I took the dive and let them hack away at my LI. No telling what kind of spam I'm going to get now. That said, wow! This is terrible.
The first thing that they say I should improve on is: Must-Have-Words. Here is their list of those words: Deployment Security API Scalability OOP Continuous Integration (CI) Availability Docker SOLID NoSQL Configuration Management (CM) Robust Tuning Algorithm Web services Networking Design Patterns Unit testing Open Source AWS Hadoop Continuous Deployment (CD) REST Big Data Agile TDD Machine Learning Microservices Artificial Intelligence GitHub.
They also say that after I pay for the service I'll get access to the other fields of things I am missing. Those include: Niche IT Skills, Numbers, Online Presence, Technological Proficiency, Typos, Soft Skills, Your Old Projects, URLs.
They do say that I have a good amount of 'Action Verbs'. But that I need more of them and give the examples of: Devised Debugged Utilized Upgraded Assembled Overhauled Redesigned Coded Rebuilt Maintained Initiated Solved Investigated Developed Architected Trained.
Again, once I pay, I'll unlock a few more categories, which are listed here: Resume Size, Accomplishments, Your Most Recent Roles, Abbreviations, Outdated Tech, File Format, Summary/Objective, Employment History, Short-Term Jobs, Marital Status, Religion, Broken Links, References, Teams
In case you haven't really read through that list I'll highlight the 2 most INSANE items there that should make any HR department dive for the pepto-bismol: Marital Status, Religion. Now, I don't know if they are warning AGAINST including those fields or encouraging including them. However, that they are items that are there at all speaks to the 'demographic' that they are targeting: complete numbskulls. Not a single person that can fog a mirror would ever include those 2 fields in a CV in the English speaking world.
One of the only people I've ever interviewed where I cut it short was a guy who admitted he lied and put "MongoDB" on his resume to get it past any robots that were screening.
Anyway, that massive list of must-have-words reminds me of the old days on the internet where web pages would have a block of content near the bottom that contained many keywords written in the same color as the background. Now I am wondering if that's the direction resumes go for some short period of time.
>Anyway, that massive list of must-have-words reminds me of the old days on the internet where web pages would have a block of content near the bottom that contained many keywords written in the same color as the background. Now I am wondering if that's the direction resumes go for some short period of time.
That's essentially the purpose of my "Technical Skills" section.
Has anyone tried this with resumes? Embed the pdf with white text at a tiny font size so machine read the keywords, but then they never show up for a person reading them. Not sure it would get you anywhere, but gets past the machines or something. Not that I think this is a good idea, just curious what would happen.
This is just completely at odds with modernity in the west. I wonder if this service was created by Indians? I say this because I've done a lot of hiring in India over many years, and almost every CV I see has unnecessary personal details such as age/DoB, gender, marital status and home address.
Occasionally they include religion too, and I've previously been cautioned by Indian managers to be careful about putting together teams that mix Muslims or Christians with Hindus or Jains (I obviously ignore this).
The 'English speaking world' is to clarify that the Religion and Marriage Status fields are heart-attacks to any HR department in the US/UK/AUS/NZ/CAN.(Granted I did not pay them, so they may be telling me to take those things out).
> In case you haven't really read through that list I'll highlight the 2 most INSANE items there that should make any HR department dive for the pepto-bismol: Marital Status, Religion. Now, I don't know if they are warning AGAINST including those fields or encouraging including them. However, that they are items that are there at all speaks to the 'demographic' that they are targeting: complete numbskulls. Not a single person that can fog a mirror would ever include those 2 fields in a CV in the English speaking world.
Why not? There's nothing lost and only anything to gain in mentioning you're a Christian/Satanist/whatever. Tossing someone's resume on the grounds that they mention they're a Satanist is actual discrimination and the applicant would have a justifiable complaint. If anything it's a challenge-- "I dare you to throw mine away without a damn good reason."
In southern states it's incredibly common for general contractors, handymen and such to stick an ickthys on the back of their truck or include it somewhere on the side vinyl. It's an appeal to customer sentiment-- "I can trust this guy not to screw me, we're both Christians." The Jews have done similar insourcing for centuries.
I personally once went on a lunch interview for a dev position where the president and his CFO expected me to join them in saying grace before the meal. Guy had more crucifixes in his office than the Pope himself. Guarantee you they would have loved it if candidates disclosed their religious affiliation on their resume; they would not have wasted their time on me.
It's a mess but not as toxic as you're letting on.
> Why not? There's nothing lost and only anything to gain in mentioning you're a Christian/Satanist/whatever.
Well, this clearly isn't true but your general point is correct: sometimes when applying for a job it can be helpful to advertise your religious beliefs. Still, those jobs overwhelmingly don't come through LinkedIn.
Slightly tangential but I believe the resume situation is another part of the "broken hiring in tech":
1. There is a whole cottage industry of resume writers. My CV got me mostly where I wanted and then some, but of course the professional "resume reviewers" told me it's awful and I need to pay them $50 to make it noticeable at all.
2. The "importance of results" makes people willing to bend the truth and then resumes start looking very sleazy. I saw CVs of interns from Silicon Valley darling companies who claim in every line how they saved millions of dollars here and there. Hard to believe frankly.
3. And what do those results even give us? If resume A says "Implemented ETL tool that improved customer acquisition 420%" and resume B says "Implemented ETL tool to work with customer data in Java", there is no reason to believe candidate A is at all better than candidate B. Well, they are better at resume writing or hiring resume writers. Or maybe they are good at office politics and were able to put themselves on impactful projects. But will they pass the FizzBuzz?
Frankly, I think a lot of managers in some places (maybe places you wouldn’t like to work) would care more about their employee being good at inflating their accomplishments and engaging in low-scale office warfare with people outside the group than having really good technical skills.
At one of my employers I was hired at a probably bad time in my life where I was quite unskilled technically (spend a whole day or something to write a fairly simply SQL query), but I would start small office fights (and contribute to office fights of my manager) over any perceived slight, and always view anything my team, me, or my manager did as delusionally impactful and important and loudly proclaim it to everyone around. They bent over backwards to keep me on board. But the technical level of this group was extremely low, so if this was in a group where someone else could verify that I wasn’t that good it may have played out in a more normal manner.
As I invested a lot in my technical skills and got a lot better/more efficient at my actual work (while caring less about fighting office people about their choice of wording in an email or something) they all began to hate me, with my manager wondering aloud to me why I had become so much worse of an employee after a great start.
We hire interns and co-ops regularly. Often times, the local university forces them to redo their resumes in such a cookie-cutter way that they appear near identical to eachother. It's utter garbage to boot.
First question we ask: do you have a copy of your ORIGINAL resume? The ones who understand what we mean and actually have it are off to a great start.
In my resume writing business, I get a ton of kids who've taken their cues from the student books put together by university career centers. Everything possible is jammed onto one page in as small a type as can be minimally read. Real disservice to the applicant.
That’s funny, because although the 420% statement seems more appealing, it doesn’t give any idea whether things improved drastically or just from terrible to slightly less terrible.
What if they are a 10x programmer put on the project that was shut down after a year of development? Did they produce measurable value or not and more importantly, do you want them on your team or not?
What if they were just doing whatever was asked of them without caring about value and now are pulling up some measurements out of mostly thin air because the hired resume writer told them to do it? Do you want this person on your team or not?
If you're still sending in resumes cold you're doing it wrong.
You need to either apply through connections or turn "cold" job postings into warm leads by finding someone in the company to refer you. How? You can find people on Twitter, LinkedIn, I've even found employees of companies I'm interested in on HN and reached out to them to establish rapport and get interviews. Get creative. I've also written blog posts about companies I'm interested in that lead to job opportunities.
Strongly disagree. I got my first job at apple, and a job at another unicorn by cold submission. I find as an engineer, cold submission on a website will often get me in contact with a recruiter quicker than any other method.
My experience is similar to yours. I found a couple jobs I was interested in the last time I did a search. I submitted my plain-text resume with no buzzwords (other than maybe "Go") and immediately heard back from both. My interviews were done within a week or two. I took one of the jobs.
My advice for engineering candidates with some experience is to just talk about your past work in paragraph form. If Docker or whatever was an important part of your work, it will probably come up. If it's not mentioned, you're probably not the expert in that area that they're looking for. Saves everyone some time.
What’s the response rate on your resume? Mine was pretty abysmal in my last job search, and I don’t really know what the issue is. Maybe it’s my nice, PDF formatting, or maybe it’s the content; I just have no way of telling.
It's not that black & white. It's fine to use both paths to a job. 26 of my 30 years in software were at jobs I applied to cold, with no leads or connections.
In my experience, if you're coming in through a contact, the resume is just a formality at that point. Make sure that you tick all the boxes, basically due diligence.
“We found that many job applications were being rejected without even an interview, because of the resumes. Apparently, 10 seconds is long enough for a recruiter to eliminate many candidates"
What exactly does he think the purpose of a resume is? If someone does not have the necessary background or experience for a job, moving forward to an interview is a waste of time for all parties involved.
When I was an engineering recruiter, 10 seconds hit the nose.
If anybody wants to writeup a ruleset that mirrors the (definitely fallable) process I used to use, here's the rules:
1. Candidate probably local? {check address, if listed, else check location of previous roles} (required by our clients)
2. Candidate doesn't need sponsorship, probably? {check address, if listed, else check location of previous roles to ensure >5 years working in US, compare against university location} (required by our clients, and saturated market anyway. didn't like this one but that was the job)
3. Candidate has proper job title? {check last job title, ensure it's not >1 year ago, check previous job titles, ensure has had job title for some required amount of time}
4. Candidate has clean work history? {check for gaps between roles, or length of each individual role, look for big gaps or many short jobs} (not necessarily a disqualifier, but will be asked about)
5. Candidate has specific keywords required by position? {scan each job in earliest->oldest chronological order, ensuring recent and decent time spent on {{TECHNOLOGY}}}
If I've gotten to bullet point 5 I'm probably already tapping their phone number into my phone, and doing a final scan for
6. Red flag? {look for political opinions on the resume, opinions of their previous bosses, proudly listed membership of organizations like the KKK (it's happened), too many spelling errors, rants about the job hunting process, odd demands surrounding salary or compensation or work style, or just general signs of weirdness/assholeness/difficult-to-deal-with-ness}
What’s with this obsession with “gaps”? What are you trying to screen for? Is everyone supposed to be working non stop from their first job until they retire or die?
I can sort of understand if it’s been years since the last position and the individual is applying for your company after being away from the market. But a gap in the middle of the job history? Why do you care ?
> 1. Candidate probably local? {check address, if listed, else check location of previous roles} (required by our clients)
So wait, are you going to dismiss my resume if I live far away, even though you don't know whether I'll actually want to move to your town on my own dime? This is something you should be figuring out in a phone screening, not just using your intuition by reading a resume.
What's the take on people who have had a career break of 1 to 2yrs? Through travel or medical situations or whatever. A friend of mine took a year and half off after having worked non-stop for ~15yrs (burnt out), went exploring and is now trying to get back into work but is having some difficulty for recruiters to call him back after applying. He never had any breaks in his work history before the recent and only one.
The job title thing worries me. My current title is “designer” but I’ve ended up doing more front-end than design at my current workplace. I was hoping to find work as a developer elsewhere. Will I get filtered out because my title isn’t already “developer”? What should I do in that case?
Well 1 Linked in stubbornly refuses to acknowledge that just because my post town is Milton Keynes - I don't live there I rejected an approach for a MK job last night on LI for this reason.
And part of 6 indicates that you are looking for NeuroTypical's "interesting" :-)
Eh... as someone who has done a _lot_ of interviews, I think you're making two mistakes: 1. assuming all resumes are created equal in terms of providing useful information, and 2. assuming recruiters can properly assess "necessary background experience" from those same resumes.
If you're not getting hits from a recruiter, I'd bet several dollars that it's not a background or human ability mismatch, but a plain ol' resume keyword mismatch.
"Know your audience" as they say. The gate keepers aren't technical. They've got a bunch of keywords against which they 'judge your background'. If you wanna maximize your chances of getting through the first non-technical stage, taking time to tailor your resume is time well spent.
It's not that simple. You may have the necessary background and experience but if your resume that doesn't show it clearly you get filtered out. Writing a resume that gets noticed is a very important skill. When we hire most resumes are really bad but there are some that stand out because they are well-written, concise and convey a clear message. It's rare though.
TODO: write a counter-compiler that recognizes resumes based on the stylistic "improvements" suggested by this tool - and mark them for rejection accordingly.
Professional resume writer here that comes with 20 years of experience in recruiting and hiring for tech startups. I have no fear of being replaced by AI anytime soon, and I don't have any knowledge of this company but can certainly vouch for their statement about other resume firms trying to upsell a service based on a shoddy review.
I often have clients that come to me with perfectly good resumes that tell me some online rating system said it was terrible. A resume can be somewhat accurately 'scored' for fit based on matching keywords, but the tech isn't mature enough yet to say if something is simply good or bad.
Not to mention the different tastes from different companies. I write a bit differently depending on who the target audience is for a resume. I don't know if these review companies account for that at all, but they don't seem to.
Great. Now everyone will juice his resume with something like this and we'll all end up in the same relative positions we were before, except 1) actual resume information density will be lower, as we'll have decreased the SNR through keyword juicing, and 2) anyone not paying attention to these tools (and focusing on work instead) will be unfairly penalized in early-stage hiring filter.
I don't think this follows. To a degree, it's already true, because a lot of tech interviews just boil down to "have you learned all the pet CS questions in Cracking the Coding Interview?". A CV just gets you the interview.
Of course you're right, some companies have software to filter CVs by keywords, and often it's as dumb as if the ad says "experience with Puppet", you need to say "experience with Chef, which is like Puppet". This is just playing the game, like everything is.
Why do they do this? If you've been involved with hiring, you know the number of terrible CVs even a small company will get is shocking, so I'm sympathetic to automating things a bit. A lot of them are minimal effort, but that's the best case. Worst case is a flat out lie, because it takes more effort to catch - usually during the interview.
So if we accept that CVs aren't just useful for raw information, but also convey some kind of measure of diligence (e.g. spelling), which you want in a programmer, then knowing about tools is also a useful measure. So I don't think it's going to be as bad as you make it sound.
You’re assuming it works well. But less tongue in cheek, this is pretty close to the current market, as it is. Things like this might help close some of the arbitrary gaps.
I agree with your sentiment regarding the timeline. We really could manage scarce resources more socially appropriately.
Readit News
The first thing that they say I should improve on is: Must-Have-Words. Here is their list of those words: Deployment Security API Scalability OOP Continuous Integration (CI) Availability Docker SOLID NoSQL Configuration Management (CM) Robust Tuning Algorithm Web services Networking Design Patterns Unit testing Open Source AWS Hadoop Continuous Deployment (CD) REST Big Data Agile TDD Machine Learning Microservices Artificial Intelligence GitHub.
They also say that after I pay for the service I'll get access to the other fields of things I am missing. Those include: Niche IT Skills, Numbers, Online Presence, Technological Proficiency, Typos, Soft Skills, Your Old Projects, URLs.
They do say that I have a good amount of 'Action Verbs'. But that I need more of them and give the examples of: Devised Debugged Utilized Upgraded Assembled Overhauled Redesigned Coded Rebuilt Maintained Initiated Solved Investigated Developed Architected Trained.
Again, once I pay, I'll unlock a few more categories, which are listed here: Resume Size, Accomplishments, Your Most Recent Roles, Abbreviations, Outdated Tech, File Format, Summary/Objective, Employment History, Short-Term Jobs, Marital Status, Religion, Broken Links, References, Teams
In case you haven't really read through that list I'll highlight the 2 most INSANE items there that should make any HR department dive for the pepto-bismol: Marital Status, Religion. Now, I don't know if they are warning AGAINST including those fields or encouraging including them. However, that they are items that are there at all speaks to the 'demographic' that they are targeting: complete numbskulls. Not a single person that can fog a mirror would ever include those 2 fields in a CV in the English speaking world.
lol
One of the only people I've ever interviewed where I cut it short was a guy who admitted he lied and put "MongoDB" on his resume to get it past any robots that were screening.
Anyway, that massive list of must-have-words reminds me of the old days on the internet where web pages would have a block of content near the bottom that contained many keywords written in the same color as the background. Now I am wondering if that's the direction resumes go for some short period of time.
That's essentially the purpose of my "Technical Skills" section.
This is just completely at odds with modernity in the west. I wonder if this service was created by Indians? I say this because I've done a lot of hiring in India over many years, and almost every CV I see has unnecessary personal details such as age/DoB, gender, marital status and home address.
Occasionally they include religion too, and I've previously been cautioned by Indian managers to be careful about putting together teams that mix Muslims or Christians with Hindus or Jains (I obviously ignore this).
"Take CV Compiler, a new product by Andrew Stetsenko and Alexandra Dosii"
Going by the names, I guess Eastern European.
They might as well expect everyone to read the following texts:
https://i.imgur.com/DQcks8u.jpg
https://john.do/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/buzzwordfirstdesi...
Anyway thanks for the word salad buddy, I'm gonna sprinkle some in my own CV. Not too much, just a smattering.
Deleted Comment
>in the English speaking world.
and
>Resume size
don't make me confident that this will apply very well to any job not in the USA. Or in something other than Silicon Valley web-dev.
I know in other countries and in other cultures, such questions may be routine. For example: in Japan, blood types (O+/-,A+/-,B+/-) have been included in interviews: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2009/02/04/in-ja...
Why not? There's nothing lost and only anything to gain in mentioning you're a Christian/Satanist/whatever. Tossing someone's resume on the grounds that they mention they're a Satanist is actual discrimination and the applicant would have a justifiable complaint. If anything it's a challenge-- "I dare you to throw mine away without a damn good reason."
In southern states it's incredibly common for general contractors, handymen and such to stick an ickthys on the back of their truck or include it somewhere on the side vinyl. It's an appeal to customer sentiment-- "I can trust this guy not to screw me, we're both Christians." The Jews have done similar insourcing for centuries.
I personally once went on a lunch interview for a dev position where the president and his CFO expected me to join them in saying grace before the meal. Guy had more crucifixes in his office than the Pope himself. Guarantee you they would have loved it if candidates disclosed their religious affiliation on their resume; they would not have wasted their time on me.
It's a mess but not as toxic as you're letting on.
Well, this clearly isn't true but your general point is correct: sometimes when applying for a job it can be helpful to advertise your religious beliefs. Still, those jobs overwhelmingly don't come through LinkedIn.
1. There is a whole cottage industry of resume writers. My CV got me mostly where I wanted and then some, but of course the professional "resume reviewers" told me it's awful and I need to pay them $50 to make it noticeable at all.
2. The "importance of results" makes people willing to bend the truth and then resumes start looking very sleazy. I saw CVs of interns from Silicon Valley darling companies who claim in every line how they saved millions of dollars here and there. Hard to believe frankly.
3. And what do those results even give us? If resume A says "Implemented ETL tool that improved customer acquisition 420%" and resume B says "Implemented ETL tool to work with customer data in Java", there is no reason to believe candidate A is at all better than candidate B. Well, they are better at resume writing or hiring resume writers. Or maybe they are good at office politics and were able to put themselves on impactful projects. But will they pass the FizzBuzz?
Frankly, I think a lot of managers in some places (maybe places you wouldn’t like to work) would care more about their employee being good at inflating their accomplishments and engaging in low-scale office warfare with people outside the group than having really good technical skills.
At one of my employers I was hired at a probably bad time in my life where I was quite unskilled technically (spend a whole day or something to write a fairly simply SQL query), but I would start small office fights (and contribute to office fights of my manager) over any perceived slight, and always view anything my team, me, or my manager did as delusionally impactful and important and loudly proclaim it to everyone around. They bent over backwards to keep me on board. But the technical level of this group was extremely low, so if this was in a group where someone else could verify that I wasn’t that good it may have played out in a more normal manner.
As I invested a lot in my technical skills and got a lot better/more efficient at my actual work (while caring less about fighting office people about their choice of wording in an email or something) they all began to hate me, with my manager wondering aloud to me why I had become so much worse of an employee after a great start.
First question we ask: do you have a copy of your ORIGINAL resume? The ones who understand what we mean and actually have it are off to a great start.
What if they were just doing whatever was asked of them without caring about value and now are pulling up some measurements out of mostly thin air because the hired resume writer told them to do it? Do you want this person on your team or not?
You need to either apply through connections or turn "cold" job postings into warm leads by finding someone in the company to refer you. How? You can find people on Twitter, LinkedIn, I've even found employees of companies I'm interested in on HN and reached out to them to establish rapport and get interviews. Get creative. I've also written blog posts about companies I'm interested in that lead to job opportunities.
My advice for engineering candidates with some experience is to just talk about your past work in paragraph form. If Docker or whatever was an important part of your work, it will probably come up. If it's not mentioned, you're probably not the expert in that area that they're looking for. Saves everyone some time.
A long time ago somebody recommended Nick Corcodilos‘ book, “Ask The Headhunter“, and it changed the way I thought about job hunting.
There’s a lot of great resouces on his site: https://www.asktheheadhunter.com
What exactly does he think the purpose of a resume is? If someone does not have the necessary background or experience for a job, moving forward to an interview is a waste of time for all parties involved.
If anybody wants to writeup a ruleset that mirrors the (definitely fallable) process I used to use, here's the rules:
1. Candidate probably local? {check address, if listed, else check location of previous roles} (required by our clients)
2. Candidate doesn't need sponsorship, probably? {check address, if listed, else check location of previous roles to ensure >5 years working in US, compare against university location} (required by our clients, and saturated market anyway. didn't like this one but that was the job)
3. Candidate has proper job title? {check last job title, ensure it's not >1 year ago, check previous job titles, ensure has had job title for some required amount of time}
4. Candidate has clean work history? {check for gaps between roles, or length of each individual role, look for big gaps or many short jobs} (not necessarily a disqualifier, but will be asked about)
5. Candidate has specific keywords required by position? {scan each job in earliest->oldest chronological order, ensuring recent and decent time spent on {{TECHNOLOGY}}}
If I've gotten to bullet point 5 I'm probably already tapping their phone number into my phone, and doing a final scan for
6. Red flag? {look for political opinions on the resume, opinions of their previous bosses, proudly listed membership of organizations like the KKK (it's happened), too many spelling errors, rants about the job hunting process, odd demands surrounding salary or compensation or work style, or just general signs of weirdness/assholeness/difficult-to-deal-with-ness}
I can sort of understand if it’s been years since the last position and the individual is applying for your company after being away from the market. But a gap in the middle of the job history? Why do you care ?
So wait, are you going to dismiss my resume if I live far away, even though you don't know whether I'll actually want to move to your town on my own dime? This is something you should be figuring out in a phone screening, not just using your intuition by reading a resume.
That's actually an excellent filter :-). I bet a lot of employers will reject you but others probably will take you probably just for that reason.
And part of 6 indicates that you are looking for NeuroTypical's "interesting" :-)
If you're not getting hits from a recruiter, I'd bet several dollars that it's not a background or human ability mismatch, but a plain ol' resume keyword mismatch.
"Know your audience" as they say. The gate keepers aren't technical. They've got a bunch of keywords against which they 'judge your background'. If you wanna maximize your chances of getting through the first non-technical stage, taking time to tailor your resume is time well spent.
I often have clients that come to me with perfectly good resumes that tell me some online rating system said it was terrible. A resume can be somewhat accurately 'scored' for fit based on matching keywords, but the tech isn't mature enough yet to say if something is simply good or bad.
Not to mention the different tastes from different companies. I write a bit differently depending on who the target audience is for a resume. I don't know if these review companies account for that at all, but they don't seem to.
It might be better served by a static page saying: these are the keywords/verbs you need on your resume, than a full-blown product.
This is the best timeline.
Of course you're right, some companies have software to filter CVs by keywords, and often it's as dumb as if the ad says "experience with Puppet", you need to say "experience with Chef, which is like Puppet". This is just playing the game, like everything is.
Why do they do this? If you've been involved with hiring, you know the number of terrible CVs even a small company will get is shocking, so I'm sympathetic to automating things a bit. A lot of them are minimal effort, but that's the best case. Worst case is a flat out lie, because it takes more effort to catch - usually during the interview.
So if we accept that CVs aren't just useful for raw information, but also convey some kind of measure of diligence (e.g. spelling), which you want in a programmer, then knowing about tools is also a useful measure. So I don't think it's going to be as bad as you make it sound.
I agree with your sentiment regarding the timeline. We really could manage scarce resources more socially appropriately.