@itamarst it’s not really clear to me what a resume looks like to you. My resume’s have never had paragraphs in them, although they might have a some sort of opening sentence that sums up my ambition.
I would argue that you aren’t really emphasizing the right thing. My resume’s are target-specific but tend to be a list of work experience with the important things I did listed in there, like “Lead a team solving X”, or “Designed interview structure” (with more filler words).
It’s also unclear to me if this blog post comes from your experience being a hiring manager for hundreds of candidates or if you are just pulling out of your butt what you think would make a good resume. This is another post which feels like you’re aiming for IT Guru status rather than dispensing useful evidence based information.
Not trying to sound harsh, but this is a low quality response. Setting aside the IT Guru stuff I think @apy had some good implied questions.
What does a resume look like to you? Does it contain paragraphs with narrative description like a cover letter? My resume and most I’ve seen in the U.S. have sections with lots of short bullet points, not paragraphs per se.
Are you drawing this advice from your experience on the hiring manager side or the applicant side or both? I’ve found that the Software Clown style posts which use concrete examples are much better at conveying your message. Are there times you’ve had direct feedback on your resume? What about times you’ve passed on a candidate because of their resume?
Paragraphs or bullet points is besides the point. You can have bullet points too, it doesn’t matter. It’s the content and location that matters, so long as it’s professional looking and readable.
This is based on decade plus of reading resumes and then interviewing people (as developer, usually, not manager) and seeing how much was missing from resume.
And most importantly, do you have any evidence that doing the change you suggest actually affects one’s success in the hiring pipeline rather than just being your preference of how resume’s should look? I could write an opposing article that says the most important aspect of a resume is that it uses exactly 3 distinct colors, how is a reader to judge the quality of such advice?
Yes, I would like to see some evidence as well, basically where I live, hiring managers will ask you about technologies, usually with a programmer/developer/team member of sorts with them, to evaluate you. It will also be frowned upon if you at least don’t list something in your resume, and if you have phrases like the ones described in other comments in this thread, devs won’t particularly like your resume.
Last guy we hired had a simple latex based resume, that was clean, listed his experiences, how he worked with others in the relevant projects, his known technologies, working projects (github/git repo), and today he is invaluable to the team.
(edited for grammar and another point)
Where are you from? Different places have different hiring cultures, yes, and what I’m writing is mostly broadly focused on US market. In the US approaching your skills as a list of technologies is asking to be treated as a
commodity: easily replaceable if someone comes along with same list at lower pay. You can do it, but you don’t want to. If an interview involved a manager with a checklist of technologies I’d probably just walk out, because I’d be pretty sure pay would be vastly lower than what I can get elsewhere. And if developers were annoyed by focusing on solving problems, rather than churning out code, working with them would be unpleasant.
Notice, however, that your coworker mentioned how he worked with others, not just technologies.
Likewise, Apy’s resume starts by listing actual work he did not, not a list of technologies.
Yes, things are different here, I’m from South America.
I guess the difference here is that we rely more on the interviews that we perform, in my opinion anyone can write about how they did something, they may be lying or may not, and we want to feel that in the actual interview.
It seems to me now that here, we want to feel how you say things in an interview, we want to see you do it, explain how you’ve worked, which in my opinion you can easily spot who was trying to fake something.
Obviously sometimes you get interviews in which the candidates were not who they said they were, and that’s disappointing, but when you get someone who knows what he’s doing, you feel it then and there by talking/coding/solving problems.
In my opinion anyway, writing something in a resume is easy, actual talking/coding whatever process you might wanna choose to evaluate them, is the real deal
Your ability to solve real, relevant projects with your skills.
Your ability to work independently.
Your ability to learn quickly.
Your relevant domain knowledge, if any.
Your ability to work with others.
So this is how everyone comes up with the same tired list of unsubstantiated lies?
My resume used the functional style illustrating skills using a list of things I’ve done. As in, I demonstrated business value in there showing what I can deliver for them in various ways with various methods. I used to tell people to do theirs that way. Quite a few got better jobs. Samples were too small and scattered to say it proves anything past it can work.
You don’t have to lie. Although, you can leave off a detail or so to make it look better than it is in minds of some people who assume too much. That can had negative repercussions down the road. So, I tell people just to get shit done and learn how to write that on paper in terms that show business side as much as tech.
I think the most important part of a resume is to not waste people’s time. They will scan the resume, looking for things that are relevant for the open position, and if they find them then they will slow down to read more. To that longer test is best kept to the bottom of the resume, or at the end of a job listing.
I like how I have my resume (on my website under /resume ) because I believe it is easy to scan, yet has bolded keywords that will jump out at a viewer.
Also, from the article, these are really good points to be able to demonstrate; and I should improve my resume to show these off.
Your ability to solve real, relevant projects with your skills.
The bullet points below your experiences are really nice, they show the reader the main aspects and give a quick overview/feel of what you worked on, without wasting time as you said.
The blue tags you have are not really my thing, but I enjoy your resume very much.
I’m not sure that the resume matters in a hiring environment dominated by keyword search and Linkedin aside from having one that is presentable after the conversation has begun. However, I invest a lot in my personal resume and have a fairly traditional structure:
Contact Info
Overview phrase/pull quote
Table of high-level areas of expertise
Chronology of experience where each entry has
Job Title
Company, Location, Date
Key technologies, single line
Active voiced outcomes using the tech above
Education
Notable projects, memberships, etc.
As a hiring manager I like to see and as an applicant I try to write concrete quantifiable “W outcome using X to do Y for Z”, ex. “Reduced B2B execution time by 15%, reduced error rate by 9%, and increased ROA by 4% by designing and developing keyword-based replacement for business_unitsome_function”, that show not just that there was work but also value and the purpose for the work.
re: LinkedIn being a “hiring environment”, I’m constantly hearing (in the Lobste.rs LI group, for example) people complain about getting harassed by recruiters and the like, but not once has that happened to me. Every once in a while, the thought crosses my mind “that’s probably because you’re fundamentally unhirable – don’t quit your job!” which I quickly dismiss, but this time I’ll ask: is this more common to the more senior folks, or maybe more of a matter of location (not in the US)?
the thought crosses my mind “that’s probably because you’re fundamentally unhirable – don’t quit your job!” which I quickly dismiss,
I don’t know you but it’s probably not that. I also don’t know what other people’s threshold is for feeling “harassed”. I get a few inquiries a week across all of the job sites, most of them are dismissible low-quality hits (no, I would not like a three month entry-level contract in the rust-belt of the U.S., go away) or rookies trying to swell their contacts and I block or unsubscribe from those. I do freely connect with in-house or well-connected recruiters even if I’m not currently interested and those bring up something intriguing a couple of times a year. I don’t job hop.
but this time I’ll ask: is this more common to the more senior folks, or maybe more of a matter of location (not in the US)?
I believe it’s several things: connections and the network of their connections, the industries you’ve worked in, keywords/technologies, and location.
I didn’t start getting cold-contacted by recruiters until I was 5-6 years into my career, but since then the frequency has grown pretty continually.
Sometimes I have no idea how they got my phone number, other times they pull my email from git commits… It’s not super frequent but I find it a bit creepy to take my email address from a commit to some OSS project and use it for an unrelated for-profit enterprise.
I’ve had, at most, two calls from recruiters. One was someone I used at a previous engagement, the other I have no idea. I use various email addresses and plus addressing (where accepted by whatever vetting is in place) to track where things come from. I generally give out a VoIP number configured with an automated attendant to a mailbox and forwarding group so I can vet calls.
@itamarst it’s not really clear to me what a resume looks like to you. My resume’s have never had paragraphs in them, although they might have a some sort of opening sentence that sums up my ambition.
I would argue that you aren’t really emphasizing the right thing. My resume’s are target-specific but tend to be a list of work experience with the important things I did listed in there, like “Lead a team solving X”, or “Designed interview structure” (with more filler words).
It’s also unclear to me if this blog post comes from your experience being a hiring manager for hundreds of candidates or if you are just pulling out of your butt what you think would make a good resume. This is another post which feels like you’re aiming for IT Guru status rather than dispensing useful evidence based information.
In case you too aspire to guruhood—
Cons of being IT Guru:
Pros of being IT Guru:
Not trying to sound harsh, but this is a low quality response. Setting aside the IT Guru stuff I think @apy had some good implied questions.
What does a resume look like to you? Does it contain paragraphs with narrative description like a cover letter? My resume and most I’ve seen in the U.S. have sections with lots of short bullet points, not paragraphs per se.
Are you drawing this advice from your experience on the hiring manager side or the applicant side or both? I’ve found that the Software Clown style posts which use concrete examples are much better at conveying your message. Are there times you’ve had direct feedback on your resume? What about times you’ve passed on a candidate because of their resume?
And most importantly, do you have any evidence that doing the change you suggest actually affects one’s success in the hiring pipeline rather than just being your preference of how resume’s should look? I could write an opposing article that says the most important aspect of a resume is that it uses exactly 3 distinct colors, how is a reader to judge the quality of such advice?
Yes, I would like to see some evidence as well, basically where I live, hiring managers will ask you about technologies, usually with a programmer/developer/team member of sorts with them, to evaluate you. It will also be frowned upon if you at least don’t list something in your resume, and if you have phrases like the ones described in other comments in this thread, devs won’t particularly like your resume. Last guy we hired had a simple latex based resume, that was clean, listed his experiences, how he worked with others in the relevant projects, his known technologies, working projects (github/git repo), and today he is invaluable to the team. (edited for grammar and another point)
Where are you from? Different places have different hiring cultures, yes, and what I’m writing is mostly broadly focused on US market. In the US approaching your skills as a list of technologies is asking to be treated as a commodity: easily replaceable if someone comes along with same list at lower pay. You can do it, but you don’t want to. If an interview involved a manager with a checklist of technologies I’d probably just walk out, because I’d be pretty sure pay would be vastly lower than what I can get elsewhere. And if developers were annoyed by focusing on solving problems, rather than churning out code, working with them would be unpleasant.
Notice, however, that your coworker mentioned how he worked with others, not just technologies.
Likewise, Apy’s resume starts by listing actual work he did not, not a list of technologies.
Yes, things are different here, I’m from South America. I guess the difference here is that we rely more on the interviews that we perform, in my opinion anyone can write about how they did something, they may be lying or may not, and we want to feel that in the actual interview.
It seems to me now that here, we want to feel how you say things in an interview, we want to see you do it, explain how you’ve worked, which in my opinion you can easily spot who was trying to fake something. Obviously sometimes you get interviews in which the candidates were not who they said they were, and that’s disappointing, but when you get someone who knows what he’s doing, you feel it then and there by talking/coding/solving problems.
In my opinion anyway, writing something in a resume is easy, actual talking/coding whatever process you might wanna choose to evaluate them, is the real deal
So this is how everyone comes up with the same tired list of unsubstantiated lies?
My resume used the functional style illustrating skills using a list of things I’ve done. As in, I demonstrated business value in there showing what I can deliver for them in various ways with various methods. I used to tell people to do theirs that way. Quite a few got better jobs. Samples were too small and scattered to say it proves anything past it can work.
You don’t have to lie. Although, you can leave off a detail or so to make it look better than it is in minds of some people who assume too much. That can had negative repercussions down the road. So, I tell people just to get shit done and learn how to write that on paper in terms that show business side as much as tech.
I think the most important part of a resume is to not waste people’s time. They will scan the resume, looking for things that are relevant for the open position, and if they find them then they will slow down to read more. To that longer test is best kept to the bottom of the resume, or at the end of a job listing.
I like how I have my resume (on my website under /resume ) because I believe it is easy to scan, yet has bolded keywords that will jump out at a viewer.
Also, from the article, these are really good points to be able to demonstrate; and I should improve my resume to show these off.
The bullet points below your experiences are really nice, they show the reader the main aspects and give a quick overview/feel of what you worked on, without wasting time as you said. The blue tags you have are not really my thing, but I enjoy your resume very much.
Yes. It’s a nice resume.
But needs a spel-check.
Oh, Phooey. Misspellings tend to be my downfall. Thank you for letting me know. :-)
I’m not sure that the resume matters in a hiring environment dominated by keyword search and Linkedin aside from having one that is presentable after the conversation has begun. However, I invest a lot in my personal resume and have a fairly traditional structure:
As a hiring manager I like to see and as an applicant I try to write concrete quantifiable “W outcome using X to do Y for Z”, ex. “Reduced B2B execution time by 15%, reduced error rate by 9%, and increased ROA by 4% by designing and developing keyword-based replacement for business_unit some_function”, that show not just that there was work but also value and the purpose for the work.
re: LinkedIn being a “hiring environment”, I’m constantly hearing (in the Lobste.rs LI group, for example) people complain about getting harassed by recruiters and the like, but not once has that happened to me. Every once in a while, the thought crosses my mind “that’s probably because you’re fundamentally unhirable – don’t quit your job!” which I quickly dismiss, but this time I’ll ask: is this more common to the more senior folks, or maybe more of a matter of location (not in the US)?
I don’t know you but it’s probably not that. I also don’t know what other people’s threshold is for feeling “harassed”. I get a few inquiries a week across all of the job sites, most of them are dismissible low-quality hits (no, I would not like a three month entry-level contract in the rust-belt of the U.S., go away) or rookies trying to swell their contacts and I block or unsubscribe from those. I do freely connect with in-house or well-connected recruiters even if I’m not currently interested and those bring up something intriguing a couple of times a year. I don’t job hop.
I believe it’s several things: connections and the network of their connections, the industries you’ve worked in, keywords/technologies, and location.
Location is really important. A lot of recruiters seem to search based on location (SFBA…).
I didn’t start getting cold-contacted by recruiters until I was 5-6 years into my career, but since then the frequency has grown pretty continually.
Sometimes I have no idea how they got my phone number, other times they pull my email from git commits… It’s not super frequent but I find it a bit creepy to take my email address from a commit to some OSS project and use it for an unrelated for-profit enterprise.
I’ve had, at most, two calls from recruiters. One was someone I used at a previous engagement, the other I have no idea. I use various email addresses and plus addressing (where accepted by whatever vetting is in place) to track where things come from. I generally give out a VoIP number configured with an automated attendant to a mailbox and forwarding group so I can vet calls.
A list on it’s own is pretty useless anyway because some people think installing the tools and writing hello world counts as knowing it.