3 ms·

Ask HN: How do you decide which skills to list on a resume?

I see these resumes from applicants with 10+ languages/frameworks listed. It's extremely unlikely they are very competent with all of them, so I never have any idea which skills they are actually good at. Is this considered good practice? My thought has always been that if you put a language on your resume you better be comfortable coding in it during an interview.

kristjan 14y ago
If I see more than a few things listed, I assume the applicant is just writing down anything they've ever touched. Unless they make up for it with something really cool in their work history or various online profiles (I stalk quite a bit), it's pretty much an autofail.
- alok-g 14y ago
  I believe your assumption is correct. I have interviewed over 100 candidates and have generally found that people who list a lot of things often do not know them well. Unfortunately, CV's talk about skills and experience people have, while the person I want to hire is someone with higher intelligence and solid foundation who can pick up new things fast. I have not observed any correlation (positive or negative) between the number of skills people list and pure intelligence.
vellum 14y ago
Some places have crazy HR filters that are keyword based so applicants try the “better safe than sorry” approach. If they’re smart, they usually list specify what language they used at each job, so you can get a rough idea of their competence in each language.
- eshvk 14y ago
  I usually tell a recruiter/interviewer upfront which languages I use at the moment which I used say $n$ months back etc. I really need an elegant way of putting the time information in my resume though. I also mention specifically the languages used at different places when I talk about "experience" in that place.
alok-g 14y ago
I generally list all the skills in my resume that I have had in the past, even if I am not 100% comfortable during an interview. (This means that I can re-learn the skill fast enough though some interviewers often fail to see that.)
biopharma_guy 14y ago
You can list any number of languages you have touched. But if you categorize them into few categories as 1.expert/highly skilled, 2. Medium/moderately skilled and 3. Novice/just learning since few months, it will make life of the interviewer easy.
leeny 14y ago
One thing I look for in resumes is a subjective sense of whether the candidate is smart/passionate. While these things are very hard to glean from a static and short document, I find, like a few of the other commenters, that a regurgitation of everything you've ever touched is a huge negative. I'd much rather see less buzzwords and more content. Very few resumes actually contain job descriptions where I can tell what the person actually worked on. I care much less about what language you worked in than what you actually accomplished and whether you have strong CS fundamentals. I'm also working on a resume analyzer and trying to use it to predict candidate success. One feature that has showed up as consistently being a predictor of a poor candidate is high keyword saturation (# of languages, OSs, frameworks etc divided by total resume length).
pasbesoin 14y ago
The resume's purpose is to get you the interview. (Re)write as appropriate. (Yes, more writing. On the other hand, no need to create one "perfect compromise" of a resume.) Also, in the U.S. at least, the resume exists in conjunction with the cover letter. (Although online applications may be impacting this.) The resume is what. The cover letter is "I'm very/genuinely interested, and here is -- briefly -- how you might/should interpret my application including the experience the resume conveys." You should hope to catch the reader's attention in 15 seconds or less, and expect them to initially spend no more than a minute -- two at the most -- on the combination. Hopefully, you make it to round two, where they spend more time on the content. More hopefully, you have a contact and/or reference of some sort, so that this consideration happens initially. P.S. I guess I'm not considering the crazy, automated keyword matching and "AI" (cough) that goes on, these days. I think the best way past that is, again, to have a contact in or close to the hiring department, so that an inquiry about you is generated internally to HR (where, inevitably, your formal application has to go -- for "established" companies, at least).

kristjan 14y ago

If I see more than a few things listed, I assume the applicant is just writing down anything they've ever touched. Unless they make up for it with something really cool in their work history or various online profiles (I stalk quite a bit), it's pretty much an autofail.

alok-g 14y ago
I believe your assumption is correct. I have interviewed over 100 candidates and have generally found that people who list a lot of things often do not know them well. Unfortunately, CV's talk about skills and experience people have, while the person I want to hire is someone with higher intelligence and solid foundation who can pick up new things fast. I have not observed any correlation (positive or negative) between the number of skills people list and pure intelligence.

vellum 14y ago

Some places have crazy HR filters that are keyword based so applicants try the “better safe than sorry” approach. If they’re smart, they usually list specify what language they used at each job, so you can get a rough idea of their competence in each language.

eshvk 14y ago
I usually tell a recruiter/interviewer upfront which languages I use at the moment which I used say $n$ months back etc. I really need an elegant way of putting the time information in my resume though. I also mention specifically the languages used at different places when I talk about "experience" in that place.

alok-g 14y ago

I generally list all the skills in my resume that I have had in the past, even if I am not 100% comfortable during an interview. (This means that I can re-learn the skill fast enough though some interviewers often fail to see that.)

biopharma_guy 14y ago

You can list any number of languages you have touched. But if you categorize them into few categories as 1.expert/highly skilled, 2. Medium/moderately skilled and 3. Novice/just learning since few months, it will make life of the interviewer easy.

leeny 14y ago

One thing I look for in resumes is a subjective sense of whether the candidate is smart/passionate. While these things are very hard to glean from a static and short document, I find, like a few of the other commenters, that a regurgitation of everything you've ever touched is a huge negative. I'd much rather see less buzzwords and more content. Very few resumes actually contain job descriptions where I can tell what the person actually worked on. I care much less about what language you worked in than what you actually accomplished and whether you have strong CS fundamentals. I'm also working on a resume analyzer and trying to use it to predict candidate success. One feature that has showed up as consistently being a predictor of a poor candidate is high keyword saturation (# of languages, OSs, frameworks etc divided by total resume length).

pasbesoin 14y ago

The resume's purpose is to get you the interview. (Re)write as appropriate. (Yes, more writing. On the other hand, no need to create one "perfect compromise" of a resume.) Also, in the U.S. at least, the resume exists in conjunction with the cover letter. (Although online applications may be impacting this.) The resume is what. The cover letter is "I'm very/genuinely interested, and here is -- briefly -- how you might/should interpret my application including the experience the resume conveys." You should hope to catch the reader's attention in 15 seconds or less, and expect them to initially spend no more than a minute -- two at the most -- on the combination. Hopefully, you make it to round two, where they spend more time on the content. More hopefully, you have a contact and/or reference of some sort, so that this consideration happens initially. P.S. I guess I'm not considering the crazy, automated keyword matching and "AI" (cough) that goes on, these days. I think the best way past that is, again, to have a contact in or close to the hiring department, so that an inquiry about you is generated internally to HR (where, inevitably, your formal application has to go -- for "established" companies, at least).