... when I open it up in Word, I don't want to see lots of red squiggles form misspelled words. If JavaScript is spelled three different ways, that's a problem.
The care and attention to the resume (which the candidate has time to prepare and consider) is used as a proxy for the care and attention that a potential employee will pay to the code base.
You could disable the squiggles in Word, you know.
> The care and attention to the resume (which the candidate has time to prepare and consider) is used as a proxy for the care and attention that a potential employee will pay to the code base.
It is very often used as a proxy. That doesn't mean it is an accurate proxy.
If I've got more resumes than time slots to call back on, its necessary to filter them somehow.
When the word processor that the person used is flagging things as misspelled, or grammatically incorrect - the person didn't use the tooling available.
I've had resumes where one section was indented and bulleted, and the next section was numbered rather than bulleted... or indented without bullets or numbers (just a tab - that has a line wrap go to the left margin rather than the tab stop like the bullets and numbers in the other section).
Many of the things I've seen aren't an accidental oversight but a deliberate choice in the formatting of the resume that is wrong or inconsistent with a very short glance.
I mentioned in another comment that I've seen a resume where various keywords were bolded (annoying, but common). Among others, the word "Java" was bolded. "Worked on Java microservices using Spring Boot". Ok. However, Java was also bolded in "Used NodeJS to write JavaScript backends" - "Script" was left unbolded.
The accuracy of the proxy is less of an issue when you are able to find at least the number of acceptable resumes as there are time slots for interviews.
Are people submitting resumes in Word files? Looking back at my experience with Word and its "consistency" in formatting that seems like a suboptimal idea, misspelled words or not.
Yes... though if one uses tabs, bulleted lists and the standard formatting; then it all works out well.
When tabs and spaces are mixed to try to align a non-monospace font, or right justification is done without using the proper tabstop - then it gets ugly and the formatting becomes less consistent.
However, I'll give a pass to that unless it is really clear that they didn't put any care into the formatting.
And yet, its things like bolding every instance of the word "Java" (I had one where Java in JavaScript was bolded, but not the Script). Or having "JavaScript", "Java script", and "javascript" on three consecutive lines. Or having every single word that was a technology bolded, even if it was one that wasn't applicable to the job description. Or having those words instead of bolded... be blue.
I can forgive a lot in lack of familiarity with the tool - but its the deliberate choices of formatting and deliberately overlooking things that the word processor is trying to help you fix (and it is right about) that make a resume move from the "too look at" stack to the "probably don't call back" stack.
Yes, your advice is generally good for a software engineer with less than 10y experience.
For senior ML researcher, for example, you are expected to list the many things you did and know. You still are going to be filtered on arbitrary things, but HR is expecting a thicker doc.
I use a 1 page resume as an ML engineer. I have a section dedicated to keywords called "Skills". Seems to work quite well for me and I firmly believe that a longer resume would have hurt more than it would help.
I used the term "ML researcher". I'm also talking from experience and generally agree that less is better for engineering jobs.
For research jobs it is very very common to list tons of things (papers, committee positions, awards, etc.,) and when your first filter is an HR person you ARE often going to be screened by volume (stupid as that may sound).
Sure, there are exceptions, if your resume starts with "PhD from Standford, advised by Prof. Hinton" you are probably going to be OK. Otherwise, you just want to play the game that is being played in the field, which, unfortunately, does often include the volume of work a proxy for success.
One page. Single sided. Plenty of whitespace for legibility. I want to know in 20 seconds if I want to short stack you for a quick call.