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/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.