This is so true. And I have to wonder why companies allow this nonsense? I'm usually left wondering who is the average "recruiter"?

They are amongst the most clueless, unprofessional and inefficient people working at these tech companies. And yet they have one of the most important jobs there.

This is not to say all are like this as there are some excellent recruiters out there but I would say that overwhelmingly most are not.

I feel like the majority of "recruiters" fall into one of two camps. The first is not actually an employee but a contractor, who hops from one company to another and so has no real vested interest the process or how they represent the company.

The second I think is a HR generalist for whom "recruiting" is just another responsibility along with all their other daily exigencies.

Either one of those generally results in a suboptimal experience for both the candidate and the company.

We often hear about how hard it is to find good people. I don't think there's a talent shortage problem, I think there's a recruiter problem.

The deep irony is that these are the very same companies who seek to disrupt and/or exploit some market inefficiency. That mentality of innovation seems to exclude their own hiring process though.

For programming positions I safely take anybody who knows how to program. It doesn't matter if you know C++ or not (we do most of our work in C++ - you can substitute any language), by the time IT gets you a computer you will know enough C++ to be left on your own. However except in the case of obviously bad jobs (anyone want to do complex merges all day - I have a job opening that is essentially that) such a job opening would give me too many resumes to read.

From that, figure out your true grading criteria. What made you discard others? What sparked your interest? Write these things down.

For example, I recently got to the following criteria:

* more than 2 years in related jobs

* worked with Linux, rather than tossing it in as a keyword

* worked in a process-driven environment

* evidence of having written programs or scripts

and then a bunch of things that looked like minor positives.

Then you can hand the whole pile to a junior and ask them to reject anyone who doesn't have all the real requirements, and write down the number of minor positives on the rest. Sort by that number.

Now you have a handful of resumes, and hopefully a better understanding of what the position really is.

I'm hiring for an established team. The team can teach you what you need to know so long as you are "smart and get things done" (Joel on Software) If there is only one or two people experience matters more because there are not experts to help you learn what you need to know. Even on my team we can teach you, but if we don't have to that is better yet. If my team suddenly needed to write Java - none of us know Java and so probably would limit our search to Java experts - someone to teach us.

There are also cases where there is a shortage of people willing to work for less than the market wage.

There are cases where one city has a lot of jobs, but the next city a few hundred miles away doesn't. In theory people can move to a new city but that has enough personal implications that people often will not.

Some of the places that complain about not being able to find people, are offering far below market rate salaries.

Though they certainly aren't helping much (and in many ways are quite simply harmful), recruiters are more of a "pain signal" than a problem source as such. The deeper problem is that the whole process (or rather, the lack thereof that many companies practice) itself is so broken, on so many levels. (Or more specifically: the expectations people have from this process, on both sides of the table).

The recruiters? They're just trying to make a living - and doing the best they can with the broken models, and let's not forget, bad data presented to them - again, from both sides. To the extent that they're to "blame", it's just that through their education (read: life choices made), they just don't know any better than to simply accept the process for what it is - and try to milk it for a buck or two.

They're doing the best they can with the broken models?

Let's step back and consider some behaviors by recruiters that almost nobody in tech will find unusual:

"Ghosting" - the practice of ignoring and stopping all communications with candidates after they have committed their time have undergone interviews.

Failing to exercise any sense of professionalism in their communications - like sending emails with spelling errors or that lack basic punctuation. One sentence emails without so much as a salutation or using "Hey," as a salutation. Details matter when someone is representing your candidacy.

Not using a calendar app to send out invites for interviews.

Reaching out to candidates to gauge their interest in a role and then never following up with them when a candidate takes the time to speak with them and expresses an interest.

The list goes on and on. These have nothing to do with unrealistic expectations or broken models. These are basic business skills, etiquette and decency.

The spin I'm trying to put on this is -- they exist solely for one reason: to fill a vacuum. The vacuum created by the fact that both sides (mostly the employer, but also candidates) perceive that there's some value for them. Despite massive (and almost overwhelming) evidence to the contrary.

So my take is... to get to the root of the problem, focus on the vacuum, not on the dregs that rush into fill it.

Not using a calendar app to send out invites for interviews.

Or using them, but being too lazy (or just uneducated) to figure out this pesky time zone stuff.

So you're absolutely right -- the list goes on and on.

My theory is they are battle-scarred by a few bad apples, who crop up here and there, now and then. These employees were high maintenance, imperiled the company, even sued. As the article said, "a good part of Human Resources time is spent managing various forms of drama."

I'm not saying that if you ever sued your employer you were wrong. Since employers are people, and employees are people, both are equally capable of corruption. What I'm saying is, if everyone acted in good faith, maybe we wouldn't need HR. But the same could be said about many things in life.

This statement is patently absurd and offensive.

Yes, there are bad recruiters out there, as there are bad sales reps, customer service people, and even shitty engineers who leave a lot of shitty code in places it shouldn't be.

Please stop generalizing

You might note that my comment resonated with more than a few people considering its position at the top of the discussion.

>"This statement is patently absurd and offensive."

It's odd that rather than consider any merits of another's observations you instead dismiss them as "absurdity" without providing a single argument as to why.

Bad reputations evolve over time. And "recruiting" by the way is not new. It has been a staple in HR since the first dot com boom.

Your claim that there are lots of people out there who are bad at their jobs is nothing more than the moral equivalence fallacy. For someone so offended that's a pretty weak argument.

And lastly if you reread my comment you will see that I said it is not all and recognized that there are some excellent recruiters out there. Its the third sentence.

edit: After reading the article fully: This person is the opposite of me. I've read hundreds of resumes, and I want depth and detail so I don't waste my time. Reading resumes is the cheapest part of the process. Just make sure your HR is sending you anything remotely decent, they should only be a very light filter.

That being said, if it’s five pages long, I’m not reading most of it anyway.

Here’s what I care about:

- What has this person been doing the last couple of years?

- Who were they doing it for?

- Scanning their overall work history, does anything interesting (good or bad) stand out. If so, make note for the interview if we get there.

- A list of any accomplishments of note. Patents, speaking engagements, related awards, publications, etc.

I don’t care about your hobbies, your family, or your GPA.

I’m not going to reject your resume because it was too long if I can easily grep the data I’m looking for. I might reject it if it’s too short/empty though.

Because this is what I look for, I keep my resume in the same pattern. The last few years of my work history will contain way more detail. A few years out I start summarizing, 6+ years out its only really big things of note or stuff I’m especially proud of still.

I have a (small) accomplishments section after that, education last. 12 years of history, organized and summarized in about 3 pages with a lot of space.

A) Make it dead simple to visually distinguish between jobs/entries.

B) Put your most important things in the first two lines, because that's all I'm reading until I decide you're worth investing time.

Also, do me a favor and collect all your keywords in one spot so I can skim them. Don't make me read line items to even figure out which technologies you've worked with.

Anyone with more than five years of experience who still does a one page resume either has done absolutely nothing useful or is cheating themselves.

I think this is a key point. Layout and presentation are really important. Even 1 page of dense, undifferentiated text is a lot. But 3 pages of well presented, sectioned content is pretty easy to read.

> I don’t care about your hobbies, your family, or your GPA.

Do you advertise this to prospective candidates, or do you expect them to read your mind and read every other employer's mind?

That's pretty much what I do.

I essentially have two versions of my resume:

Part 1 is a single page, outlines the basics, plus the last 2 or 3 places I've worked at, etc. Just a summary format, but with enough detail for the reader to understand who I am, what I know, and what I can offer them as an employee. The next 2-3 pages are more detailed overviews of those places I've worked in the past that I listed on the summary, plus maybe a couple more.

I tell my recruiter (I work with a couple of independent recruiters from agencies) to pass along either the single page or all pages to the prospective employer, depending on what they think or know that the employer likes to read. If they are like you, they get the full thing; if not they'll get the summary.

When I go to the interview, I take a copy of my full resume, but I ask my recruiter which version they passed along first. That way I know what kind of person I'm probably dealing with in the interview. Regardless, I always make an offer of the "long form" resume, if they'd like a copy (and I take multiple copies in case I need to hand them out to others who may not have a copy).

I've never had a problem with this system. Even so, I read articles like this, and comments like the ones here on HN, and take them in stride, as I feel that my resume is a living document that can always use improvement and updating (especially as my skills expand).

A sister poster listed a set of bullets they like to see; accomplishments, engagements, projects (I would call this all "telling your story"). I'm of the belief that for most people, you can well and truly fit this on one page. I've gotten patents, spoken at conferences, published papers, worked from tiny contracting firms to tech behemoths, and can tersely summarize the important bits for a given interview in a page.

(I mention this to shake my head at awj's somewhat tone-deaf assertion that someone with >5 years experience and a one pager has accomplished nothing)

When I'm interviewing others I find that there's often a gap between "diminishing returns of what I can get out of a denser resume" and "the meat of really getting to know how you'll perform as an employee", and that the most difficult part for me is less filtering the former and more getting to the heart of the latter when it is at its core an extremely subjective question that one has to explore differently with each candidate.

My overall thesis re short resumes has some obvious caveats: I tailor my resume for the job in question and certainly don't enumerate all, outdated, or irrelevant accomplishments. I also don't tend to include any sort of "personal statement" or longer form in this enumeration; I'd typically consider that a cover letter if one is even applicable.

As an entertaining cap to how differently we seem to approach this, I've even been turning over the idea of condensing my resume onto a business card, and think it's situationaly very possible.

That makes it worse than dating and hopefully you don't choose from 3-5 versions of yourself in the closet to bring to a date.

It makes me wonder what sorts of things you are hiring for. Your comments make me think maybe some jobs need more depth to convey qualifications.

(I recently submitted a multipage job application and, in light of that, I am trying to decide how I feel about the comments here and also trying to make sense of them. Surely, there must be more to such preferences than personality of hiring managers.)

The problem with short resumes is that it is easy to hide shallowness. While that is easy to fix in face-to-face interviews, that takes up a lot of time and $$$. If you have to give details about jobs and projects, it becomes more difficult to hide shallowness.

I once interviewed at "7 year C Developer". We brought the person in and after a bit of a chat, asked some basic interview question - build a linked list, or something. We said that you could assume you have a pointer only to the beginning of the list. The person stated, "well, I don't know much about pointers."

Interview over!

Then you can submit a large resume with that. Hiring managers get more detail but also help in screening that 1-page resumes give the benefit of.

Even better, we really should get rid of the "make your own resume idea" and come up with a standard resume format by industry. Companies can then add supplements as needed.

This would backfire terribly. As someone who's mostly done macOS development over the last 3 decades, I can't tell you how many jobs have made assumptions that all of your work was done in Windows, with Visual Studio. If there were some sort of standard format, it would make very dumb assumptions like that and I'd be unable to fill it out. Fuck it. I'd rather just submit a resume I came up with on my own. I can tailor it to the employer I'm working with easily.

As a senior PhD student, the advice I give my younger peers and master students regarding academic posters: you should be able to read it from across the room, or printing in A4 and held at arms' length. Most posters are horribly over-cramed.

I see the same things in academic papers. The length is limited, but many people find a way around by including tons for mathematic, which is much denser. When I take the pain to go through it, I usually find all this math to be unnecessary (but it does give the paper the halo of serious research).

1) The appropriate metric for 'well written' is that you can read the whole thing aloud and understand the findings in the time it takes a person to eat a sandwich, a bag of chips, and drink a medium coffee. About 75 minutes. Anything more may be 'read' but not understood and anything less means you should have done more work.

2) Everyone loves jargon. The more obscure words the better. The more complicated and obfuscated, the better. I find that I want to grok the research. Most of my compatriots do not want to do that. However, we all think the same thing about everyone else. More complicated papers result in a 'treasure hunt' mentality that many researchers actually enjoy, it seems. The journal club evolved into a 'tennis game' of sorts where the submitter would lord over the others about their knowledge of the paper. i don't want to generalize too much, but I think this behavior of 'one-up-man-ship' and 'I-know-more-than-yoooou-dooo' is core to academia.

Some personalities like long explanations, some do not.

Beware that your personality will often miss important details that would be in the verbiage.

Those or like reading often waste too much time reading unnecessary details.

There are pros and cons of both.

(I hope I wrote that in the style you would like to read)

But when you are communicating, it is common sense to make sure the important points come across, then only dive into the details. Unfortunately that is not always something you are incentivized to do in academic research, where fumigation is the norm.

I'd also point out that one can be terse and uninformative as well - point in case: most public Git repositories out there.

I enjoy reading, and will often read long pieces -- albeit I would wish they were terser, because often they could be, with no loss of precision.

I have also never met anyone that, even though they like to read like I do, would take pleasure in reading something that drones unnecessarily. When communicating, that is -- plenty of people enjoy the mini-novels put out by Slate, the New Yorker, ... (and me too, sometimes).

I have taken to the habit to summarizing the things I read on my blog. These summaries are of course less informative than the source, but the signal-to-noise ratio is much higher.

When doing a presentation there are other considerations/rules.

Those rules do not apply to the more generic discussion.

Posters are wonderful.

Papers aren't Posters.

> It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules.

Is there any field for which this is not true?

Just ask Louis Slotin. Oh wait. You can't.

This is for entertainment or marketing purposes, though.

(and they missed out parts (b) and (c) of the question, plus they didn't read the linked web pages supporting my assertions)

Yes, I really need to cut back on how much I type there, but I have trouble communicating in person so text is just so much more comfortable for me. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

If your question has multiple parts, break them into separate, sequential questions.

Lastly if the question is so complex that this doesn't work, and for whatever reason you can't talk to them in person, present them with what you believe the answer is and let them critique it. This won't always work for every scenario but it might be worth trying.

End the email with the question in the subject asked again.

EDIT: If you find that you need to have a conversation, either walk over to their desk or pick up the phone.

Yeah, that really depends on the content of the conversation, but I have seen that tactic used in so many situations (including non-email) that I assume it as the default reason. So I limit myself to one question per email.

Some people will understand what you mean with very little. Others likely won't understand regardless of how much explanation you provide.

Make everything that is critical super obvious. Bulleted questions is a great suggestion.

Super true

1. Place most important piece at the top. Answer the following question to your audience: What is the purpose of this email and how does it apply to me?

2. Bulleted or numbered lists are ideal for multiple questions/points. It visually divides, gives you ability to order most to least important and also allows someone an easy way to respond inline to each question.

3. Iterate on your first revision with goal of reducing length and maintaining intention. This takes practice and forces you to ask do I really need this line of text.

4. If you distribute to a large list, identify at the top the scope so those it doesn't apply to can discard.

5. If you are emailing a group and you need replies or action items for different people call this out. You can do this by calling each name out: @Joe - Can you help identify x? @Jane - Can you follow up with so and so? etc. This way their name is attached to it.

I also try to eliminate parentheticals. Branching lines of thought are very difficult for most people.

This is something that I hadn't thought about but now that you mention it, it does seem to match what I've experienced.

Nice catch.

I haven't watched it, so this question might not be relevant - but how do you explain the popularity of shows like "Game of Thrones"?

From what I gather, it has several various plot lines woven over and around multiple episodes and seasons.

People also don't seem to have any problems deciphering the various "plot lines" within their own circles of family and friends (in my experience with people who seem to have waaaay too much drama in their lives).

Is there something about "video" that makes it easier to parse in this fashion than text? Does emotional attachment to characters in such dramas (or personal involvement) make it easier to understand intertwined plot lines?

Just musing on things here...hmm.

Once that's done, you can ask if they have the time to answer another question, and continue with the interaction.

- Make each bullet point actionable/respondable

- Condense the bullet points/trim the fat

- Use sub-bullets as an aside or to provide narrative/opinion/background

Now people have essentially been informed up front that you expect X number of things for them to respond to and they’ll be less likely to miss the stuff in the middle.

You’ll also find that you’ll get the same information and intent across with your TL;DR bulletpoint summary, but in a way that doesn’t cause the reader to bail out.

It’ll also make it easier for them to respond because you’ve essentially given them references names for each point they’d respond to.

Where are the rest of them then?

2. Read The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and E. B. White (< 100 pages).

3. Read the first several chapters of On Writing Well, by William Zinnser (< 100 pages).

(Don't like reading? Oh :)

I've since started tagging people in the body for specific items I need from them. Varying levels of success, if people are on the email and see themselves tagged in a specific part of the email, they know where to read carefully and what response I expect from them.

The contemporary interpretation/translation of this quote is usually "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."

[1] - "Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte."

I think it’s for the same reason elevator pitches are short. Shorter usually equates to better written, more relevant and the the point. I guess concise is a concise way of putting it. The writer has decided what’s relevant or not, so the reader doesn’t have to.

There’s a tendency for people describing themselves (or their company, etc.) with too many loose end details. We also do this and could do that. ..not wanting to limit themselves or leave anything outside the frame.

Imagine describing your diet. You could do it in 20 words, 200, or 2000. I’m trying to sort people into diet piles. I can do it with 20 words. If you use 200, that probably means I have to trim your 200 to 20, and sort from there.

I recommend all e-mails to Director and above be written as if your audience is a hyperactive teenager. Go with simple statements (they don't understand nuance) and bullet points.

Also, take a look at your resume and take off all acronyms unless they are well-known (eg: HTML) and reword any overly technical statement into simple words "Utilized X to lower the Y by leveraging Z technology which resulted in a 25% speed increase". Nah, do this: "Increased speed of [project] by 25% by leveraging [technology you mentioned on your resume]"

I dislike all resumes that are overly technical and I can't imagine how recruiters feel about seeing borderline non-sense.

1) emphasize the most important verb by putting it first, and favor more-active and more-specific verbs over very general or passive ones, as in putting "increased" ahead of "utilized" and "leveraged", and

2) favor simple language ("leverage" or "utilize" can often just be "use", for example) because, counterintuitively for middling or poor writers, simpler language usually comes off as more forceful, confident, and authoritative than fancier fluff.[1] It's also easier to read, and you're less likely to make small blunders that will bother some readers.

improves most writing significantly.

[1] Incidentally, I think high school and university paper length requirements that reward such flabby writing without without sufficiently punishing weak style choices are part of why people write that way, especially when they're trying to write "formally".

I'll write a one page resume and a longer form resume for many clients. The longer form resume can be useful during the actual interview, as it can provide the interviewer with some fodder to ask about from the applicant's experience.

A one page resume also tells the reader "I don't want to burden you with more information than you need". When an applicant sends a five-page resume to a company, there is some tacit expectation that the applicant wants the recipient to read the whole thing (otherwise, why did he/she include five pages?). That's an unnecessary burden to put on someone.

A single page resume isn't always entirely practical, but there are ways to make it work even for people with 10 or 20 years of experience. Keep in mind that a resume doesn't need to include every single job (the details of the oldest jobs of technologists tend to be almost entirely irrelevant).

The resume also has to be written with the mindset that the reader isn't likely qualified to even determine what the candidate does. You have to assume the reader (when human) is looking for keywords in the same way a machine (applicant tracking system) is, so including a summary that simplifies it for the reader is useful.

When the CTO of a startup tells the temp at the front desk "You're screening our resumes today, only send along Python developers with over five years of experience", a resume summary that begins with "Python Developer with five years of experience..." checks all the reader's boxes right away.

When writing the resume, make it as easy as possible for the reader to figure out who you are and what you do. Don't use inside baseball terms or corporate lingo that doesn't translate. Remove noise to allow hiring signal to come through.

I have one of these five pages resume. I usually get a job offer after an interview.

Edit: If anyone curious about the format/layout, here its: http://www.giis.co.in/LakshmipathiG.pdf

My wife wants to move back to her home state. I have over 25 years experience and I have sent out 40+ applications. Jobs I am perfect for, jobs I am under qualified for and entry level jobs. ZERO Phone Calls.

I need to just put my application like I am straight out of school.

Many places shy away with dealing with non-local applicants for various, often silly, reasons:

They don't want to offer/negotiate relocation expenses, don't want to deal with long distance interviews, don't have the setup/infra to give good long distance interviews, not willing to pay for travel for an in person interview, not willing to conduct only phone/video interviews, not willing to feel responsible for having an applicant pay their own expenses to travel for an interview.

Many places are not willing to consider/interview someone with those moving parts because if they don't hire them, or things don't work out after hiring them then the company/manager will feel responsible and the applicant might bad mouth the employer. Granted bad mouthing an employer after a bad hire experience can and does happen, it doesn't often have as much weight and drama as when someone "moved across the country".

It's easier for an applicant to shout "I flew across the country to interview and this company is/was a joke... they didn't hire me, and I had to pay to travel to the interview!" or "I was hired by this company and I 'moved across the country' for it and then they canned me for [stupid] reasons a, b, c, they are a joke! They 'ruined my life' Avoid them!".

Unfortunately you need to move then look for a [local] job or conceal that you are not currently a local applicant at least until to are at an in person interview.

When I turn up for interviews, nobody bats an eye, and all interview questions that touch on previous jobs talk about what I've been doing in the past 3 years.

Although if OP has sent out 40 applications and gotten no responses, ageism isn't the issue. There's something about his experience or resume that is turning people off.

In terms of resumes and job search, though, software development is completely unlike every other field. I don't think anybody's advice here on "here's how my resume of 15 years of c++ is arranged" is going to help you at all. It's a completely different world.

People complain about ageism in tech, but I suspect programming is actually one of the least ageist fields out there due to its underlying meritocratic nature.

I'm turning 45 years old next year; I've been employed as a software engineer since I was 18.

I've never had a problem getting a new job, whether by choice or because I had to due to a layoff or other scale back by a company. Part of the reason, I believe, is because I am always looking and working to improve my skills (my latest efforts have been in AI/ML and self-driving vehicle technology). I don't want to stagnate or otherwise get stuck in a rut, so to speak.

That doesn't mean I don't worry, but I think I may be ok as long as I'm not trying to drop into an SV startup/unicorn or one of the "big players" like Facebook or Google, that tend to hire younger players. That doesn't mean I'd turn down the chance interview at such a place, but I'm not looking in that direction (plus, I'm pretty rooted here in the Phoenix area).

Contact info is in the profile.

Having just done my CV, I couldn't imagine paying someone for it - it's deeply linked to my personality and my own experiences.

It's like direct mail marketing - expect a very low response.

From this comment I assume you've put your resume in a giant pile 40 times. Unfortunately that's probably not going to get you the job you'd really want but you probably know this already (apologies in advance).

In general, I'd always recommend engaging with potential employers at MeetUps, email / Twitter saying you like their business and want to put your skills to use, etc - something that differentiates you from the normal "applicant." You don't need to ask them for a job - just ask them for an informational interview / discussion and if you can help. If so, they'll refer you and you'll have at minimum an inside track to the application process. If not, you're still better off than you were before.

How about picking the top 5 that you are the best culture fit for and most excited about. After that, create well written 100% custom cover letters and relevant resume. You will get a 100% response, this has worked for me in the past and is a win/win for you and the employer.

In the long run it takes about the same amount of time. Now wear the employers hat...which one are you more likely to read and then engage with?

I've always done that and I have far less experience than you.

Education (But not a certified teacher) currently a STEm lab Coach for the past nine years, Systems Librarian and media creation (audio engineering and video editing). I also do a lot of statistical programming (R) for the company I work with for grants.

So I try to just make each resume simple for each job.

Informal writing gets anything and everything. I'll mix it up all over the place, but I don't differentiate between the various dashes: You'll get a single dash and like it, dang it!

:D

There's the hyphen (-) you are used to then there's the en dash (–) and the em dash (—).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash

>An em dash (or an en dash) denotes a break in a sentence or to set off parenthetical statements.

>The en dash (but not the em dash) indicates spans or differentiation, where it may be considered to replace "and" or "to" (but not "to" in the phrase "from … to …")

>The em dash (but not the en dash) is also used to set off the sources of quotes

I can’t count the number of people I’ve seen with “mySQL” and “Javascript” on their resumes.

Correcting your use of punctuation wouldn’t hurt either.

First, to get to the phone screen many companies now use some form of automation to weed out applications. Less words simply means less chance of an automated match against the job description criteria.

Second, never underestimate how lazy the HR screener is. They aren't technical, they aren't ambitious, they're generally borderline incompetent people whose sole marketable skill is that they are pleasant to talk with. If you don't spell out, in detail, that you're a Front-end Developer who uses X, Y, Z tools for N years the screener won't be able to read between the lines.

Quick example... I was in a time crunch so I asked a recruiter to find me a Front-end Dev. She came back and asked for a job description, project brief, culture brief, competitors / no hire list, and salary range. I felt like she was asking the right questions, she seemed smart. A week goes by, "Sorry, no candidates." Oh... Ok, well it's a hot market... we can up the price $5k.

Next week, "Sorry, no candidates." Hmm, that's really odd. She apologized, said she had gotten over 100 resumes, and said, "Nobody has 5 years of HTML / CSS experience listed on their resume." After a brief talk, she fundamentally didn't understand anything past a direct keyword match.

Anyway good and bad recruiters, but you never know when your resume is going to end up in the hands of someone really junior. Better to have everything spelled out. Better to be explicit around what you did with each past job. Generally the posted job description is all the recruiter is going off of to match you, so it's easy to tune your resume to fit.

* Optimize Your Resume and Boost Interview Chances - Jobscan || https://www.jobscan.co/

Came here to post this. A lot of modern ATS systems (especially if you're jumping through a recruiter or applying to a large enough company) will screen for keywords.

I've always maintained a 2 page CV, one page with the relevant experience pieces/qualitative info, and another page with "Skills", which is essentially keyword fodder. Granted, especially earlier in my career, I got invited to interview for roles that were well out of my league.

There are a lot of HR people in the world, that is a bit of a generalisation, don't you think? I'm sure there are lots of great HR people, and lots of incompetent HR people, just like any other job.

So I'd agree with only the middle of your last sentence.

Every second I spent talking to a recruiter has been an absolutely unmitigated waste of time. And they always try to waste so much of my time, too. They always seem to want to "touch base" and "reach out", or try to mine my contact list for other prospects. It didn't take long for me to figure out that they care not at all about my outcome, and overwhelmingly prefer quantity over quality.

When I run across an outlier, I’ll let you know; seriously. But after twenty-five years, I wouldn’t get my hopes up.

(Remember that parent said “screener”, not “VP of HR w/25 years experience”. And even the VP can be a waste of good office space sometimes.)

I had some great recruiters to work with, but they move up fairly quickly.

I did the math once and for the initial filter which was the resume scan, I and another person gave about 1 1/2 minutes per applicant and it still took an hour! I doubt in the future I'll get any more time so please make it scannable in ~1 1/2 minutes.

Careful where you think you're wasting time and effort.

Having a short resume is also a test I use. The hardest paper I ever wrote was in an advanced Psychology class where we had to perform some sort of analysis on a character in a book. The paper had to be at most 4 pages, for something that could have easily taken 10 or more. Understanding how to communicate effectively is one of the best skills that people can have. Do I discount people immediately for not being able to do this? No, but it is something I take note of when I see it.

If it doesn't and that is important to you, this isn't your person.

Equally, are you discounting this person just because you can't be bothered to spend an extra couple of minutes parsing their resume which upon closer inspection is solid gold?

Being concise and communicating effectively doesn't necessarily mean the same thing.

So here's the thing, with all that in mind, you ask if I can't be bothered, no I can't. Just because someone spews something on a page and calls it a resume does not mean that I should take a look at it. Have some pride in what you send to people. Yes writing resumes suck, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't work at creating it. People say, "I don't know about design", or "I'm not a writer."

1. It's not that hard to understand the basics of design and layout. Buy a book. Read a website. Download a template off the internet. 2. Ask someone to look at it before you send it.

It doesn't have to be great, but it least make it look like you care enough about what you do to make it decent.

1. Decision fatigue - A longer resume doesn't make the choice easier, it makes it harder because now I have more to compare and contrast more.

2. Half-life of knowledge - I did computer vision about 5 years ago, but I leave it off my current resume because I know the field has changed so dramatically since I last did it that my knowledge of it is out of date.

About 1-2 page, nothing forces you to read through all the 6 pages. If the first page is not a fit, then move on. In my experience, a single page often lead to me to have to dig way more on the person to try to find anything related to this one -- not sure that a time saver.

Not all skills and experiences wither at the same rate. This industry has a bad habit of assuming all skills last about as long as your average JavaScript framework. I'm sick of being typecast based on what I have been doing for the past few years.

My favorite resumes are the ones that make me curious about the person and show some enthusiasm but that requires a good writer.

I mostly try to stay away from the more aggravating and useless of grammar pedantry, but it's just not a good signal about diligence and attention to detail.

The CV scoring was entirely uncorrelated with who went on to do well (in fact it was slightly negative but not statistically relevant).

That said, graduate level roles suffer from the behavioural/motivational disconnect between education and the workplace. I'd love to do another study with more senior hires.

In case anyone's bothered we wrote it up here https://medium.com/finding-needles-in-haystacks/putting-appl...

One is optimized for getting past HR and screeners. It should check the boxes the job posting has, and leave out anything that indicates your age, unless they specifically ask for 10+ years of experience.

The other a longer, more detailed one to hand your interviewer during the interview in case they want to talk about specific experiences more.

Either way - you're always gambling here. You can't read the personality on the other side of a job post. Even if that job post looks like the best dev manager in the world wrote it (and that may be the case even) it doesn't mean that applications don't go through the screener who's also handling the hires for janitor, marketing rep, and help desk. It could also be going directly to that manager, and they may have a preference for detail.

Applicant Tracking Systems have arguably been a disaster for humans seeking positions in larger organizations. Taleo etc are laughably basic and typically miss valuable candidates because they work on 90's era keyword loading...I know this having hired for lots of positions in a couple of large companies. You can copy all the keywords in a job application, stuff your resume with them and the ATS will pick up the resume as 'valuable'

I can't say anything positive about the vast majority of HR organizations, who are mostly just sitting in the management meetings waiting for instructions to fire or hire and have virtually no influence outside that...

I agressively delete unrelated skills and promote related skills based on the job description.

It was two columns.

That was all it took to throw off the resume parser at Indeed of all places. So what you're doing will be hopelessly destroyed by any resume parser out there. That is likely the reason for the performance.

very good

> largely graphical

dear god no.

I've been a designer for 12 years and have no trouble getting hired, and my resume is basically 100% letters. The people who let infographic gimmicks distract them from traditional indicators of competence are not people you want to work for, generally.

You are not judging the person on his technical merits and suitability of the role but rather his resume skills. Unless the role you are hiring for is creating resumes.

Again, "tell me why I should hire you and in plain english" is just a bad question and a bad intent. You as an interviewer need to judge that and rather say here is why you should join.

Well, here's mine, on qualities of a good resume:

  - consistent style
  - no complete sentences (too verbose especially w/ consistency)
  - everything relevant listed
  - good organization, most relevant things first
  - LaTeX or markdown for consistent formatting in your output
  - no typos
  - nice resume paper (a nice touch)

At my current job I have found one person that knows what markdown is. Could you go into more detail for me please?

Markdown can be used to output to LaTeX, but I haven't built a build-chain that takes markdown and puts it into my prefered resume style yet.

I'd like to build one, though, but I'm still not sure what type of markdown to use.

If you're a developer applying directly to a hiring manager who is also a developer, and you're going to bypass traditional HR, you might try a resume preformatted as markdown, which seems to be what you thought I meant, but I think that would be a bit nichey - meaning it probably won't work in most situations.

What does this look like, exactly?

Edit: Surely it looks different if I were to hand it to a hiring manager vs a machine reading resumes, yes? What are examples of both?

1. how to find the hiring manager for a role (take a wild stab on LinkedIn)?

2. after that, reach out to them directly on LinkedIn and reference the job listing? Attempt to guess their email format and cold email?

Also recruiters that have a form with 10 textareas (for you to fill out career history) are the worst.

2. Tell why you are an exceptional fit.

3. Tell where you can see your work.

I have not spent five years working with Docker tooling. I do have experience with ___, ___ and ___ and if you've used ____, _____ and _____ (in this case on Android) you've used my work.

80% interview rate.

Maybe you are in a field not taught directly in schools or in some other way specialized and prized field, but don't flaunt your anecdotal evidence around like a puffed up bird. If that is the norm then I am a pineapple with hurt fee fees.

What does this mean? 80% interview pass? 80% successful hires as manager/interviewer?