My rule of thumb is I don't write a cover letter unless I have a good reason to write one. For example, I found a mid size company through an interesting blog post and felt like that was something worth mentioning and that I thought the company seemed interesting too. It was probably as short as a tweet but I got an email and subsequently an offer very soon after. Generic cover letters are a waste of everyone's time.

> Generic cover letters are a waste of everyone's time.

"Generic cover letter" is an oxymoron. Cover letters are supposed to be individualized.

The sample cover letter in the article is quite generic & doesn't seem much tailored to a particular job description.

> The sample cover letter in the article is quite generic

Yes, the first paragraph in the cover letter is almost identical to the opening paragraphs of numerous spam emails. "You're building a great feedback organization product I think has great potential". Really? Well, ta very much; now tell us something we don't know.

While I generally think a cover letter, even if mostly generic, is a good idea as a way of at least somewhat personalizing your application, there's a lot about that one that sort of turns me off. It would be a net negative for me.

Yup, exactly. I'm in central Europe, I've never written one and no-one missed it. If a cover letter was mandatory I didn't apply. Same when I was at the other end of the hiring process, I never required a cover letter, good people are in high demand, so why make them jump through unnecessary hoops.

> good people...unnecessary hoops.

This is an excellent point. A point that plenty of hiring outfits still don't get. They're so focused on their needs and their (self) importance that they forget who "the customer" is.

I do web dev. When I see this is marketing agencies I laugh (and don't apply). If you're a marketing agency and you don't understand who "the customer" is then you've got serious problems.

The rule applies elsewhere as well. It's a relationship. If you're process says "welcome all plebes" then that's exactly what you'll get.

I think this is correct. Be mindful of how HR is likely to work at the place that hires you.

Big Co: there is some HR screener looking for keywords who hands a stack of resumes -- maybe a hundred -- to a hiring manager who has to quickly go through them and pick maybe 5-10 who will get a screen. If the screen goes well, it may go to a second screen or a full panel.

The thing to keep in mind is that interviewing bears substantial costs for the firm. You are yanking 5-6 senior people out of usually an overloaded sprint to spend an hour and then more time writing up a form, so basically 1 day of work. But you may have 300 people applying. That means if everyone got a full panel, it would take 1 year of labor to fill 1 position.

Obviously that's not possible, so the end result is going to be capricious for the person going through the process -- there's no way around that, as you can only have resources to do an indepth look at 5 out of those 300. So yes, interviewing sucks and you will often get unfairly ruled out for stupid stuff. We get it, but that's how it has to be and will continue to be as long as applying for a job is costless and open to everyone who can upload a pdf. It's just a bad equilibrium -- the more people apply per position, the more arbitrary the process becomes, which encourages more people to apply to many different positions to hedge their bets, which creates more resumes per position, etc.

For really famous firms like Microsoft or Google, they may get 1000-3000 applications per positions. Even if most of these applicants are unsuitable, they still gum up the works and add more randomness to the process.

OTOH, if it's a smaller company you don't get so many applying and they can afford to give a better look per resume, but then again it's going to depend on the job market situation. Still your odds are better.

Strangely, it's rare for the candidate to actually think about what it's like on the other side of this and take steps that make it easier to process their resume.

Stuff like: keep it to a single page, read the requirements in the job posting and include relevant experience/skills rather than a full dump of everything you did, etc. And never, ever, lie about a skill or experience. Try to make the resume easy to read for someone who has to read 100 of them per hour.

As someone on the other side of the table now I’m almost at the point where I’ll bring anyone who provides a single page CV in for interview, just because they’ve clearly put some thought into it. I’m so sick of trawling through five page CVs which contain absolutely everything apart from a reason to hire you.

The worst resume I ever got was someone who had spent a lot of time cross-referencing their work history with the technologies used there.

So under ConsultingCo, there was: 12, 13, 15, 21, 28, 34.

You were expected to flip a couple of pages to learn that 12 was JavaScript, 13 was HTML, 15 was .. and I stopped caring at that point & binned it.

Maybe there are some cases where a bibliography of publications or something like that would push up the length but I think it's a pretty good rule of thumb that two sides of a sheet of paper--which is still relevant given that people print out resumes and make notes on them--is pretty much a hard upper limit. I'd probably find one page a bit tight though if you have any amount of work history.

I'm fine with 2 pages on a sheet, and have never thrown out a resume because of its length, but for long resumes I just skim. But I disagree that you need 2 pages.

Here is a perfectly fine resume that can be half a page for a lead role or higher. Let's say this is a role for a webapp developer and the candidate has 10 years experience. With this resume, which is only half a page, you are probably way ahead of the competition. This is all the info a hiring manager needs.

   position
   Name/email address
   
   Languages: Java, Python, C++, JS

   Experience: 
   
   Foo Corp: 2017-2020. Lead Engineer to Principal Engineer. Web App developer for Foo Authentication System and other microservices. Used standard LAMP stack and then Spring Boot.

   Bar Corp: 2012-2016. Sr. Engineer to Lead Engineer. Worked on backend order fulfillment logic, developed new test infrastructure for WebApps, client side test harnesses, security test suites, and related work. 

   Baz Consulting: 2010-2012. Engineer. Worked as consultant for primarily B2B clients, primarily in Java. Delivered over 30 successful projects to spec.

   Bat Heavy Industries: 2007-2010. Associate Engineer to Engineer. Started as QA hire and migrated to development, responsible for metrics gathering app, qa infrastructure code, worked in python, java, and other languages.

   Education: B.S. Chemistry, Foo State University.

I find it so interesting that you select for that, because that example tells you virtually nothing about the person that isn't generically applicable to a large number of candidates.

Especially those with 13 years experience. Delivering 30 projects is the only item that stood out for me, but everyone with a few years can make that claim depending on what they choose to call a project.

The number of languages listed is laughably small for a 13 year candidate, but I guess they have picked out the ones they think you want to see.

From that resume, I cannot tell even one thing that the person is particularly good at, or any qualities they could bring to the company that would set them apart - other than their decision to write a short resume and avoid telling you much about themselves.

> I find it so interesting that you select for that, because that example tells you virtually nothing about the person that isn't generically applicable to a large number of candidates.

Correct, this is how all resumes work. Remember, nothing on the resume is verifiable apart from the dates and companies the candidate worked for, unless you do a phone screen or panel interview. So the resume selects the candidates suitable for the skills based interview. I know some people think the candidate needs to write "I am passionate about quality" or "I love collecting butterflies and have all of Nabokov's first editions" but those are primarily creative writing exercises that don't end up telling much that is reliable or reproducible across candidates.

> The number of languages listed is laughably small for a 13 year candidate, but I guess they have picked out the ones they think you want to see.

Correct, and one would understand that for someone with 10 years of experience it's not hard to pick up a new language, nor is language particularly important in this role. Neither is framework.

> I cannot tell even one thing that the person is particularly good at

No, you can't tell that from a resume, but you can tell what a person worked on (perhaps poorly). In this case, there is plenty of QA, webapp, and some security experience. This gives you avenues to drill down during the in person interview.

Remember, the only thing you know is true on a resume is the list of prior work experiences. Then you look for a collection of claimed skills. So when reviewing the resume you check whether the claimed skills match your needs and then drill down to verify the claims during the in person interview. That's pretty much all the info you can ever get.

I wish everyone viewed the process like this. I was job hunting a few years ago and increased my hits by roughly 50% by doing one thing: adding more color to the stupid resume.

Like, physical RGB color? (As opposed to metaphorical "color" of fleshing out your statements) That's... pretty funny, actually.

> The number of languages listed is laughably small for a 13 year candidate

Why would you expect a dev have more languages listed? Many jobs involve only 1-2 languages, so why should they have more? (Assuming you don't list languages you've used for a project once years ago, which you're unlikely to have much relevant benefit in vs learning them fresh)

When I get the 8 page resume, it usually tells me this person cannot express what is important. Quality vs quantity is missed by so many people.

I wonder if you tell prospective candidates this? If you don't, it's just another random element in the application process. How do I know you're the guy who wants a one page CV, or if you're the guy who will reject me because my CV isn't detailed enough?

Unless you can speak to the person in advance, or find out via a third party, you can't know.

There is variation, so it's a numbers game - you have to send out without knowing if you're doing the right thing in each case.

I've spoken with recruiters about this, and like hiring managers, some of them favour a short resume that says very little ("less is more"), others favour a detailed one ("your experience will impress").

However there is a consistent aspect. They pretty much all need:

- Something that fits what HR is looking for in a few seconds skimming early in the first page. Bear in mind HR rarely understands any of things they are looking for, and are easily led astray if they think you are in category X when they are looking for Y, even if you can do X and Y equally.

- Something that fits what the hiring manager is looking for in a few seconds skimming early in the first page, and doesn't look onerous to read through.

- Something that passes keyword matches.

- Depending on the company, or how you get in, something that passes an ATS's assessment of experience (not just keywords but duration working, level of things like did you do management), and doesn't get tripped up by things like column formatting.

One of the things to remember is that almost nobody will read the entire resume or CV, unless it matches what low-effort pattern matching they are doing in a quick initial skim.

There's also quite a lot of variation in whether they are looking for "exact matches" to named skills ("although you have listed CSS, Webpack, ES6, Typescript, HTML5... we're can't proceed because we're looking for someone who knows JavaScript"), or quite fuzzy ("we know any good developer can learn a new language fairly quickly, what we're looking for is evidence that you know software").

Again, you just have to guess and play a numbers game, because they rarely say what they are looking for, and they are looking for different things.

Yes, this is also my conclusion. To a great extent, it's a lottery. As a contractor (in the UK), I look for new roles every year or two on average, so I end up applying for quite a few. Most of these roles involve agencies, so the CV has to meet the arbitrary requirements of both the agency, and the end client - and these are often quite different.

It's even worse: the people initially sorting applications are usually HR contractors. They give what they thought is a good selection of resumes to the recruiters, who do further selection, maybe some contacts, and give their picks to the hiring manager.

This is an important distinction because unlike recruiters, who are usually somewhat familiar with the company business and can recognize if not technical details then experience (e.g "Oh, this guy worked for 10 years at the shop known for its high standards!"), contractors are generic clerks who have no idea what anything in the resume means. They are given some words to look for at best.

In my opinion, submitting through web portals/jobs@ emails is already a losing proposition. I can recall many cases when I've done this, got no response, then a couple years later the same company's recruiters would hound me. I'd been quite successful when I went through an internal referral or directly through a recruiter. But, if you really have no choice and go through the web then the best strategy is to stand out with anything that can catch attention of a completely non-technical person reviewing your application. A cover letter is a strong move in this case. And keyword stuffing is also important for passing the first stage.

I work for a small dev agency. Our tech lead did 10 interviews last week. In total, that's a lost day, at least.

The problem is I can't tell which companies will have an HR/recruiter vs a manager as the first filter. Almost all calls I've gotten from startups (most of which would be considered "small" companies) were via a recruiter.

I guess if I apply to an established, small/medium company that is not a startup, it's more likely to be read by a manager.

I think a rule of thumb is "by the time a company is large enough to have someone in tech doing full-time management, your application is going to pass through someone else before getting to them for a second pass of filtering."

Small, scrappy startups will have the decision-maker doing the first-pass filtering. None of those people will be called "manager".

In 25 years, I’ve never randomly spammed applicant tracking systems. My first job was based on an internship and after that I used my network of former coworkers, managers, and local external recruiters.

When you say recruiter, do you mean HR from the company or an external recruiter?

If they already know which company it is, they probably mean an internal recruiter.

When going via external recruiters, you tend to know you're talking to a recruiter before you find out which company the job is with.