I'm going through the hiring process now so from my perspective: Keep your resume short, and tailor it for the specific job. If the job doesn't say anything a

I'm going through the hiring process now so from my perspective: Keep your resume short, and tailor it for the specific job. If the job doesn't say anything about a specific skill, take it off your resume (unless its a general skill like UNIX) - include no more than 6-10 skills. I definitely include skills and don't think it's tacky in our applicants, but it is tacky to include a huge list of acronyms and makes people think you actually know less (less about more, instead of more about less). Cover letters are nice, but in my view they are just a paragraph to know how well the person speaks english (many hackers don't speak english well). I like short, casual, cover letters ('hi, saw the post on craigslist, heres 4 bullets why im good for the job, hope to hear from you soon, DONE.) Number one thing for me is to keep in concise, don't make the reader read through a giant paragraph description of your work, just bullet points and tailor the bullet points to the job (you're trying to say "heres my experience at abc123 corp. and heres why its relevant to you"). cover letter is exponentially more important if you aren't replying to a job posting, and less if you are (we use craigslist so get a ton of applicants and we weed people out based on bad english in the cover letter, but we dont really see many cover letters so good that they sway us positively)