
Your Résumé Won't Get You Hired - tghw
http://hicks-wright.net/blog/your-resume-wont-get-you-hired/
======
jusob
In my experience in hiring, this is the opposite: we don't get may cover
letters (if any), and never require one. There are not too many reason a
candidate wants the job: more money, bad work environment at the
previous/current company, or unemployed (or soon to be).

~~~
russell
The article is right. The cover letter gives you a chance to jump out from the
resume format and do some marketing for yourself. I accidentally did A/B
testing on my cover letter a few years back. I wasnt getting much response
with a dry cover letter, so I rewrote it with a more informal upbeat tone
adding humor and even threw in snippets of song lyrics (I kid you not).
Immediately the response doubled. One thing it did was engage the front line
screeners and HR types. If you dont get by them you dont get anywhere. It also
gave me a personality that people could remember.

~~~
webignition
I couldn't agree more.

Presenting your personality is precisely why I carefully write a friendly,
intriguing and upbeat cover letter for each and every job.

You can't present a culture fit better than by presenting your personality.

I once went to Dublin for a weekend with the sole intention of eating a
banana. I returned with a girl to whom I proposed whilst in Dublin and who has
now been my wife for over five years.

That says more about me, outside of my skill set and experience, than my CV
ever could and works wonders for making me stand out, as well as intriguing
whoever may be reading my application.

~~~
sedachv
"I once went to Dublin for a weekend with the sole intention of eating a
banana. I returned with a girl to whom I proposed whilst in Dublin and who has
now been my wife for over five years."

That is the best thing I have heard in a long time. I can't stop laughing.

------
zach
Of course not, that's why I send a complimentary desk calendar.

It has color pictures of me in various worldwide locales (thank you,
Photoshop) and notes important days, like my birthday and when HR should
schedule an interview with me.

Then there's always the inflatable sword with my name on it. Nobody can resist
an inflatable sword!

------
iigs
Counterpoint: In my experience as an interviewer (for peer positions) there's
no benefit. It's vaguely amusing to read people imagine what the position
might be like and try to spin it to sound like what they want to do, or to
hear them talk about changing the world or getting all excited about our
industry.

It seems like if you're not a principal in a business (i.e. a YC hacker)
you're a cog in a business: your primary task is to do what your boss wants
you to do. I'd rather see professionalism that results in being good at your
job (and going home at the end of the day) than hell bent on some quest to
find life satisfaction at work.

This topic has blown through a couple times in the past few weeks and there's
definitely been a lot of "YOU MUST DO THIS", "it doesn't matter", but I still
don't have a feel for how as an candidate it might help me, and I find
rationalizing my desire to do geek stuff as a passion for working at a
specific company _very_ disingenuous. If I'm finding positions on monster.com,
I'm looking because I want a different job, not because I'm passionate about
improving peoples lives with $company_brand widgets. Maybe employers that are
expecting these are getting their resumes from elsewhere?

------
alexgartrell
If you're handing your resume to an HR person, cover letters are good to
differentiate yourself from everyone else. If it's a tech person, cover
letters can be good if they talk about amazing stuff you've done that doesn't
fit into a Resume. (I want to work for your company because your line of
software is similar to many of my projects [list])

~~~
mustpax
While I agree with you about cover letters and HR people, I think most amazing
stuff should fit in a resume. I’ve definitely included relevant academic
projects in my resume and have gotten great traction from them.

Generally speaking, if it’s important and relevant to your career, and you can
express the subject in a concise bullet-point way, I say put it in.

You still have to remember to keep the resume short, but including
unconventional yet amazing stuff isn’t half bad.

------
qeorge
Computer people hate cover letters because they're redundant, and so they
annoy people like us. But this can't be stressed enough: _HR people aren't
computer people, even at software companies._

Anecdotal evidence: just last week a friend in HR at RedHat told me very
matter-of-factly, "our intranet is a wiki!" She's a sweet girl, and very smart
in her own field, but is nothing like your potential co-workers.

~~~
gecko
tghw works at Fog Creek, as do I. We're both software developers.

Here's the thing: your cover letter (hopefully) isn't redundant. If you want
to think of it in computer terms: your résumé is data; your cover letter is
the function through which to view the data. Your résumé may say that you only
have experience working with VBScript. Your cover may tell us that you do
that, but you hate it, so secretly, in your spare time, you pretend to be a
fellow named _why, and write your own languages. Conversely, your résumé may
be a shotgun approach to skills, but your cover letter sounds about as excited
about coding as I personally am about doing my taxes. In neither case is the
cover truly redundant; even if, in terms of raw data, your cover letter _is_
redundant, it tells me more about you than your résumé ever could hope to.

I'd challenge you that, if there's a redundancy, it's the opposite of what
you're positing: the résumé is for HR to tick crap off in a spreadsheet; the
cover letter is for me as a person to learn who the hell you actually are.

~~~
skorgu
Wouldn't the interview traditionally fulfill those criteria?

~~~
tghw
The problem is, interviews cost money. We fly every candidate in for a day of
interviews and put them up in a nice Manhattan hotel. And that's the cheap
part. The expensive part is taking developers' time to actually do the
interview.

So while the interview most certainly looks at those sorts of things, we try
to interview only when we're confident that a candidate has the potential to
actually get the job.

------
noelchurchill
In my experience the resume has been more of a formality than anything else.
I've always been able to get jobs by being referred by a mutual friend/work
associate.

~~~
frossie
That's all very well if you are being headhunted into a company with no formal
HR rules. We, for example, are a reasonably cool place to work at but our
paymaster is an Equal Opportunities employer. That means we have to be very
very strict about the hiring process and even in situations where we know and
have solicited an applicant, s/he _still_ has to be graded according to fair
and consistent rules like all other applicants.

The original article was correct: an employer typically asks for 6-9 things in
a job ad; some will be obvious directly from your resume (eg. "10 years
experience in C"); all others should be dealt with in a cover letter. For
example if the employer asks for "MacOS X experience" and you haven't got any
in your resume, a cover letter that says "while I do not have much direct
experience with MacOS X, I have programmed for many years on similar POSIX
compliant environments such as FreeBSD and I am confident I would quickly be
productive in the MacOS X environment".

------
pmichaud
Cover letters are really only useful when you're acquainted with the company
well enough to actually want to work with them (but not well enough to just
call up and say hi). It's more commonly just fluff:

> I want to work for Acme Corp because RocketSled 2.0 is exciting...

Blah, blah, blah. If you're hiring for acme corp, just accept the acme
resumes. If you're hiring for somewhere neat, then why not dig into your
network and make the cover letter AND the resume unnecessary?

~~~
tghw
Why would you apply to a company you didn't know well enough to want to work
at? You should have some reason you're applying to the company. Think about it
this way: if you're already an employee of the company and someone applies who
doesn't really want to work there, and HR lets them through, would you want to
work with them? I wouldn't.

But even if you can't write a good "I want to work and Foobar Inc." paragraph,
the cover letter gives you a chance to talk about all the stuff you do on the
side, to show how much you love making software.

Personally, I would much rather work for a company that hires people who love
working there than one that hires people just because they know a guy who
knows a guy.

~~~
iigs
Reasons why I'm currently looking for a new job:

1) I'm looking to change locations, half way across the USA

2) I've been in my current position for nearly five years, and am ready for a
change:

2a) In my chosen trade (being a unix sysadmin) you often get tremendous
latitude in selecting tech, tools, and tasks, but cross pollinating with the
technology stack at other companies gives you answers to questions you didn't
even know you had and makes you a better employee for it.

2b) I'm a disbeliever in the "you've got to get out by the time you're forty"
age discrimination stuff. I have, however, seen a lot of people, both young
and old, that have spent long enough in one industry that they were not
hireable for a position in mine because they'd spent so long in a single frame
of mind that they fell flat on their face after several attempts to coax them
through design/architecture questions.

 _Think about it this way: if you're already an employee of the company and
someone applies who doesn't really want to work there, and HR lets them
through, would you want to work with them? I wouldn't._

Sure, if someone actively doesn't want the position they applied for they
should have told the recruiter "thanks but no thanks", but, frankly, if I find
a job I'm interested in, the interview is _mutual_ : while you're determining
if I can reboot routers with style and grace, I'm determining if you're a
sweat shop, if my potential teammates are idiots, and if my future boss is a
jerk. In my opinion it's the employer's job to sell _me_ on why I want to work
in that industry, rather than the other way around.

~~~
Tsagadai
Ever tried dropping your age from your resume? There is no requirement to put
it on. If you get into the interview and the interviewer has an, "Oh, you're
not what we're after" moment you know why. In this country that is grounds
alone to sue so most companies will give you a decent interview, at the very
least.

~~~
iigs
Actually I'm currently in the prime of my hiring age, and it's not listed at
all, but it's very easy to infer, particularly if an individual has dated
their college history (I honestly don't recall if I did or not).

~~~
mgenzel
And if you don't 'date' it, it's a flag to the person who reads your resume
anyway, that you're old (which is why you would do that). It's tough.

------
xenophanes
bad article. talks about 7 criteria, and has lots of numbers, but doesn't tell
us what they are. lacking meat.

~~~
tedunangst
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/SortingResumes.html>

------
rokhayakebe
Same goes for contract gigs/sales/partnership inquiries. I noticed more than
60% of professionals you approach with a short (under 8 lines including
salutations), tailored email with or without a portfolio/resume will email
back and ask for more information. Throw a resume alone and you are not very
likely to capture the guy/gal's attention. Be different.

------
staunch
I just focus on phone screening really heavily. Anyone with relevant
experience on their resume gets called. Any of those that seem really good are
asked to come in. The best person is made an offer, if they decline, the
second best is made an offer. Very few "bad" candidates make it passed the
phone screen, so little time is wasted.

Works great.

~~~
trapper
I agree, it's much faster. When hiring for a developer position I usually ask
"what's the most recent scientific paper you have read" and ask them to
discuss it. Extra credit is given if it's in a different field than computer
science.

I have found this a very reliable way to weed out candidates who can talk the
talk but really are just winging it.

------
phugoid
It would be more relevant if everyone here commenting would indicate whether
they are personally involved in the hiring process, and in what role.

Otherwise, we may as well be discussing the purchase of a new car with folks
who have never and will never buy one. Their perspective must be discounted
accordingly.

I am not involved in hiring. But I sure wish the companies I apply to were
like Fog Creek; openly publishing their hiring philosophy and requirements
check-list.

------
christopherdone
I have seen my coworkers viewing applications... many were discarded outright
because of stupid spelling errors or poor grammar, or no letter at all.
Applicants whose work and homepage weren't available or were scarce lead to
the (inductive) conclusion that the applicant was crap.

My last two job interviews lead to being hired, and my approach is generally:

(1) be very picky about which company I apply to; (2) go the company's web
site to get a history, which is important for: (3) write an interesting letter
saying what you like about the company, and give attachments and links to
things that they can go take a look at, and (4) to actually provide some
critique of the work the company has done, and provide solutions. Anyone can
point out mistakes; we need someone who solves problems, like The Wolf.

Also, in reference to language skills, I like a quote by Dijkstra:

“Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's
native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.”

------
abyssknight
Yes, yes it will. The job I hold now, the interview process went as such:

* Phone interview with resource manager. "So, are you interested in working at such and such doing Coldfusion and .NET?"

* Phone interview with hiring manager. "Do you know Coldfusion and Perl? What have you worked on?"

* Had an open interview session with another part of the company. Explained this to the hiring manager. I was told I would hear something the following week.

* Offer letter arrived on Monday.

It really doesn't get much smoother than that. Not once did I have to defend
things on my resume, make up answers to crazy questions, or jump through silly
hoops. They wanted someone who could do the job, and I could. So they hired
me.

------
patcito
As programmer, something that might help more than a cover letter or a résumé
is open source code you wrote.

~~~
phugoid
I want to believe that, but assume that the number of applicants is a hundred-
fold more than the number of interesting positions available.

You need to survive that first sift through the pile, especially if it's done
by non-techies.

------
eli
If I'm looking through 100 emailed resumes, your cover letter (which should be
in the body of the email) is an advertisement for you. It should give me a
reason to bother opening your resume.

~~~
iigs
You have 100 resumes to read and you're reading the long-form bodies of
emails? Why? I've always had the benefit of a HR department to do that
screening but I'd think I'd read the resumes first and then go back and follow
up and read the emails they sent.

~~~
eli
HR department? At a startup?

------
dpnewman
i do think cover letters are important, but would emphasize they should employ
a less is more approach. just enough to show a "voice", a persona --
humanizing the interaction. perhaps pointing out 1 or 2 key things that might
show in an understated way that you "get" something that might be of value to
the employer, or highlights something about your unique value. but don't
overdo it. too much about why you want to work at this company is gonna start
to smell a bit.

------
vaksel
Resumes are pretty useless, half the stuff people write is made up on the
spot, the other half is exaggerated beyond belief.

------
jpcx01
I don't care about a resume or a cover letter. Show me an interesting github
profile and I'll recommend you for hire.

------
michaelawill
I always thought the point of a resume was to get you an interview. Then it's
your job to get yourself hired.

------
known
Hiring is Obsolete <http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html>

------
Ardit20
I thought a cover letter was a prerequisite. Anyone can put a CV together and
email it to 1000 companies, but to write a cover letter for each company just
shows you actually know what you are applying for to start with.

~~~
alain94040
If you email your resume to 1000 companies, you've already lost the game
before it starts!

This is no way to find a good job. Plus, you already know it intuititvely,
when it happens to you, you call it spam.

As a hiring manager for many years, I barely took notice of all the e-mails
sent to jobs@mycompany.com. But the ones sent personally to me, from someone
who has some connection (works for a competitor, uses our products, etc...)
would get first class treatment.

I know it's tought out there for new grads though, because what I describe
kind of requires some experience (read
[http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/05/13/being-a-new-cs-
grad-...](http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/05/13/being-a-new-cs-grad-in-this-
economy-sucks/) for more advice on that topic)

