I read a lot of resumes. Honestly, the number of quirky over-designed resumes I see is probably 1 in 50.
The vast majority of people do submit clearly organized resumes based on a template they found.
The reason those quirky over-designed resumes get shared on HN or other social media is because they’re different, not because they’re common.
Occasionally a recruiter will ask/demand I give it to them in MS Word - I've learned it's always a bad idea to give recruiter a resume in an easily editable format.
They usually strip the content from it and drop it into a container resume that has their details so that they get credit from the hire I assume. lol. That being said, whatever the poster was doing to stop the resume from being edited is moot. They will just copy the content from the PDF and paste it into a new one.
"It says on your resume you have extensive experience in X."
"I do not."
They also have a thing for stripping your name and contact details out and pasting their ugly letterhead over the top. Which I suppose they could still do with a PDF if they have Acrobat Pro.
This makes some amount of sense because they want to avoid the company bypassing the recruiter and their commission. I was once hired like this (although I didn't know it until much later, when the owner told me). I think it's a realistic and reasonable fear.
I have a "redacted" version of my CV for this purpose which removes the personal information, but I can't recall I ever actually used it since I haven't really used recruiters for a decade.
But I'm guessing that's your point, right? Because the hiring manager should notice, and the interview process should screen for it, so this must be a symptom of much larger scale dysfunction in the tech recruiting/hiring space.
"You mean FOOlang? Yeah, a little."
"And what jobs did you have when you did that?"
"Uh, I learned a little about FOOlang in the job I had from 2010-2012, and then it came up again in the job in 2015."
"Thanks! I think I'll have something for you tomorrow."
And then the recruiter edits "Skills" to include six years of the still-misheard FOOLAND.
Everything else is worse.
Oh yes. As the candidate this is also great when the interviewer says something like “It says here you’ve worked with x” and you go “I’m fairly certain that that wasn’t on there when I submitted the resume (to the recruiter), let me see that” and it turns out like the OP said, extra skill added in a different font.
I have no idea how hard it is to get around that, but probably too hard for most headhunters.
So enlighten me, since I don't use Word much: if you mark your resume "Final" and a headhunter wants to "improve" it, what do they need to do?
In some pdf readers there is an option "respect limitations"… by disabling it you can print even when print is disallowed and so on. I guess it's the same with word documents.
I was hoping I'd have to supply a password to edit it, which would be a somewhat reasonable level of security. But no; you just click "edit anyway." Duh.
The best you can do is a digital signature[1], which proves that the document has not been tampered with. Of course, it's up to the recipient to ask for a signed document and to actually check if the signature is still present and accurate upon receipt. Otherwise, it's very trivial for a third-party to remove the signature and add their own edits.
[1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/add-or-remove-a-di...
I actually got an interview - I never followed up, but I thought maybe they had a security policy against opening PDFs or something.
"Can you send it to me as a Word file?"-style recruiters have always been correlated with a poor experience for me.
When it does, you have trouble fitting it all on 1-2 page. You quickly go to text only, and organize things accordingly. When you lack experience, you try to make things look like an infographic so as to fill space with trivial information.
What's wrong with saying, "May I draw your attention to my experience? They have something to say."
It's a real skill, I tell you.
And even then, I would daresay that those are applied and therefore lesser. If you want to be able to expand one word into one entire paper, you need to go deep into academia.
My resume, and the resumes I've seen aren't too far away from this format. More bullet points and a bit more detail than this, I guess. But otherwise pretty similar
It's actually easier - you just tag on whatever you do every one in awhile. "Normal" resumes are like ads for you, and the positive/negative usefulness of your resume is more about your ability to produce compelling bullshit for an audience, miss the mark, or land in the middle of the bell curve.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Resume_(United_States)
Over the years my CV has become super dense with text, not because I have more experience to list but because I've been told repeatedly to list all the languages I've used and details of the projects I've worked on.
The guy leading it was spectacularly useless from the get-go, training us in how to use word in the most wonderfully terrible way, one particular nugget i remember him coming out with was:
'bold is particularly good for standing out, in fact I would even go as far as putting the entire document in bold'
I asked him about all caps, but stopped short of asking him if i should sprinkle it with glitter for fear i would 'fail' in his assesment of me and cut my benfits.
Jeeeeeebus. That sounds like something right out of an episode of BOFH!
What a muppet. Clearly you should use the Header Font.
Found a picture of it for reference, plus or minus minor tweaks depending on the company: https://external-preview.redd.it/Sfx4gvcEZXKXr8cxBseyyW2ycGP...
Certainly far above average chops for an entry level applicant so I don't know what every employer's problem was. Much harder world for junior developers than anyone would make you think if even I had that much trouble. I was legitimately scared I had no future outside of fast food for a while there.
- Half of your CV is empty space
- Dates are formatted really badly, no one would be able to get a good grasp on your project and work timeline quickly
- You have a game project that spans several years, and you sum it up into one sentence. Why are you doing that? It's one of your main selling points, and you don't expand enough on it.
- The prioritization is not sound. I'm reading about your proficiency with vim (pretty much irrelevant) before I even know your work history.
- You mention Linux administration. That's pretty broad. You should specify more. Did you deal with network config? systemd? FUSE?
Overall your resume looks lackluster, unprofessional and bare-minimum. It's been more than 7 years now, and you still see nothing wrong with it? Sorry if that sounds harsh, but I'm doing you a favor by giving you a reality check.
Half is empty - just graduated, can't expect that much stuff to put there.
Maybe I should have expanded more on the game but I was getting the impression nobody cared that much about personal projects.
The very first two things you do with a resume are match up the list of technical skills with the list of tech in your position requirements, and check the education requirement. That's why those two go at the top.
I'd dealt with a lot of config issues running Debian on various hardware in high school as well as installing it, dealing with apt, understanding chron, a lot of basic things. I don't think systemd was much of a thing yet.
I still fundamentally disagree that the resume is bad. Again, I'd hire this person, and I'm saying that as someone who's done interviews and hired people now.
That is what you do. The very first thing I check is where they worked before and how they describe what they did there.
In the case of juniors, that’s replaced with looking at basically anything they did and how they describe it.
By the time the CV gets to my desk the keyword matching is already done.
While the resume isn’t necessarily bad, it screams to me that the candidate didn’t even bother to look at, or didn’t care how a CV is normally structured/laid out before handing theirs in.
It’s not necessarily bad, but when looking through a bunch of them you don’t really want to adjust your mental parsing model for every resume, so barring anything else about it that stands out, you just mentally dismiss it.
To be fair, this is something I’ve seen more from people just leaving school.
Education on the top is a waste of most anybody's time, let it be on the top only if you have no work experience (and if that's the case, yikes).
I don't care about language/skillset checklists, because that's not what I hire for. Especially with no indication of relative strength or accomplishments with them - if I need a specific skill I'll happily scroll to see if it's there or not, but I want to see an actual story about this person's career and interests, not a set of "fill in the blank" stuff that every graduate has:
* woo high school and a college degree great, that's not something we're going to talk about
* version control, editors, etc are table stakes
Why is all of the experience effectively unscanable (by eye)? Prose-first, no easy way to separate by date, by project, or position held?
A resume doesn't have to be a thesis in print design, but I think you'd do well to consider the feedback you're receiving in this thread and that you alluded to receiving before - this resume isn't advertising anything to me and it's work for me to construct a coherent story about why this candidate is a strong fit for hiring.
... are you kidding with these two sentences side by side? you just answered your own question, ask about the email process! and how is that outline of what I did even that vague? and everyone says to list accomplishments that benefitted the company instead of responsibilities, which this is a perfect example of.
I'll hopefully never have to write a resume again but if I have to I'll just pay an expert. The way I instinctively read and understand a document by actually reading it and caring about the content first is just too mismatched from the average neurotypical's way of looking at the world for me to empathize.
> and everyone says to list accomplishments that benefitted the company instead of responsibilities, which this is a perfect example of.
It's not perfect, it's nearly worthless. A perfect example would have at the very least some hint of the business value and the nature of the problem at hand.
> The way I instinctively read and understand a document by actually reading it and caring about the content first is just too mismatched from the average neurotypical's way of looking at the world for me to empathize.
This is pretty patronizing. I'm actually suggesting that the content of the resume you provided is itself lacking. The issue is not that "oh no the neurotypicals don't want to read my resume", the issue is that this resume's content has room to improve, but you think that can't possibly be the case. Yeah, you're lacking empathy (or at the very least pretty defensive), but it's because we WANT content, not because we're looking for surface-level stuff. In fact most of the feedback has actually been that this resume is TOO surface-level (list of skills? don't care, vague bullet points? don't care), and you're defending the superficiality of content, which is incoherent alongside the claim that people don't care about the substance.
All that extra detail seems trivial to me and covered well enough by the gist provided. Is this version really that much better for these details? Is it even enough detail for you yet? It feels like too much detail to me.
It was something about tax ID's and temporary merchant licenses for the state of Maryland.
Edit: An actual dramatic improvement is trivial to pull from your bait example, by the way:
"Automated a manual process for collating tax ID and temporary merchant licenses for the state of Maryland, honoring rate limiting and supporting auditing of failures. Used Python and Gmail API".
Obviously there is some precision loss in my writing because I didn't work on the project and because your description of "something about tax ID's" was ambiguous to begin with.
Could even add "saving 30 hours a week/day/whatever".
The first is like what you say - make sure you check the right boxes. OFten the first person who sees your resume is non-technical, so make it easy for them to progress you on to the next step.
The second purpose of the resume is far more important: get people interested in YOU.
Almost everyone has done interesting things, but many people are bad at communicating those things. Often people are bad at even identifying the interesting things!
For each skill/technology you want to highlight think of a situation where you solved a problem using that skill. You're aiming for a problem your interviewer will find interesting, and will want to ask you questions about. Very briefly highlight the problem and that you fixed it with SKILL, and you're done. The more specific you can be the more interesting you will appear.
Two or three of those, your employment/education history, and contact details, and you're done.
I think your resume does do this, but it should be both more prominent and more intentional.
If I was helping someone today and they showed me this resume, I'd recommend re-ordering the sections and putting a brief intro at the top serving the same purpose as a cover letter. I'd also make sure they create tailored versions for each job they apply for.
It's like fashion. Arbitrary but just having the basics understood goes such a long way professionally and socially compared to the effort expended
People like my interior decorating, I can appreciate other things that are aesthetically pleasing, and I've made my share of actual art. I just don't think I have it in me to understand whatever in the world is going through someone's mind when they're displeased with this resume. It's a missing faculty like blindness or tone deafness. When I get a resume or an email I just read it, I don't sit there and hem and haw over how many pixels the bullet point is indented or whatever it is.
This is why resumes should be abolished entirely and replaced by a standardized database you put your experience and skillset into. Anything an employer wants to know has to go in a standardized field. No discrimination can possibly occur based on your ability to format a piece of paper according to invisible, unpredictable metrics that you might have no faculty for and have no bearing on your ability to do the job.
I'd say too often what happens is that engineer minded types rebel against unwritten norms like these and derive a sense of moral superiority from being immune to them, when ironically from an engineering POV it would make more sense to just do these little things, iron the shirts, use a template, and call it a day.
I think it’s telling that you have received very valid and constructive criticism on this resume from multiple people, yet you still can’t see why this is a bad resume. You know from data and observation that in the real world this is in fact a bad resume, because it doesn’t get you interviews and offers - which is the point of a resume.
People will offer all sorts of wacky feedback about resumes when prompted, but the real issue is that recruiters just don't look at or care about resumes that much. For my last few jobs I just sent an unformatted text file as my resume, one that would make dist1ll's eyes bleed. The most recent recruiter was actually angry at me for how "unprofessional" he thought my resume was, but the decision was out of his hands.
You have to network your way into a job. Put out feelers to friends, family, friends' families, professors, professors' friends, etc. A referral will jet you past the recruiter's filters and get you a real shot at a job.
Not necessarily, but it does make it easier if you have that opportunity. Places like Tata are good for someone with no connections to get a footing.
Chances are good you're acquainted with 50+ people, and if each of them is acquainted with 20 unique people, that's 1000 people you can contact through a few weeks of hanging out and chatting
Professors often know relevant industry people in town, too
Worst case, you can hop on here or blind and ask for referrals. Some random dude cold-mailed me before and asked for a referral to my company. I chatted with him a little to make sure he wasn't completely insane, then passed his resume on to a relevant hiring manager. I forgot all about it until I noticed that a $3000 referral bonus showed up in my paycheck a few months later
I don't care for a fancy resume, but it should at least look like you spent more than 15 minutes on it, and with the reader in mind.
I’m sure thousands of competent frontendists exist but they’re drowned out by people from bootcamps who can’t even spell “bartender” properly (and I have a bartender who’s the best of the class in my team, so again, nothing is set in stone, but I was losing my time with front-endists).
No need for 5-star skills ratings, dual-colored backgrounds, unreadable fonts, and whatnot...