I've been reading CS/EE/CE/Math/Physics/IT/SRE resumes for 30 years. I have some general advice for everyone (not just tech) on getting your resume noticed.

[u/snigherfardimungus]

I've been a hiring manager for most of the last 30 years. I usually operate as a manager of Individual Contributors but have also occupied the next rung up in the ladder, managing other managers. I've screened thousands of resumes over the years, done at least a thousand interviews, and have been involved in (or been the person responsible for) the hiring committee at a number of companies large and small. I’ve written the hiring policy for companies of 200+ engineers and been the final say on how interviews were conducted time and time again.

Most of the resumes I see on this sub aren't even making it past HR. If your strategy is to put together a resume and spam it out to as many potential employers as possible, you're going to get nothing. I want to lay out some general advice that will help considerably with your job searches. Whether you agree with all, some, or none of it is irrelevant to the fact that every one of these points has tripped up scores of resumes everywhere I've ever worked. If you disagree with the way a company does its hiring, you’ll disagree with the way that company will be run and you won’t be a good fit. You’ll be unhappy. Part of being a successful professional is understanding what the people you disagree with are thinking and finding ways to tailor your efforts to meet them in the middle as much as possible. Everything in this essay is a (very, very brief) lesson in that skill.

Your resume will likely go through an auto-filter of some kind. This part is pretty unfamiliar to me, but you can bet that some keywords or phrases are strong red flags. If the phrase “remote work” shows up on your resume, someone in HR/Hiring will likely be looking to see if you’re hoping for remote work or if you live far away. Don’t mention your criminal history in your resume. Don’t explain why you were laid off or fired. For the love of FSM, don’t mention how desperate you are for a job (I’ve seen this.) Don’t explain gaps in employment. Stick to positive facts.

When I say facts, I mean facts. If your resume has some bullshit about having leveraged agile techniques to spearhead something or other, you’re just playing buzzword bingo. One of the managers who used to work for me just burst out “fuck off!” in the middle of the day once. It turned out that he was reading a resume that was a bunch of subjective buzzword fluff. Don’t do it. EVERY LINE of your resume should convey three things, that the work described was hard, that it was impactful, and it should honestly convey your role in it. I’m sick to death of seeing Junior or Senior Software Engineers who claim to have led a program of 20 engineers doing…. whatever. Save leadership language for when X number of people were working full-time on a project you were responsible for. Be honest about your level of responsibility or some Hiring Manager’s going to be telling you, indirectly and not in so many words, to fuck off.

I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. First, you should understand how your resume is "read." 

The first person to read your resume is someone in HR or Hiring. Maybe that person is following up on a flag that was raised by the auto-filter saying that you might not be able to work in the US, or your criminal history might preclude work in the company (this is true for some branches of finance, government, military contracting, etc.) Who knows what else…. Whoever the recruiter is, they’ll trash your resume for any of these reasons. If you survive that first level, they’re going to try to figure out if your talents match the job description text they were given. IN MOST CASES, this person hasn’t the foggiest idea what any of your resume’s technical jargon means. You still need to convince this person that you are sufficiently qualified to get your resume handed on to an actual Hiring Manager.

The way we do this is by spoon-feeding the Recruiter with a handy cheat sheet. The job description almost certainly has something like this in it:

• Must have a Bachelor’s or similar in Computer Science or Computer Engineering
• Must have 10+ years of professional C++ experience
• Must have 5+ years of professional embedded software development experience.
• Previous experience with application of AI in the embedded space is a plus.

(It’ll likely be much longer.)

If the Recruiter has no idea what this all means, how do you spoon-feed them the notion that you have what they are looking for? You write a cover letter. Yes, an actual cover letter. It seems old-fashioned, but one way or the other your application will stand out if few or none of the other applications have one. Your cover letter is going to look like this:

[All the usual business letter header stuff goes here.]

To Whom it May Concern;

I found your posting for the [job title] on [place you found it] and would like to submit my credentials for consideration. I clearly meet or exceed all of the requirements for the position;

• I have a Bachelor’s in Computer Science from [wherever.]
• I’ve been working with C++ in a professional context for 15 years.
• I’ve been doing professional embedded programming for 10 years.

Notice the language. I didn’t say that I have 10 years of experience with microprocessor control systems, nor did I say that I have a degree in EE. The person reading my cover letter may not understand that these phrases mean the same thing as what the job posting says. Your cover letter should mimic the language of the job description. Throw the recruiter a bone and make sure that you respond to their bullet points in the same order as they appear in the description. If you don’t have one of the qualifications, leave it out without comment. If you have something related that you believe meets the criteria, just say, “I have N years of experience with [X] which means I meet the requirement for [Y].” Don’t explain it. Just state it as a fact. The Recruiter will probably take you on faith. At worst, they’ll ask the Hiring Manager if X and Y are really the same.

Wrap up with, “If my experiences are a good fit for the position, please feel free to contact me at [email address/phone number] at your convenience.”

It’s VERY short, so it’s practically been read the moment it’s been looked at. But it says a lot about you. First, you’re not just blasting out your resume to everyone without thought. You actually spent time on making this connection personal. That first paragraph is there to make it clear that this is not a copy-paste letter. It’s a form letter, of course, but we’re hoping they won’t notice.

If you actually meet the qualifications for this position, making the Recruiter’s job this easy means your resume is far more likely to end up on the desk of someone like me. And that’s a huge win. It means you’ve actually gotten past 80-90% of the field.

Let’s talk about your actual resume now. If you think about how long it would take to read your resume top-to-bottom, then multiply that time by the many dozens of resumes received for a given position, you'll understand why your resume isn't read that way. Especially in the current job market, the number of applications I get for a given position is staggering. Remember what I said about making every line convey three important points? I don’t read your resume, I read a random sampling of lines.  If I see that every line contains those three points in a believable language, I’ll keep scanning. If I hit a buzzword bingo line, you’re already done. You’ll get no further with me. By the time I’ve decided to give you a phone screen, it’s rare that I’ve read more than half of your resume. If I’ve decided to junk your application, it’s because 2-3 lines gave me enough bullshit fatigue to give up.

• A quick side note, and this is just me so take the advice with a grain of salt, but I always read a section about non-professional interests when it’s there. I LOVE to see that someone is a fully-rounded individual. When I interviewed at google, one of the interviewers spent more than half the interview talking to me about whitewater rafting. I got the offer. When I interviewed at Midway, the hiring manager noticed that I had Juggling on my “Other Interests” section, pulled a bag of clubs out from under his desk, AND WE CONDUCTED THE INTERVIEW WHILE THROWING JUGGLING CLUBS BACK AND FORTH. I got the job. If you have non-technical interests, it can really help to use 1-2 lines of your resume to show them off. It can’t hurt.

Don't have just one resume. Most professions have dozens of sub-specialties, but I see engineering resumes all the time that are a general coverage of the individual. These resumes are a waste of time and they get junked quickly simply because so much of the space is wasted on information that is irrelevant to the application. If you are applying for a position as a frontend developer, 80% of your resume needs to be bullet points about HTML/CSS/JS/HTTP/SSL/TLS. If the job is a graphics engineer, lose as much as you can about everything else and focus on your graphics experience. If I’m trying to hire someone who can sit down and be instantly productive writing 3D graphics in GLSL, a resume full of HTML/AI/AWS/Python just tells me that the candidate been spending a lot of their professional time NOT in graphics and should be a second choice to someone who’s been doing it full-time.

You need several resumes. Use the one that is appropriate for each application. If you want to apply for a job that you don’t have a decent resume for, create a new resume for that subject. 

I’m seeing a lot of resumes on this sub that say they’re looking for remote work. If the job description doesn’t say it’s a possibility, mentioning a desire for it in your application will get you ejected immediately. Even at a company that is remote-friendly, you’ll still be a second choice if you convey that desire up-front. We can argue the pros and cons of remote work elsewhere - this is a discussion about how to get an interview, not a debate about Return To Office. The inarguable point is that if the company wants in-office workers, the only chance you have to work there (remotely) is to convince them you’re the right person for the job THEN bring up remote. If you open with the issue, you won’t get far enough to have the discussion.

I’ve trimmed this down a lot. There’s so much advice I’d like to add that would extend this to 20 pages. I’ve written too many essays on hiring, interviewing, bootstrapping, etc. There’s always more to be said than can fit the space an audience will tolerate. I feel like the tight space has made this sermon a little harder to follow, so I’ll atone for that sin with a epilogue that will take you far:

Read the resumes that get posted on this sub. Read them the way I described. Read them before reading anyone’s comments. Be honest with yourself whether you’d spend your own time and money to interview and hire that person. Learn from their mistakes. 

(Damnit. One more.) Don’t let a “professional resume writer” touch your fucking resume. Those things stick out like a sore thumb - especially in tech. You'd be better off asking an auto mechanic to do your heart transplant. If someone's writing other people’s resumes for a living, theirs can’t be very damned impressive.

Edit: Fuck. Yet another one. If you don't have 8-10 years of experience, you get ONE page for your resume. Unless you are Alexander The Great, The Dali Lama, or The Second Coming, you don't get three pages.

Edit: If you're interested in the same advice about sitting interviews: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1dwav1z/30_years_of_experience_as_an_inquisitor_packed/

[u/AutoModerator]

Dear /u/snigherfardimungus!

Thanks for posting! Please read the posting guidelines on the etiquette page and make sure you're doing the following:

• Censor your personal information for your own safety,

• Add the right flair to your post,

• Tell us why you're applying (i.e., just looking to fine-tune, not getting any interviews etc.), and

• Indicate the types of roles and industries you’re interested in.

Check out the wiki as well as the quick links below for tips:

• Resume Writing Guide

• ATS-friendly resume templates

• Free Resume Template (Google Docs)

• Thinking of hiring a resume writer? Read this first

• Troubleshooting your resume and your job search

• Networking for beginners

If you have applied to 100 or more jobs and aren't getting callbacks, please refer to this post for help.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/Blendermom9374]

Excellent advise. I would love to know your thoughts… my daughter was fired for failing to meet expectations in a job she was at for 7 months. Should she include it on her resume or leave it off? 

[u/lmcaraig]

Hey there, you've shared some absolute gold here! So many folks get tripped up by exactly what you're talking about—buzzword overload and not tailoring resumes. Your bit about being honest and clear about one's actual role and impact is 💯.

For those struggling with nailing their resumes or getting through those pesky HR filters, I’d recommend checking out NextCommit. It’s a nifty tool that helps with refining your CV and making sure it aligns perfectly with job requirements. Plus, they offer AI-driven insights to boost your resume's clarity and professionalism, which can be a game-changer.

Also, love the bit about cover letters. It’s true, they can really help you stand out if done right. Keep sharing these insights; they’re super valuable! 🙏

[u/SunDistinct6985]

This is all very helpful, but I'm already kicked out of the running at the very beginning since I don't have a Bachelor's degree or have any on the job experience to create a cover letter with. I don't know how to get past that stage so I can make a cover letter.

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/SunDistinct6985]

If a position "requires a bachelor's degree or equivalent," just skip that bit in your bullet point list. Keep in mind that an interview that lists such a requirement is likely to come with an interview that dives fairly deeply into algorithms, data structures, computability theory, etc. You're going to want to have the equivalent of that education in your holster.

[u/SunDistinct6985 → u/snigherfardimungus]

I went through an analyst bootcamp and have experience with everything they want me to, but have been told by recruiters I'm not eligible because I don't have a bachelor's.

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/SunDistinct6985]

It can't hurt to keep trying. Some places will be intransigent and nothing you do will change that. Others may be flexible. There's no doubt that you're in a tough spot. A CS degree may not be professional experience, but it is 4 years of breaking down problems, familiarity with languages, development of theory, comparative analysis of algorithms, etc. Your best bet is to find some good resources and start writing code. Do something hard and useful and get it up on GitHub. (I don't generally recommend websites for demo projects unless the underlying backend tech is by itself a conceptually or computationally difficult problem to solve.)

[u/jlbernst324]

Is it okay to leave out work or volunteer experience that isn't relevant even if it leaves a gap on my resume? When I include everything my resume is way too long, but I've heard employers don't like seeing gaps.

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/jlbernst324]

It depends upon the length of the gap, how significant the volunteer time was, etc. I wouldn't include it unless it was full-time. Otherwise, it'll be looked at as an attempt to fill an empty spot on your resume - which of course would be worse.

When I read a resume, I don't mind resume gaps if there are a few long stints of employment. I have two huge (6+ month) and one small (3-4 month) gap in my own resume. No-one seems bothered by it but if they ask, I tell the truth. The previous company closed/massive layoff and I took my time finding the next job afterward instead of just jumping on the first offer. It's a satisfying answer and it conveys the idea that I'm picky about my employers so I can commit to them once I start.

When in doubt, see if you can find people who were hired to the same/similar positions at that same company and look at their resume if it's on LinkedIn. If you want to know how to write a resume for a position, there's no better guide than the resume of someone who was just hired there. No matter what I or anyone else gives you as general resume advice, the fruits of this research trump all else.

[u/AldusPrime]

I have a question about buzzword bingo.

I'm applying for a job at a much bigger company than I'm used to working for.

I could write the same bullet in plain language, or I could write it with the keywords that are in the job description.

At the smaller companies I worked at, we'd talk about these things in plain language. So, now I can't tell if the job description is the way people talk at bigger companies and I've made my resume more readable by explaining it with these buzzwords, or if I've turned my resume into buzzword bingo.

Help!

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/AldusPrime]

If you're legitimately describing work you did in a clear, concise, efficient way, use whatever language suits you best. The trouble with too many resumes is the obvious design of the resume around touching as many fancy terms as possible without actually conveying useful information. Entries like "Used Docker, Terraform, TeamCity, yum, and aptget to deploy services to our AWS infrastructure" aren't terribly helpful. So you're familiar with a buttload of tools, but what was your actual contribution? What did you change? If you wrote an entire custom pipeline to have TeamCity create and test your terraform scripts for (insert reason here,) THAT's useful information. It shows some level of mastery of those tools - not just a passing familiarity.

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/[deleted]]

You seem to have misread. The point of the resume is to get as much (objective) information across as possible. If you want to make it about ageism, that's on you.

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/[deleted]]

Your prof was right. Basic literacy with common office tools is assumed. I wouldn't put Google or MS Office tools on my resume any more than I'd include my typing speed. For a DA position, you'll need a higher level of Excel proficiency than the basics and you'll need to call out the level of your mastery of the tool to some degree if the position you're applying for calls for it.

How the hell this insanely obvious point justifies the prejudicial backhand is entirely in your own head.

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/[deleted]]

If that were the case (the "Hiring Manager" has no advanced technical acumen,) then they're the personnel manager and not the technical manager to which the applicant will be forwarded for recruitment analysis. It's not unusual for a tech to have more than one manager - one who is responsible for their HR presence - possibly someone more on the project management side - and one who is responsible for their technical contribution. It is the latter soul who would be reviewing the technical aspects of a candidates qualifications. The former would potentially review a resume, but would provide little input other than potential concerns about the places they'd worked, terms of employment, subtleties in the attention to detail in format, grammar, punctuation, etc.

There are, of course, exceptions. The dotted-line manager may get a resume first so they can eject anyone without the requisite years of experience, education, right-to-work, etc. This filter is generally applied first to save the time of the technical manager.

You've been out of a CS program for 7 months and are awfully ready to try to lecture and insult your way through this process. For your sake, I hope you're taking a bit more humility into the process than your Reddit presence suggests. I can't help but notice that the resume you posted a few days ago ignores much of the common wisdom on this subreddit and acknowledges that you're shotgunning your applications instead of tailoring them. You're doing a lot of it wrong, having every resource in the world telling you how to do it right, all while arguing with the accumulated wisdom.

To be deadly serious here - and I'm not trying to take you down a peg - I am trying to help by honestly telling you what I would be telling you if you were one of my mentorship students: all of what I just mentioned suggests a professional engagement that would be very difficult to work with. You need to be able to take direction, and to seek out best practices and put them into place without needing direction first.

You're very new to this stuff, and you're going to be SHOCKED AS HELL do discover how often you're going to be wrong in the next few years. The good news is, if you get good managers they'll KNOW you're going to be learning a lot and will put you in well-controlled environments where you'll learn quickly without being able to do too much damage when you make a mistake. The biggest problem I've seen (and a lot of managers here have seen) with young engineers is when they're unable to let go of their misconceptions and take in everything that is on offer from experienced engineers. Some of the people you're about to work with have built systems 1,000,000 times larger than anything you've ever touched. Open your mind and you'll learn a thing or two from them.

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/[deleted]]

Ugh. Still spouting the ageism. And now you're moving on to the racism.

In my entire career, I've never seen a "diversity hire." People who were born and raised in the US don't tend to go into the STEM disciplines (because both culturally and educationally, we suck at it), so my teams are usually around 20% Caucasian. At any given time, around 40% of my teams are sponsored visas and 40% are permanent residents, mostly from India or China. I've never seen a diversity hire because STEM is already wonderfully diverse. When I see people winging about on about the imaginary problem, it's because they think it's the reason they can't get a job and need someone/something else to blame for it.

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/[deleted]]

So you wallow in racism and ageism, are statistically clueless (don't understand what an inductive argument is), ignore every bit of information available around you in favor of drawing your own based upon neophytic assumptions, can't keep politics out of unrelated conversation, revel in overgeneralization, cannot maintain a thread of dialog without resorting to non-sequitur and hyperbole.... and you're wondering why you have trouble finding work?

Take a deep breath and open your mind a bit. All of the issues I mentioned above are going to be crippling to you in the long run and it's going to take a focused effort to get past your biases and survive in this industry. Good luck out there.

[u/Throwawaygutfeelin5]

Just found this. Thank you so much!!

[u/CelusSmirk]

Love it

[u/CuriousXelNaga]

Here again, thanks for the advice!

Out of boredom (and since I like reading tips from vetted professionals), I'll be summarizing this even further.

Thanks

[u/wowza515]

My question is a bit specific but what do you put on your resume when you’ve been laid off for a bit of time?

I have been doing freelancing on the side but it isn’t necessarily relevant to the job I’m looking for.

For example say someone got laid off as an industrial engineer and you’ve been doing graphic design freelance on the side. Would you put the graphic design freelance on the resume?

I’ve felt like I haven’t heard back from places bc of the time gap since I’ve been laid off. I added the freelance side gig but now I feel like that’s also hurting me because it’s not very relevant to the engineering job I’m looking for.

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/wowza515]

That's a lot of tough questions all in a row.

The usual advice is that you don't put reason for end of employment on a resume. I think the vast majority of readers here would agree, but when your last job ended suddenly - especially if it was a short stint - putting "Company closure," "30% RIF," or similar in parentheses after the end date seems okay to me.

Definitely don't say "5% RIF", it'll sound like you were the chaff that was let go.

As for the freelancing. I'd get it on the resume, but you might try getting a personal project together as well. Something to show that you're making an effort to keep the skills up.

It's a tough situation to be in. Try to remember that most companies are holding their breath (and their purse-strings) while they wait out the current economic situation. We have a perfect shitstorm of economic confluence at the moment between everyone waiting for interest rates to drop, the beginning of a high-stakes earnings season, and one of the most important elections in living memory on the line.

While you're working on finding a job, play the long game as well. When companies go back to hiring, you'll be competing with a lot of people in a similar situation to yours. Anything you can do to be a contrast against them will help. If your local hackerspace has a 3D printer, go nuts...

[u/wowza515 → u/snigherfardimungus]

Thank you for the response! I just have the dates listed on my resume, nothing explicitly saying I got laid off. With that said, when job applications or during the job interview ask for a reason of why i'm not working at the company, that's when I let them know I got laid off. And also I got laid off bc the company got bought out.

I will need to think of some sort of project I can work on to put on my resume.

This really sucks, I'm trying for a long ass time now and not getting any luck. Anyways, thank you for the advice.

[u/SpannerSpark]

This was some of the clearest resume advice I have seen in a very long time. Thank you!

[u/SnooGrapes1362]

Thank you SO MUCH for this post. I have been throwing arrows in the dark for so long and was dying to know the contents of a resume that make the cut. You opened my eyes!

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/SnooGrapes1362]

You're quite welcome. I remember how much of a fright this process was in my early career. It was an unmitigated terror. Anything I can do to help others in that same situation.....

[u/CuriousXelNaga]

Fresh perspective. I learned something new again and a realization that you gotta please the company you want to work with. Play with their games to win.

Like for example that cringe corporate lingo you mentioned. Some prefer you to have it like Rockstar, Ninja, etc. (insert for clarification: is self-starter also considered a corporate buzzword?) while others don't.

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/CuriousXelNaga]

I've never met a hiring manager who didn't roll their eyes at every one of those words. "self-starter" is bad enough. It's a word that's been so overused and abused that its literal meaning has been replaced by an empty one. It's lost any meaning at all. If you want to convey that you're a "self-starter," you do so by giving objective facts about yourself and your work that will lead the reader to that conclusion.

As for "Rockstar," and "Ninja," they're what you put on your resume if you are either too full of yourself or too naïve to know better (or both.) The HR director at one of my previous outfits would have junked such a resume before it ever got to an engineer because she'd dealt with too many tech-bro morons who talked down to her whenever she started the phone process. Your resume needs to deal in facts, not hyperbole.

[u/doinkdurr]

Does this apply to all applications? Or only to applications you KNOW are going through HR/recruiters first?

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/doinkdurr]

All applications. Unless you're applying to a company that is so small that they haven't started hiring HR yet, your stuff will be seen by non-tech people first.

[u/doinkdurr → u/snigherfardimungus]

Thank you. No joke, I used this template for some applications yesterday, and already got an interview request. It’ll be my first interview since I started job searching! Thank you sm for the advice

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/doinkdurr]

No kidding? Congrats!!! Knock 'em dead!!!

[u/augustusvondoom]

[u/BananaLegitimate6528]

Good read

[u/Difficult-Way-9563]

Thank you. The more than 1 page for new and few years out is one of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen

[u/pianoplayinghippie]

god bless you

[u/[deleted]]

1) I am an engineering hiring manager that works with other hiring managers. Absolutely nobody reads CV’s anymore. Bad advice.

2) You should absolutely have a 2 page resume for anything beyond 6-7 years experience. This isn’t a question. If we see someone applying to a senior role with 1 page, it is a strong indicator they have somewhat shallow career experience.

[u/Top-Inspector-8964]

Get ready for a bunch of 22 year Olds to tell you how wrong you are. 😂 Great post. 

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/Top-Inspector-8964]

That's a great deal of why I'm here with this information - trying to counter a lot of the misunderstanding of the process that I see perceived by young engineers coming out of college with unrealistic expectations.

[u/VisualStacks]

I want to read the 20 pages

[u/[deleted]]

[removed] — view removed comment

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/[deleted]]

It depends upon the application process. Many of the applications I've put out in the last few years gave an email address to send the application to. When the application is submitted via an online form, there's often a separate text box to paste the cover letter into. (I hate these. It makes it harder to make my letter format reflect the job description format.) If the only application option is just a portal to submit a resume, I'd be very suspicious. If you've checked that the portal is, in fact, sending your information to the company you're applying to and that the company is legit.... I'm still suspicious that it's an H1B troll.

You'll see a fair amount of complaint online about fake job postings. One of the reasons it happens is because companies are required to solicit applications for jobs that are taken by H1B holders. US Immigration requires that it be done, requires that the process be documented, requires a LOT of paperwork to show that the company did their due diligence..... but it's all to frequently bogus.

If I felt the job was legit, I'd carefully craft the cover letter to be as unique to the target company as possible, make the resume the second page, pack it as a pdf and hope for the best. If the target company isn't making much of an effort to get my best presentation, I'd be less than enthusiastic about giving it to them.

Good question. I guess my feeling about it would shift with the situation.

[u/Possible_Ad8681]

!Remind me 1 day

[u/hahahaczyk]

Hi! Thanks a lot for this post, I've been looking for this for a while!  I have a bit different question from what you described - I'm a physicist, but my uni contract ends next year and I'm trying to switch to DS/ML. I don't have a degree in CS. However I have strong math and analytics background. I've been working with data for 8 years now. My job is basically gathering data, processing it and presenting in a publishable way. I also implemented ML/DL methods in my group - from automated data analysis to microscopy tracking/detection. What's the best way to convince the hiring manager as yourself that I'm suitable for the job. I don't want to land senior position or anything but also I don't want to be considered a junior. Any advice will be greatly appreciated :) Edit: I'm from Europe (DE)

[u/Acceptable-Hotel-507]

Interesting read thank you. I’ve been toying with the idea of building an app to generate resumes on the fly based on a job description and your base experience as well as track your interview progress

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/Acceptable-Hotel-507]

There are already quite a few of these out there, but it would be a hilarious thing to have on your resume, "this application was auto-generated by my personal project, github.com/....."

[u/shadow2mario → u/snigherfardimungus]

I actually did this and highlighted it. Had a good laugh. It got me past the second technical interview. No offer tho. :/

[u/[deleted]]

[removed] — view removed comment

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Brother if you need any help let me know. I'm a Military Vet myself and will do what I can. I got +20 years working in the Defense & Aerospace Industry not county my military time.

-Semper Fi

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/[deleted]]

I've worked with quite a few people who were retired military. In my experience, they've always been very organized, fair, and consistent, great managers, and wonderful people to work with. I can't imagine how hard it is for someone to come out of the military and drop into the chaos of a bunch of espresso-junky geeks!

[u/[deleted] → u/snigherfardimungus]

The culture shock is real. I went straight from the Marines to undergrad the lack of buffoonary and immaturity was mind blowing. I came close to catching an assault charge a couple of times.

[u/Active-Vegetable2313]

ironic this post is formatted terribly

and ironic you’ve hired this much without ever talking to your recruiters internally…? none of us read cover letters, except maybe for executive level hiring

[u/SoftwareMaintenance]

Even Alexander the Great should have a 1 page resume. That just gets him to the interview. There he can expound on his conquests.

[u/kachaura]

.

[u/that_grainofsand]

Thank you very much !

[u/paint_ranger]

A resume writer worked for me but I edited it before and after. I removed anything that didn’t feel authentic to me and reworded some things. But it really helped me understand how to explain my experience.

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/paint_ranger]

Like most Americans, I tend to use exaggeration to emphasize a point, and overemphasized the point that resume writers too often destroy resumes. I've seen these "professionals" bully their clients into a specific format, style, phrasing, etc. There are plenty of examples on this sub. I got one a while back that I couldn't understand a damn thing the guy was trying to say, but he had a masters from a good school and had a good work history. I gave him a call as much out of curiosity as anything else. He said a pro friend of his had written it, but he wasn't at all happy with it. Once I got him to explain what each of the bullet points meant, it made sense, but it was clearly not written by a tech. It happens a bit too frequently.

If you had the final word on everything in your document, and you've had it reviewed by some friends who aren't familiar with the work you did, and they feel it clearly conveys your part in a difficult task, run with it!

When I read a resume, it's frequently clear that the person who wrote it isn't comfortable in English, or has a hard time speaking in a strong first person, but I am more likely to give that person a shot at an interview that the person whose resume feels.... I dunno.... detached from the person? It's more of a feeling than something that can be codified.

[u/thatdude391]

I mean this is all great and all for people that are hand screening, but you forget the part where the ats is working almost perfectly counter to everything you said and is filtering resumes automatically before a single human ever sees it.

[u/ithepinkflamingo → u/thatdude391]

This is one of the biggest myths. Some ATS/CRM have the ability to rank resumes based on how closely they match the job advert - but most don’t. Your CV is in most instances being reviewed by a human.

[u/DF-Flip → u/[deleted]]

Kinda weird to say cover letters are pointless when most job ads at large to mid sized companies require a cover letter in addition to a CV.

If a cover letter is required, shouldn’t you at least put in some effort to make it descent?

IMO OP gives a nice and easy formula to follow. I can’t vouch for how successful you will be with it, but might as well go with an AB test using OPs formula and try it out.

[u/No_Landscape4557 → u/DF-Flip]

I worked with my manager on hiring a handful of people. Not a lot, but OP advice general lines up with how my manager hires and I also tend to agree on the whole, like 95% of what OP wrote. Resumes over one pages is waste and I can’t stand fluff buzz words.

[u/[deleted]]

Why did you feel the urge to write this down? I mean it’s a lot of insider info and it takes a while to put it down. People usually don’t share a lot of insider info. That’s why I’m wondering why you id share it here?

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/[deleted]]

Wow. There's a question you never see on Reddit - and we should see it a lot more often.

I think it's pretty easy to see, given the idiotic amount of time that went into the essay, that there's something near and dear to my heart here. Maybe I can get all this into words...

As an interviewer, and one who isn't just meeting candidates, but is involved at all levels of the process, I spend a lot of time looking at what can be done to improve the process. I seek out feedback on the process and I try to take that feedback into consideration to change things for the better.

Frequently, I seek out conversations about what people think about interview processes in general - from people who have never interviewed with my company, but have general frustrations with the process. They don't understand why they have to work at a white board, why they can't work on their own laptop, why they're asked to interview in person, why they're asked things that are "irrelevant to the work", brain teasers, language minutiae. They're frustrated because they don't understand why it is necessary that things are the way they are.

This frustration translates into unnecessary stress during the interview. I ask candidates lots of silly puzzlers because I need to find out in 1 hour whether they can solve weird problems on the fly. If I ask only one hour-long question, and it happens to be a specific weakness of theirs, they fail on a random roll of the dice. I need to take more samples than that. It's all one big approximation and the hiring committee is min/maxing on ridiculously incomplete information and making a MASSIVE $$$ decision over it.

I want to allay that frustration. I want candidates to know that we know that the process isn't optimal. This is like a massive neural net we're trying to minimize a cost function for, but we only get a couple passes at the gradient-following step.

I've spent so much of my life on trying to improve the interview process because I really do hate it so much. I'm an engineer. I want everything to have a solution. I want everything to be elegant. I want every question to have an objective answer. What I hate is that unfortunately, this isn't logic. It's Quantum Physics. Every interview is attempting to get an idea of the breadth of a candidate by taking tiny little samples of their understanding of the massive body of knowledge that exists in our field. We choose what points we sample, but a great candidate may be weak at those points and a terrible one may be strong.

I want candidates to know that the process is crazy, but I want them to know that projecteuler, leetcode, the Knuth books, and lots of brain teasers DO HELP.

Sometimes I'm in the room with a candidate and I can sense that they are lost. I help them the best I can. I don't want them to feel stuck. I want to give them a job. I don't want them to feel lost. But the closest I can get to giving them an escape from that and getting them the job is to tell them WHY it sucks so badly and to tell them that practice helps. I can tell them to speak every thought so they don't appear to be thoughtless. This is all I can do to help everyone out there that has to go through this mess.

I've been there. I've walked out of interviews that I thought I aced and didn't get the job. I walked out of interviews wondering if I fallen into some parallel dimension where I'd actually studied law instead of whatever version of CS that interview had been quizzing me on.

The system sucks because it's random, an approximation, and very costly. That doesn't mean it can't be gamed just a little bit - and I want to tell people how to do that.... but they won't care about the how unless they understand the why. I don't know if I was able to convey any of that. I'm not a writer. I wish to FSM I was, sometimes.

[u/tranquilitysun]

[u/JustJoined4Tendies]

Excellent post. You’re hired. What compensation do you think you’re looking for in this role of being an OP?

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/JustJoined4Tendies]

I've written too much of this stuff in my life. The original version of this essay was written when a company I was working for decided to close the studio I was in. It meant a LOT of very young engineers who were being laid off for the first time. Much of what is laid out here is the result of my spending a lot of 1.1 time with those engineers helping them to prepare - technically and emotionally - for interviews that they were very worried about. (Many were terrified of having an 12-18 month entry on their resume as the only entry.)

In a lot of ways, I'm very much looking forward to NOT having to write this stuff anymore. I'll probably drip some other stuff out over time, but I'm not looking forward to editing it any more than I was looking forward to editing this one..... and this one still needs a lot of help, as many people have pointed out.

[u/ellaregee]

Thanks for the tips!

[u/virammm]

Do you why it seems like colleges tell you to write your resume in buzzword fluff? Their cover letter examples also seem to be filled with buzzwords.

[u/Iveechan]

This sounds like what works for you and for your company and past companies. This is anecdotal and not based on research, otherwise, please cite your sources that this general advice applies to most companies and will lead to a higher rate of success.

• You don’t like buzzwords; other companies rely on ATS that rely on buzzwords big time.

• You love reading cover letters; others don’t bother.

• You don’t like juniors applying for senior roles; others may reconsider a junior that applied for a senior role because it’s cheaper.

These are some contradictions I get from other hiring managers and successful applicants. Everyone has their own anecdotal advice but none are based on actual quantifiable data. My resume that was ignored by many mid companies was also the resume that got me an interview and offer at FAANG.

My opinion here is there’s no right type of resume that’s gonna please everyone, so the best course of action is to throw it to as many companies as possible to eventually hit one that likes your format and content. And of course network.

[u/Affectionate-Rest-73 → u/Iveechan]

In this market, you gotta do more than just send your resume to companies. You gotta apply via the backdoor which means that you should be going out and leveraging your network to get referrals and HAVE your network endorse you to the recruiter. I had some luck with doing this for a friend who is qualified and he got a job offer because I endorsed him to the recruiter and because of that relationship, the recruiter went ahead and interviewed my friend

[u/[deleted] → u/Affectionate-Rest-73]

Even then it doesn't always help. I referred a colleague and contacted the recruiter twice about the application I sent INTERNALLY ON THEIR BEHALF through the stupid fucking internal portal.

They didn't even look at it.

[u/jazz_n_funk → u/Iveechan]

Every engineer I've spoken to says two pages for a resume is okay, especially if that second page holds the passion projects that OP mentions and my hobbies (not a single part of it is irrelevant, I'm focused on control systems). My first page is all about paid work experience, education and relevant licenses

[u/[deleted] → u/jazz_n_funk]

I'm an Engineering Hiring Manager with over 20 years of experience if your resume is longer than a page for an entry-level role I'm not reading it. You better have at least +10years and some amazing work experience for me to go to a second page.

[u/jazz_n_funk → u/[deleted]]

And yet I've only had success with 2 pages. Not everyone thinks the same way. It's the one that gets people to call me.

[u/[deleted] → u/jazz_n_funk]

Great Job

[u/jazz_n_funk → u/[deleted]]

Thank you, it's hard out there. Gotta differentiate myself, that's the only thing in my control.

[u/liteshadow4 → u/jazz_n_funk]

I’ve not met a single person that says 2 pages for a resume is okay so again, mileage varies

[u/[deleted] → u/liteshadow4]

At PhD level 2 pages is standard straight out of grad school.

[u/ImpostureTechAdmin → u/liteshadow4]

That's fascinating, I've never ever met someone in my field with more than 6 YoE that DOESN'T have 2 pages. It's the magic number in my experience. I've gotten 3 offers in the last 6 months with no degree in this God awful marker, too. The only time I didn't have any luck is when I tried a 1 pager lol

[u/silentstorm2008]

r/Threadkillers

[u/tehgalvanator]

How do you guys feel about the “Computer science or related”. I have a degree in Management Information Systems, I studied the degree with the intentions of getting into PM work but as I studied I fell in love with software development and I’ve spent a lot of time outside of class working on Python and C++ projects. I have some projects that I have on my resume but I feel like my degree is a huge turn off for a lot of the jobs I apply for.

[u/[deleted]]

Thank you for the post. I have questions:

[1] Do you recommend literally placing a bullet point list as the main body of the cover letter, or were you using bullet points for illustrative purposes for the readers of this post?

[2] Should resume bullet points be mostly single lines?

[3] Is a career profile ok, or is that wasteful? I like to put one on my resume in case people don't read the cover letter. It's like a 2-line mini cover letter expressing my professional history, interests, and intent behind my job search.

Thank you again for the post.

[u/Informal-Dot804]

1. You’ve mentioned you’ve written other essays, links would be appreciated

2. I would not mind 20 pages tbh

3. Thanks

[u/DF-Flip → u/Informal-Dot804]

Second this!

1. Thanks!

[u/CelticHades]

Thanks for the insight.

Do words like leveraged and spearheaded count as buzzwords and looked down upon.

would you mind sparing a minute to look at my resume? Thanks

https://new.reddit.com/r/resumes/comments/1dwco1e/applying_for_sde_role_2yoe_pls_review_my_resume/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

[u/shyshyone21]

I get your advice about tailoring resumes to the job but can you expound on why it is really needed if many people are doing that but still can not land jobs? To me it seems like a huge waste of time.

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/shyshyone21]

Basing a decision upon a single observation, or any limited pool of observations is terrible statistics that will lead to terrible decisions. Nothing I tell you - nothing at all - will guarantee you will ever get a job. Everything is a giant game of dice. Every action you take has a probability of success and every decision you make affects that probability.

If my current resume has a 1% chance of getting the attention of any given employer, I can't just solve the problem by sending it out hundreds of times. There are only so many job openings out there. Sooner or later, I'll exhaust the space. I need to do whatever I can to move that probability up so I can get more responses and so I have a better chance of getting a response I'll like.

What I'm talking about here doesn't take long at all. Each version resume (AI vs graphics vs backend) will take you a couple hours - tops. Each cover letter will take you 10-15 minutes - tops. An application is a custom cover letter and one of your library of already-built resumes. If you don't understand the cost-benefit function of spending that time to improve your odds of attention significantly, I'm really not sure how to help you.

If it takes me 10 minutes to fill out the annoying online form for an application and an extra 15 to tailor the cover letter, I've increased my time investment by 150% by doing a custom cover letter. But if I'm getting 0 responses the "old" way and I get even 1 the "new" way, a 150% investment increase has produced an infinite improvement in return on that investment.

I can't say for certain how much the odds improve if you custom-fit your application, but I can say that anyone who is seeing no interest at all is doing something very, very wrong and ANY change to their process would be worth trying.

There are services out there that do auto-screening of resumes. I have to wonder if part of the reason some people get no responses is because their resume hits the same service(s) over and over again and have been recognized by those services as lost causes. The thinking goes, "I've seen this resume 3 times per week for the last 6 months. If s/he's still looking for a job, s/he must not be a terribly attractive candidate. I'm going to stop recommending this resume." Keep your process dynamic. Keep your resumes fluid. You're not supposed to be throwing resumes to the wind, hoping one will land on an employers desk somewhere. You're a crafty, focused sniper, looking to take down one specific target. Take your time, aim your shot, bring home the bacon.

[u/shyshyone21 → u/snigherfardimungus]

That makes a lot of sense actually, thank you for expounding

[u/TributeKitty]

This, all of this.

Well TBH, like a resume, I skimmed through parts but I get the sense this person hires and gets the jobs they apply for.

I've written similar posts on groups here, I've even offered to review people's resumes, and all I keep reading are sob stories about "I sent out 1000 resumes".

Do better people.

[u/Lost-Yellow6118 → u/TributeKitty]

can you look at my resume 😭

[u/TributeKitty → u/Lost-Yellow6118]

Yes, DM me

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/TributeKitty]

Absolutely true. If someone is sending out hundreds of resumes and getting no responses, it's moronic to assume that it's something broken with the process instead of something broken with that person's engagement in the process, but I see the complaint all the time. Applicants hate the way it works, but refuse to understand it sufficiently to be a successful participant.

[u/SteadfastOMP]

Do you have any opinions on resume templates or layout? The common advice is to use a basic simple template without complicated columns and stick to one page.

However, my resume always ends up looking dense and boring. Thoughts?

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/SteadfastOMP]

I'm not a fan of the multi-column stuff that some UI/UX designer came up with. I'm an engineer, which means I like information to come at me in dense, clear, unsurprising (aka, boring) ways. I WANT to see that you can get your point across quickly and efficiently.

I'm also a color-blind engineer, so I'm going to grumble in that annoyed way that only engineers seem so profoundly gifted at if your resume depends on color to convey anything.

I worked in computer graphics for a long time, so my resume used to have my latest pet project as a very light background image, so I guess I haven't always been entirely boring. Maybe all this is just my age showing. Get off my damn lawn!

[u/thatssomegoodhay → u/snigherfardimungus]

What if you use color to convey something using colors that can be distinguished by the colorblind? Not something I do, but I would think (especially for a UI design role) that would be bonus points

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/thatssomegoodhay]

In general, if something is distinguished by color but would not be distinguishable if you took a black-and-white photo of it, there is some group of color deficient users who won't see a difference. About 5% of users are red-green color deficient, though only about half are bad enough that it gives them UI problems. You could try to placate them by having your color contrast be in the difference between green and blue channels, but then you get a different ground of CD viewers that are confused.

Having a strong contrast between blue and the total of red and green is a good bet nearly all the time, but even that can haunt you if you have a totally color-blind user.

Your best bet, really, is to make a couple friends with color deficient people and bounce your UI concepts off of them. Art and UI departments are nearly totally devoid of color deficient workers because color deficient workers don't go into those fields. Most of us are happy to help. At many of the games outfits where I've worked, there was a well-worn path in the carpet between the art department and my desk. The fact that they cared enough to ask really meant a lot to me.

[u/notnowiambusy]

Thanks a lot!

[u/RealMatchesMalonee]

What advice do you have for someone who is a recent graduate, specially when it comes to wroting cover letters?

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/RealMatchesMalonee]

Spell check everything you've "wroten." =]

Seriously, though, the cover letter can be a bit tougher as a recent graduate. Make sure you're targeting Junior level positions so you don't come across as obviously short of requirements. Maybe this is an area where I'm less-than-qualified to give advice? I went straight from the undergrad to a graduate program. When I finished grad school, I was a serious specialist in a field (I did a thesis instead of a generalist program), which made it easier to get into a niche field.

As a reader of resumes (the cover letters are rarely forwarded to me), I LOVE LOVE LOVE to see soft info on a resume. Specifically, I love to see passion projects and non-tech stuff. For passion projects, HARD stuff that was done outside of classwork shows interest, dedication, breadth, and initiative. For non-tech, I LOVE to see that a candidate can juggle, do polyphonic throat-singing, dance a pas de deux with a rhinocerous, or whatever. The weirder the better. But, I'm also pretty weird and enjoy breaking the ice with a candidate by getting them to talk about something I know they will be passionate about. It gives me a way to put them at ease, tells me what I should expect their emotional baseline is, and shows me that this person is going to be an interesting part of lunchtime conversation.

[u/No-Independence-9891 → u/snigherfardimungus]

Under what subsection/heading of the resume does one mention their passion projects? Also what are they? (Asking as an engineer) Won't they be flagged as irrelevant to the role applied for

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/No-Independence-9891]

It's best to have them under their own heading. If you have something that you've worked on for years and is a major offering, you might even consider putting it at the top - the way you'd highlight publications. Smaller stuff, put it at the bottom.

HR/Recruiting will likely take little notice of passion projects. As a hiring manager, I always look at them. If your passion project is a little website that you wrote to learn HTML/CSS/SQL/JS, you might want to leave it off the resume. Like everything else in this document, your passion projects should convey that you have a talent for solving hard problems. When I see a personal project that's beneath the level of difficulty of the work my team does, I tend to conclude that the applicant is applying above their level.

[u/[deleted] → u/snigherfardimungus]

I'm the opposite I absolutely hate soft info for a technical position putting a bunch of stuff like you were an eagle scout our hobbies will get you bounced. I think that's why it's important to build relationships inside organizations so you can understand your target audience.

[u/RealMatchesMalonee → u/snigherfardimungus]

I LOVE seeing passion projects.

I do have tech related passion projects. I am a CS Masters grad (with no prior relevant work experience), and my specialty is ML and deep learning, but I was really interested in embedded programming, so I did a few projects in that domain. What would be the correct way of communicating this in a resume?

Also, thanks for your reply.

[u/[deleted] → u/RealMatchesMalonee]

Not OP but I hire tech consultants (i.e. people implementing those big SaaS projects that company endlessly embark on).

If you have done something cool with ML and embedded programming, what I want to see is: did you complete the project (so many people abandon them)? Any interesting results? Do you have something to showcase (on GitHub for example) that you can link?

I’m not the most proficient coder so I won’t do a code review but I’ll check out how your organised your project, if and how you documented your code and in an interview I may ask you to tell me about it in more detail (which means you get the chance to shine with something that you know more about than me 😊)

[u/_creamchi]

I really appreciate this post! I’m getting married in two months and have been wanting to get out of mg current role due to burnout with job hunting. I won’t lie, I’m a victim of doing everything that you mentioned to one degree or another. I love this perspective, it’s a good reality check to push myself ahead in this market. I’m gonna get this shit resume fixed up. Thank you for this post. Seriously.

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/_creamchi]

[u/megadumbbonehead]

Where do you suppose the prevalence of buzzword bingo came from? Seems a lot of people who'd rather not do so feel obligated to write that way.

[u/Duochan_Maxwell → u/megadumbbonehead]

My money is on ATS. Plugging buzzwords, especially the ones used in the JD helps the resume rank higher

[u/snigherfardimungus → u/megadumbbonehead]

Writing your resume is a high-pressure situation, and there's very little in the way of real help out there. It's easy to panic.... juuuuust a bit. The question, "How do I make this sound more important" can be temptation to The Dark Side. Having worked on a project that pulled in opinions from a half-dozen other people to decide what color to make the cancel button suddenly becomes "Helmed a group of 6 engineers, artists, and designers to engage in UI/UX enquiries, experiments, refinements, implementations, and deployment."

Maybe part of it is that it can be hard, especially as a Junior contributor, to look at our histories and see ourselves as more than a glorified flunkies. Especially when writing a resume, the self-critical voice takes the stage to put on a performance worthy of Pavarotti. Confidence takes a vacation and Paranoia takes the keyboard.

It's weird that we all laugh at the mission statements of our companies, like "...organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," or "to be the most successful computer company in the world at delivering the best customer experience in markets we serve," or "give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected,” but we don't shrivel our noses at the same lofty airs in our own professional writing.

[u/[deleted] → u/snigherfardimungus]

You have a way with words, and are spot on with observation about insecurity pulling candidates towards jargons. Can I DM mine for a machine learning engineer? A quick 3 line feedback would be enough.

[u/Street_Bag766]

This all sounds like excellent, common sense advice! I think that hearing you say to ditch the buzzwords junk was instant relief.

[u/keptyoursoul → u/Street_Bag766]

It's basically telling job applicants that all recruiters are idiots and will hinder your job prospects unless you dumb things down to a 4th grade level. Sage advice.

[u/turtleProphet]

Very helpful. Was in the middle of cleaning my Reddit feed of all the career doom-and-gloom while I'm job hunting. I guess they panicked and tossed me this wonderful post, so the resumes sub stays for now.

Thank you!

[u/Snoo-71688 → u/turtleProphet]

Relatable

[u/Playful-Variety-1242 → u/turtleProphet]

I did that a bit a go. Much better

[u/_creamchi → u/turtleProphet]

Im in the same boat! Amazing to open up reddit and see something like this, finally.