decide to ask you about technical things you are "expert" in, and you flounder, then your credibility is shot.

karaterobot 4y ago

If you are applying to work at this company, this is probably good advice. If you're applying to work at most companies, ignore this advice. Everything he writes here makes sense, which is why you know that in our nonsensical industry, it is a waste of your time to put it into practice.

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kube-system 4y ago
It’s how things work at small companies or early stage startups that don’t have non-technical layers of bureaucracy reading your resume.
pyb 4y ago
I think "he"'s actually a "she".
ThaDood 4y ago
Any advice you would give for brushing up a resume? I'm not a dev but work in IT and do a lot of admin work, networking and a lot of security work. I am having a super hard time fitting all of the skills and tools I use on a one page resume. I had considered using like a GitHub Pages resume but haven't had a solid reason to do so.
looping8 4y ago
It's remarkable that, for an industry that prides itself on having individualist approaches and everyone doing things their own way, everyone somehow also keeps trying to give universally true advice. That said, the title is, explicitly, "What WE Look for in a Resume". The intro makes it clear this is about them and them only and is more of a transparency report, an encouragement for others to be more open too. So I wouldn't blame this particular post of trying to be too general.
gwbas1c 4y ago
Honestly, having spent half of my career at small companies and occasionally screening resumes... I'd say this is great advice for joining a small company. More importantly, if you're directly applying to a role, or you're applying through a recruiter, it's useful advice. I generally follow these practices, too, and I'm quite happy where I've landed.

waterfirezero 4y ago

This is just for this specific company or this person alone. Usually, they or HR only spend around 15-20 secs on each resume to decide. Github or others don't matter

aqme28 4y ago

> To get anything done, you need to start it. This is... not true? Also not necessarily something to even select for in a corporate environment (even if you want to tell yourself that it is).

suby 4y ago

> We read every resume. This means that a lot of tricks you’ve read about how to beat automated screening such as include certain phrases of job descriptions in your resume, repeat “hot” keywords, fill your resumes up with random metrics, etc. not only doesn’t work on us, but also hurts your chances. It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game and attempting to maximize their chances for success. It forces people to make a choice where they're effectively rolling the dice as to what the best course of action is -- either they optimize for the reality that resumes are largely computer screened, or they optimize for humans hoping that it's not. I don't think you should blame people for optimizing for what is likely the most common scenario.

thomasahle 4y ago
>> repeat “hot” keywords, fill your resumes up with random metrics, etc. not only doesn’t work on us, but also hurts your chances. > It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game Particularly when they started out by saying they're "looking for reasons to say yes", not for reasons to say no.
- iamwpj 4y ago
  YES! I thought, well say "yes" to my list of technologies I'm familiar with. If you want to hear more about how I acquired those skills, you could ask...like with a process of engaging with applicants. Let's call it an interview.
lolinder 4y ago
> include certain phrases of job descriptions in your resume Especially this one, because I do that for the human reader, not just for the machines. The point of the resume is to show that you meet the requirements for the job—asking a candidate to rephrase the job requirements in their own words actually obfuscates the parallels between their work history and your requirements, creating more work for everyone involved.
kube-system 4y ago
> It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game and attempting to maximize their chances for success. If a resume just lists word soup, you’ve really given the reader no choice. What you should be doing (if you want to work somewhere where humans read resumes) is not keyword spamming, but using those key words in sentences that are also meaningful to humans.

ryandrake 4y ago

> I do care about metrics. I especially appreciate metrics that are presented with two components: > How they can be tied to business objectives. > Your contribution in achieving that metric. I think this one is often tough for junior ICs and even senior ICs in big companies. It's still tough for me after decades. A lot of us are far down on the totem pole, 8 managers away from anyone who knows anything about business objectives. If your job is to turn protobufs from one API into json on the other API, it's going to be difficult to turn this into a description of adding business value. Projects in tech companies are gigantic. "Impact" is always super hard to quantify. Down at the bottom of the totem pole, you're working on a tiny 0.01% piece of the product. That's my impact?! Not very impressive. Higher up on in management, or off to the side in product management / project management, you're not really physically doing any of the actual product, but are making architectural decisions, serving as tech lead, herding cats, submitting status reports and so on. How do you quantify that? Some people just punt and focus on the product's performance: say [PRODUCT] earned the company [$X] and won [Y] awards. But you're still not quantifying your own impact. I think for the last 10 years of my career at BigTech, I can't possibly quantify my impact in numeric terms because they were such small pieces of gargantuan projects.

Existenceblinks 4y ago
I think business process perf profiling is a thing but micro managing seems to be their debugging. It's going to be nice if they can profile any part of process without messing with us (hey how's going?)
pwm 4y ago
> I think for the last 10 years of my career at BigTech, I can't possibly quantify my impact in numeric terms because they were such small pieces of gargantuan projects. Honestly, this would make me depressed rather quickly. I can't imagine not knowing/experiencing my impact via the work I do. Maybe it is one of the personality differences between people choosing to work for startups/scaleups vs. big tech (no judgement either direction, just my conjecture).
- malwrar 4y ago

NKosmatos 4y ago

Some good suggestions and tips in the post and if I may, I'd like to add a tip of my own: scan the CV/resume for spelling, grammar, formatting mistakes. I know it's not a very "scientific" and objective criterion, but it has never failed me :-)

yamtaddle 4y ago
Do... you invite people who've made those mistakes in to interview, at least? Else I'm not sure how you could have even a fairly unscientific sense of whether applying this criterion has failed you or not.
- NKosmatos 4y ago
  Definitely, and to be honest I’ve seen a few exceptions that confirm my unscientific rule. I try not to judge by the look, but in a CV for an engineering role I like a nice format without errors. Same goes for code reviews. I prefer clean & commented code over dirty/sloppy hacks.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Ah, cool. I definitely would expect some significant correlation there, but wouldn't be so sure without checking—looks like you're Doing It Right (well, as right as one can with hiring practices, short of running an actual study), sorry for implying you might not have been.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

What im seeking in a company, i can datamine in a day from linked in. Your tech department churns through people? Dying from tech debt. People vannish from the job market after quitting you? Toxic culture and burnout stake. Why cant a company be expected to put in similar effort to background crawling? Why cant there recruiters be not expected to properly vet the jobs they contact me with? Why is the effort expected so low, from those who have the biggest ressource pool?

darth_avocado 4y ago

I would actually not apply to this company. All of the advice sounds great, but not at all practical for some of the best engineers in I’ve met. >Regular contibutions to personal GitHub for a year, well too bad I work 15 hours a day in this tech company that has private git repos > open source contributions, or stackoverflow answers Well too bad that I don’t want to work opensource or use stack overflow (I don’t for work because we have our own internal one for years) > show measurable impact Well too bad, whatever impact I have in the corner of a 50000 employee company is probably not going to be enough for you. How about just checking I know what I put on the resume and being done with it, instead of expecting me to cure cancer for a job position that has me change colors of a button every few days? Edit: to be clear, I do agree with some of the things said like “look for a reason to say yes”. This is generally good advice outside of hiring. It brings new opportunities and when it goes wrong, lessons.

irrational 4y ago
> well too bad I work 15 hours a day in this tech company that has private git repos Same. I've been in the industry for nearly 25 years and have written hundreds of thousands of lines of code and tens of thousands of sql queries, but I can't share any of it.
- bastardoperator 4y ago
  If you want to play the game: https://github.com/artiebits/fake-git-history https://github.com/artiebits/fake-git-history
  - kube-system 4y ago
    If I am considering a candidate enough to look at their GitHub, I will actually look at the content. If someone was actually trying to pass this off as relevant work, I’d disqualify them for being dishonest. They’d be 1000x better off by having no GitHub history.
    - bastardoperator 4y ago

irrational 4y ago

The one thing I don't see mentioned here is spelling and grammar. Probably the single most important thing you will ever write that absolutely must not have any spelling or grammar errors is your resume. When I am reading resumes, as soon as I see a spelling or grammar error I toss the resume. To me it indicates that you don't have an attention to detail and you really don't care enough about getting a job to make sure your resume is flawless.

IYasha 4y ago
Especially in the age of spellcheckers... BUT! If a person clearly makes a typo, it indicates that he/she is not using one. And that's probably fine.

fatih-erikli 4y ago

Noone reads a resume. Linkedin page is enough.

eertami 4y ago
I have to review job applications but I don't have LinkedIn, and without an account it won't let me see your page.

rogers12 4y ago

This is an ad for a startup that is hiring a "founding engineer" with a "competitive compensation package". Are you so excited about the mission that you'll work toward it for free, anon?

exmadscientist 4y ago

Regarding resume length, I'm a huge fan of the "collapsible" approach: if when reviewing your resume I somehow print out only page 1, is it still great? Is everything I need to be interested in you there? If so then you can have all the pages you want. The origin of this test is that I do not actually want to read your resume. I'm not going to look at the other pages if page 1 is boring! So tell me who you are first and if I'm interested, I will follow along.

tester756 4y ago

>Metrics that we’d love to see ehh, metrics oriented CVs feel like bullshitting >If you’ve been working for 2+ years, remove your GPA and coursework. I care more about your work experience. I do believe in this too, yet I've been told a few times that in some countries or corpos people tend to care about this and I do wonder whether I should have "targeted CVs"

dysoco 4y ago

> if you consider common skills like Jupyter notebook and git your competitive advantage (the only reason to include them in your resume), I would automatically assume that you have no other competitive advantage I get this, yet, at the same time, I've been asked by recruiters if I was comfortable working with "git flow with Gitlab and Jira" since I did not name any of those in my Resume. I wonder if I've ever been filtered at first instance for small annoyances like this, it's hard to build a good resume when everyone is looking for something different so I would appreciate if things like adding keywords would not count as a deterrent.

tonnydourado 4y ago
Now I thinking how I can put that I've been the unofficial git guru in several jobs in the resume without sounding like I'm just playing the keyword game. Maybe under "Skills" I'll add something like "git is my bitch and I eat merges and shit rebases". Or is it too formal? XD
plugin-baby 4y ago
> I've been asked by recruiters if I was comfortable working with “...Jira" Great question - I might start asking this, and shitcanning anyone who claims to be both experienced and comfortable with the idea of working with Jira.
commandlinefan 4y ago
You can optimize for this one guy who has something of an axe to grind, or you can optimize for the 99.99% of employers who look at education, relevant skills and employment history. It's almost definitely worth ignoring everything in this post.

reset2023 4y ago

Absolute bs. It's all about connections, the whole resume thing is bs. People in high positions are there because someone got them in. You need to be top 5% smart to make it there, and with SO MUCH effort and sacrifice to to achieve the same. Capitalism rewards entrepreneurship.

lexarflash8g 4y ago
Basically go to an Ivy League school and you are set for life? Please don't tell me society works like that -- its extremely cynical and it doesn't motivate people to work hard for opportunity-- life becomes based on nepotism or whate college/frat you went to as defining your life. Obviously not everyone has the capacity to do some jobs -- you can't turn an Amazon warehouse worker into a ML engineer in a year. Let's not forget that HN is a bubble of elite coders/educated thinkers in the top 10 percent of income, education, and intelligence distribution in society anyways. I feel you are inflating element of artificial scarcity without considering other perspectives.

stevev 4y ago

A resume should only be considered a template or an overview of the person’s experience and skills. Anyone can put keywords, metrics and effective processes. I’ve never found a comp sci undergrad to have any trouble learning. Lack of passion, yes but this doesn’t translate to poor work performance. Ultimately it boils down to how well the individual will work with the team and management. It’s more of a personality question. A great resume and the person could be a dick despite being technically able.

bastardoperator 4y ago

Sorry, I prefer a concise one page resume that tells me just enough that makes interested to want to learn more. Anyone can claim outcomes and metrics on a resume that can never be validated.

kube-system 4y ago
You don’t need to “validate” the outcomes and metrics on a resume. The usefulness of this content (or anything on a resume) is not in its utility as a test of character.
- bastardoperator 4y ago
  Who said it was? I'm just saying I don't need a bunch of useless fluff on a resume.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    I like when people list outcomes and metrics. It gives me a starting point for something to ask questions about. Projects make for a lot better interview discussion topic than “skills: HTML, JavaScript, CSS […]”
renewiltord 4y ago
Right. We each have different candidate fit models. I think this article is well-written, but I think she should post this on her job listing as a note somewhere in the JD e.g. https://jobs.lever.co/claypot/9c6fedbf-3c91-4a48-98b9-467d00ae4afb https://jobs.lever.co/claypot/9c6fedbf-3c91-4a48-98b9-467d00... And it's good for people to post those things so you know what each group is looking for.

ddmichael 4y ago

We don't care.

oytis 4y ago

If every company provided such a guide for what they look for in a resume, job hunting would be a bit less frustrating

Existenceblinks 4y ago
I think the result is the same and thus same frustration. A lot of off-guide factors in consideration.

Existenceblinks 4y ago

I honestly don't like the tone of how our industry treat us. They are trying to find skilled workers to help companies or finding beggars who please them the most?

kilgnad 4y ago

>We read every resume The attitude that this post conveys is that the advice she presents is universal. No. It's just her company and for her circumstance only. If you tailor your resume to fit her advice you'd be tailoring it for her company. Many startups don't read resumes. For my company the resume is screened for buzz words by a recruiter. The candidate is fed into the interview pipeline before ANY interviewer reads it. I read the resume 10 minutes before the interview starts. My company IS a startup, her advice Does not Apply to My company.

physicsguy 4y ago

I interviewed about 40 people over the last year, and agree specifically with not listing every single possible technology you've touched in the last 10 years, especially things you're not comfortable talking about. Because I will pick ones we're using or that I have experience with, and will ask you questions about them, and if you can't answer really basic questions then I'm a lot less confident you're not bullshitting me about everything else you've written down.

MayeulC 4y ago
I think (I'll have to touch it up soon) that my CV bundles skills by degree of familiarity. I wonder if that's appropriate? For instance, I have used lisp dialects to build useful functionality, but I'm not that comfortable with it. Does that kind of thing have a place on a CV? Most CV advice I could get seemed to be from non-technical people. I guess I primarily want to showcase adaptability, and making a laundry list of languages I have "notions" of could work. As long as it can be reasonably explained, one can probably put it on a CV, though it depends on the recruiter.
- physicsguy 4y ago
  I think it’s more important to focus on core skills. Put it this way - by far the best two candidates I interviewed this year had CVs that basically said they worked in Python and had for a number of years and told me a bit about projects they did with it. The worst interviews I had were with people who over-egged their ability on a huge range of things and couldn’t answer basics.
wyclif 4y ago
Expertise takes time to acquire. I’m skeptical of people who claim to be experts in too many things While I believe this is true, the problem with the statement is that these resumes and candidates are not claiming expertise; they are listing skills. Basically "I've used this in my work before." That information probably isn't very useful (that you used Jupyter or Git), but the resumes in question are trying to cover all the bases.

omgomgomgomg 4y ago

This is very interesting, it appears to be catering to devs who love to work on own project and see help on SO. It also helps a competent manager to see the code structure and such. Nothing wrong with that, but! ask yourself, if all the SO profile is all questions and no or no correct answers, what does this tell you? How would you know if the repos are not forks or copy paste jobs? And what kinda projects will be in the repos? For sure nothing proprietary, hence private projects. Have these projects been done during work time or during time off? Both are bad, if the dev worked on private projects during work or if they go and code 5 hrs a day after work, or any unhealthy amount. I used to do many projects outside of work,things like sign up, log in features from scratch in node because I thought I need to learn the next new thing, but once I moved positions into a more product ownerish role, ie, much more work, I had literally no time any more to spin up a personal project. But yes, all in all, this is much better than applying at the typical company where hr is writing nonsense job requirements like 15 years experience in golang and such.

revskill 4y ago

Wait, a ML expert should somehow have a AI bot to automate resume screening for her ? So what did really she teach at all ?

TrackerFF 4y ago

If we assume that S = Passing the software screening stage A = Concise and short CV, made to be read by humans. B = Bloated and keyword-riddled CV, made to be read by machines. I = successfully landing an interview To me, it seems that P(I | A) > P(I | A). That is, if a human reads CV "A", you have a greater probability of landing an interview, than using CV "B". But then, P(S | B) > P(S | A), because the screening software can filter out candidates that lack the correct keywords, etc. And in order to get to the interview stage, you need to pass the initial screening stage. You could have the best CV in the world, but if its rejected at step 0, then that doesn't help you. So it seems to me that its better to maximize your CV for S. This all of course assumed that there's no alternative ways around / bypassing the screening stage. I think the fundamental problem is that once a company crosse a certain threshold on the number of applicants, using humans goes out the window for the screening stage. 150 for one person seems tough, but what if the company gets 15000 applicants a month? And most of these are junk anyway?

activitypea 4y ago

On the topic of job hopping: I'm on my fourth job in four years. First company was a startup that went under, other two I immediately realized I wasn't a good fit but I stayed for about a year each, gave it my all, then resigned with peace of mind. Salary was never an issue. Now I'm at a startup again -- I'm happier than ever, wouldn't leave this job for the world, but we're on shaky ground and the recession might sink us despite our best efforts. So in 2023 that might be 5 jobs in 5 years. I don't think I'm the outlier. I've only met one person that does legitimate "job hopping", and you can tell from talking to them that something's off. Most of the time people switch jobs for good reason. Disqualifying someone based on that means you're either an Ivy League kid that never got their hands dirty, or you just think you're a rare enough exception that the rule still holds.

JBlue42 4y ago
I've been unlucky enough to have 'unintentional' job hopping, the gaps of which I think make me look like a poor candidate. If someone looked at my LinkedIn or resume, they might automatically move on because of a 4 month gap here or there. If I actually received an interview I could explain "Well, this was a small company and they couldn't pay me on time so let me go" or something similar. When you've been stuck towards the bottom end of the economy with companies that may not be run that well, it can make you look worse than you are vs circumstances beyond your control.
rm445 4y ago
I'm due to interview someone tomorrow who has had 20 jobs in 25 years... a few 6-month contract positions but mostly 12-18 months in 'permanent' roles. I'd estimate that most of the roles would have been on project-based work of >2yrs duration. I'm keeping an open mind - this person isn't ruled out but it's difficult not to read something into the possibility that they've never seen through a project.

jedberg 4y ago

I've read a lot of resumes in my time, and here is my advice: No one reads resumes. At best they skim them. They look at the shortest lines, which are usually where you worked and the job title. Name recognition makes a difference here, no matter how many people tell you otherwise. This applies to your college as well. But don't let it discourage you, it's more of a "if you have a big name there you get a boost but it's not a negative if you don't". They skim for key technologies and then read the text around them. They most likely will read the full text of the most recent job, so make sure that is the most detailed and interesting. Your resume should talk about results. Don't say "Created a new CMS for the company". Say "Created a new CMS for the company in Python that resulted in an ~70% reduction in website update times, from 1 hour to 18 minutes." If you do put a "skills cloud" on it, be ready to talk about them all. If someone had a skills cloud I would immediately look for the most esoteric skills and dive deep on it in the interview (after Googling it myself) to see if you were BSing or not. If you really know that skill, you should know more than what I learned in five minutes of searching. All this applies to your LinkedIn as well, which you should keep up to date, so that if there is a job you want but don't want to spend the time applying, you can just send them your LinkedIn. :) Edit: Forgot to mention, as pointed out below, that your resume also drives the interview, so while some of what you write won't be read to get the interview, you still want it there as a place to jump off during an interview. Always better if you can drive the conversation towards your most positive qualities, which is easier if they are in your resume and the interviewer asks about them.

jwilber 4y ago
At first you say: “No one reads resumes” Then follow up with the age-old advice: Your resume should talk about results. Don't say "Created a new CMS for the company". Say "Created a new CMS for the company in Python that resulted in an ~70% reduction in website update times, from 1 hour to 18 minutes." My take: I’m actually not convinced anyone cares too much about those numbers in a resume. Great topics to probe in an interview, but not much of a signal on a resume. Reason being: they’re easy to fluff and are almost always inflated bs. I do agree with all of your other points
- 4y ago

bobobob420 4y ago

"Daily contribution to GitHub for one whole year" hahaha

Eleison23 4y ago

[dead]

snozolli 4y ago

For example, if you consider common skills like Jupyter notebook and git your competitive advantage (the only reason to include them in your resume), I would automatically assume that you have no other competitive advantage. What an insane take. Different teams use different tools, and a team may or may not have time to bring someone up to speed on a tool they haven't used. Listing git isn't a statement that it's your "competitive advantage". It's simply stating that you have experience with it.

plaguepilled 4y ago
Came here to post something similar. While I agree that if you're going for a senior position its probably less relevant, there are lots of junior and mid level riles that have various "hurdle requirements" like this. As a result, listing them on the resume is a way to say "yeah, I can do that"

memling 4y ago

I've had the luxury, perhaps outside of the first job, of looking for work while I have work. This makes it a bit easier to be targeted in my approach, so it might not work for everyone. But I use a resume to apply for a job, so every job gets a different resume. At the top of every resume is a job description: a table that lists the company needs and my skills with respect to the requirements--even if I don't have any. Typically it's one page for a hiring manager to compare against the JD and decide whether she wants to look at the canned bullets of my work experience. My current and prior jobs had a formal application process post offer: I did not go through an online application process or submit a resume to an electronic system until after we'd gone through interviews, etc. If I find a place I want to work, I make some effort to find out who the hiring manager is for a given position. If I can find an email address, I'll reach out; if not, I look for a mailing address. If I'm really motivated, I'll try to find a phone number. My experience with this approach has generally been positive: it helps identify good employers, makes, I think, a good impression, and ensures that we don't waste each others' time.

andrew_ 4y ago

> Show how you acquired and use that skill in your job This can be difficult to do especially as the years of experience add up. I have 20, and can only put so much on 1-2 pages. I typically limit short story telling to the most recent gig. > Share your expertise on public channels such as: StackOverflow answers, open source contributions, papers, blog posts I share stints and short responsibilities for the open source work/projects I'm involves in. Again, towards a reasonably-sized resume, listing any more than that could easily bump my resume to 3+ pages. > Daily contribution to GitHub for one whole year. Terrible metric. Perhaps this wasn't well-written. Consistent contribution is more important than vanity metrics like daily contribution. And even then, it doesn't represent what someone has been up to. A month's worth of work can be squashed into a single commit that is pushed. Not to mention this can be easily faked. This reflects poorly on the person writing this as a form of measure. > Having previously joined another early startup before and stuck around. Bad signal. Startups are fickle, and many don't last more than a few years. I've joined several that shut down a year or so after I started. And I get asked about it all the time during interviews. > I’m a bit hesitant when I see candidates who change jobs too frequently, e.g. 5 different companies in 5 years. I understand that not all jobs work out, so it’s okay, sometimes necessary, to move on. However, consistent job jumping can imply that you get bored or give up easily. A year at a job is hardly enough to get deep into a problem space and make significant contributions. I don't think the author fully understands the startup ecosystem, or hasn't considered the range of nuance that exists. > We look for people who can bring a unique perspective to the table. I like this, but they don't mention critical thinking, which goes hand in hand. > 5. We care about impact, not meaningless metrics Odd assertion, since they clearly care about meaningless metrics like github contribution frequency. > If you’re applying to a small startup, say, of less than 20 people, spend some time researching who works at that startup and email them directly. Careful here. This can quickly get you blocked if you're pasting the same message to multiple people. A better practice is to choose one person and reach out, wait, and try again. But write the message organically, don't just copy and paste. > Don’t include a link to your GitHub link if it’s empty. False. Include it with context. e.g. if contributions are hidden by a private project that you've been involved in. State why it may be sparse. A long-standing github account is a good signal. Another point of concern: The word "references" appears only once, at the top. References are under utilized, and I include a line at the end of my resume that states references are available upon request. As I don't provide them by default so their contact info cannot be farmed. Based on this article, I personally wouldn't bother submitting an application to this company.

rcurry 4y ago

You folks are probably going to skewer me for this, but here goes: I’ve been a hiring manager for many years and hired a lot of people. It starts with reviewing resumes just to see if someone has a few years of experience in similar technologies as what we are working with. If it looks good, I just pick up the phone and spend half an hour or so shooting the shit - an intelligent person will realize this is an opportunity to talk about their experience and they’ll do that. If that goes well, they come in for a face to face chat with me and maybe one or two of our developers, totally free form and absolutely no coding challenges or nothing. If they seem like they have their shit together, we hire them. I’d say I have about a 90% success rate with this model. Yea, sometimes you get a good bullshitter and it doesn’t work out, but that’s easily remedied… I have a lot of faith in casual conversational interviews and don’t worry about grilling people on whiteboards. I just go with my gut and that’s it.

yamtaddle 4y ago
Anyone who can bullshit so well they can survive this really ought to be in sales or something. They'd make way more money with their evidently incredibly good social skills, working in a field where it's directly applicable. I'm convinced most of the "bullshitters" people "catch" with programming puzzles, who "can't even write a for loop" are just choking under interview pressure, or are for-real bullshitters but never would have made it through the process you describe anyway, because they're not that good at bullshitting.
- RandallBrown 4y ago
  We were interviewing someone that used to work with my manager... as his boss. My manager basically said "This guy is awesome, we'd be crazy not to hire him" but obviously my manager wasn't allowed to be a part of the interview. He BOMBED the interview, which was a pretty simple coding challenge. I could tell he was incredibly nervous (despite being a very experienced developer) and it felt obvious to me that he was only bombing because he was just so nervous. I could tell from talking to him that he probably knew what he was doing. We hired him and he was great. Some people are bad at interviewing (myself included.)

pojzon 4y ago

> Expertise takes time to acquire. I’m skeptical of people who claim to be experts in too many things. Someone does not like DevOps/Platform Engineers.

indymike 4y ago

The author is on to something here: "look for reasons to say yes" The default in hiring is no. Confirming the default is a lot of work, and often, you miss a lot of great talent. Here are some situations where I've seen this play out: NO because of degree requirement. YES candidate wrote the CMS our product was built with. (candidate didn't get job because we found out two years later he had applied and the recruiter never forwarded the resume on) NO because of 3 years out of industry. YES to candidate because he had the same job at competitor that went public 3 years ago and had a 3 year non-compete (was a CFO, so it was real). (recruiter had a policy of I talk to every applicant, and the candidate told her who he was and why he applied... hired) NO because of multiple 1 year gaps in employment. YES because candidate had managed multiple five year construction projects on time, on budget. Turns out the gaps were where they guy took one year off and volunteered, helping build schools in Africa. (recruiter sent to hiring manager, and hiring manager passed because he thought the guy was a "job hopper")

blowski 4y ago
Exactly. I don't want to spend weeks interviewing people, my boss doesn't want to pay me to interview people, and my PM wants someone who can work on their tickets ASAP. It will be much easier for me if I can just hire you. So "give me reasons to say yes" is great advice, along with "don't give me reasons to say no" (like lying or being an arrogant douchebag). Use things like degrees as a green flag, rather than the absence of one being a red flag.
- throwaway12933 4y ago
  > Use things like degrees as a green flag, rather than the absence of one being a red flag. I don't quite get what you mean by degrees, university degrees? is being self-taught a red flag?
- indymike 4y ago
  > So "give me reasons to say yes" is great advice, along with "don't give me reasons to say no" (like lying or being an arrogant douchebag). Ultimately, you have to decide if you actually want to work with the person you are hiring.

mbesto 4y ago

Friendly reminder: Resume's get you interviews and interviews get you jobs. Optimize as such.

hackan 4y ago

Yeah, it's always the same w/ this: there's absolutely no consensus whatsoever. I once removed "git" as keyword (as i.e. recommended at the beginning of the post), and got asked tirelessly by recruiters if I actually didn't know git, and why I wasn't mentioning it... So yeah, those skills list are meant for recruiters and machines alike...

tptacek 4y ago

As a data point: we've been hiring resume-blind for going on 2 years now. We tell candidates they don't have to send us resumes, and we generally don't read them.

jedberg 4y ago
How do you choose who to interview? I did resume blind hiring for a bit. I had a list of skills they would need and said “apply if you have them”. Then I asked them to submit a paragraph about how they will bring a unique perspective to the role. I got a lot of interesting applications but some of the interviews didn’t go very well. They didn’t have the skills.
- tptacek 4y ago
  We don't interview. We do work-sample tests (WSTs). Anybody can get our first WST just by asking. Not submitting any WST response is our biggest downselect, followed by rejected first WSTs. I'll get on the phone with anybody who asks to, and we'll answer almost any question by email regardless of where people are in the process. The whole thing is calibrated to take less candidate time (from a suited candidate) than an interview loop would. You can see a warts-and-all experience report from a thread started earlier this week (amusingly, I only found it because I was searching for people shit-talking Chicago on HN): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34488427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34488427

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treya 4y ago

Looking for a very specific set of things or type of resume is a huge oversight. Very few people are going to know what you're looking for, and anyone competent doesn't value their time so little to micropolish their resume for exactly your company. If you're not scanning every resume to read between the lines of how the applicant has devised their resume to try to digest what skills and experience and personality they actually have, then you're basically overlooking a significant percentage of those who apply A corollary to this is if the company you're applying to isn't competent enough to figure out if you're right for the job, you probably don't want to work for them anyway

twobitshifter 4y ago

Reading the claypot.ai website doesn’t really attract any interest or give the idea that you’ll be working for a startup that’s going to be financially rewarding or with a purpose or even a product. My guess is the recruiting and hiring is mostly due to Stamford connections and not the type of place that’s attracting applicants outside of that sphere. This is the sale they make to candidates, would you “say yes”?: What makes Claypot AI special? A culture of transparency, collaboration, ownership, and learning (we're in a new space so there is a lot for us to learn!) An opportunity to win over a large, growing, yet untapped market for fast ML delivery A strong community Expertise in both distributed systems and machine learning A very high bar for engineering craftsmanship What will you get? Competitive compensation package Flexible remote-friendly culture with options for in-person collaboration Learn how to build a startup from the ground up Public speaking opportunities An environment for you to grow into the career you want

electrondood 4y ago

There was a radio ad on NPR for Indeed.com that said "We identify candidates for you whose resumes are an exact match for your job description," and I thought "NO YOU FOOLS! YOU'RE GIVING AWAY THE GAME!" It's literally as simple as using the exact phrases in the job description to (truthfully) describe your own accomplishments.

abatilo 4y ago

I interviewed with Claypot last summer for an infrastructure role. They responded about 5 weeks after I applied. My first conversation was with Chip herself, where she appeared to be checking Slack for our entire conversation. I did a technical interview where the interviewer asked me to do calculate some statistics over streams in a Jupyter notebook. I completely bombed the interview, let that be clear. But it was very odd to me that for an infra engineer role, at no point was I asked about any experience with ML infra, scaling, operationalizing models, storage, networking, etc.

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commandersaki 4y ago

I tailor my resume to almost every company where I seem like I could fit. Especially since I’ve had a lot of jobs and a subset is more interesting to an employer than a different subset, and I like to keep page count to 2-3 pages max even though I could probably do a 7 page resume. A major pain point in doing this is you lose track of what you said and to whom, especially if you include cover letters (which I also do). What I learned that is helpful is to save every version of your resume/cover letter including any sources (latex), and timestamp/date these resumes. Do this even if you didn’t tweak your resume, space is cheap. Anyway I found that to be real helpful to track what resume I’ve sent out and what it says.

psim1 4y ago

When I have been the one hiring, whether as a supervisor or as part of a hiring committee, my favorite part of the paperwork has always been the cover letter. I cannot agree with this article's advice saying it is not important. Are you kidding me? Write me a few nice paragraphs about yourself, why you think you're a great match for the position and why you want it. Highlight something from your resume that I am probably only going to otherwise skim. The cover letter is like the first couple minutes of sitting in the interview. We get to know each other a little, and importantly to me, I get to know whether you have half-decent writing skills.

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago

dance monkey, dance!

stuckkeys 4y ago

So, does anyone have the “perfect” resume template? I have been told many things by various recruiters. None of the answers are the same. If I apply, and some other person applies and has less experience than me, but they have an inside connection referral. They will most likely get the job. Sometimes I had gone through few rounds of interviews, and had very good vibes/result. In the end they say no. I have stated to lookup org reviews. If a recruiter reaches out to me they have my full attention, I expect the same. Often times something serious comes up and then they go MIA. Still learning the way these organizations operate when it comes to hiring. Have yet to master that.

throwaway23411 4y ago

Since it wasn't obvious to the OP, Skill clouds are for ATS filters, not human eyes. For the human eyes, emphasize job title, the company (basically a brand name), and key results at the position. Emphasize your education if you went to an Ivy school or top state school, otherwise it won't hold much weight. Ultimately it's a numbers game, if your resume gets in a stack with Ivy & FAANG holders, you are fucked, so apply more. Another option is to side-step this stupid process, and get tight with a recruiter and networking. More importantly, once getting into an interview, you will find the only thing they value is LC top 50, so practice those.

chinchilla2020 4y ago

> It can weaken your resume. For example, if you consider common skills like Jupyter notebook and git your competitive advantage (the only reason to include them in your resume), I would automatically assume that you have no other competitive advantage. Yes, but I am forced to include git to ensure that other companies won't throw my resume out for now listing git.

shantnutiwari 4y ago

Great article! And I note how, in the comments, people are taking a few lines out of context and going "Ha! Id never work here" I recommend you read the damn artice and make your own mind