
How to write a developer resume that will get you hired - peteretep
http://www.slideshare.net/perlcareers/how-to-write-a-developer-cvrsum-that-will-get-you-hired
======
gedrap
At our university, University of Manchester, we had a careers service drone
telling us to list your experience working as a waiter and highlight skills
you learned there ('communicating in stressful environment' and what not).

Dear young readers. Seriously, don't do that. Waste of space at best. Looks
just stupid at worst. It doesn't tell me anything about your ability as a
programmer at all. Description about a weekend project is much more useful.
And no, clarifying whether someone wants latte with regular or soy milk is not
a 'communication skill'.

~~~
FlyingLawnmower
Do you (or anyone else reading this thread) have advice for current college
students looking for internships or their first full time job?

Unfortunately, I don't have the breadth of experience detailed in the
slideshow to even justify a multi-page CV. In my environment, we work with a 1
page resume and <2 minutes of interaction with a recruiter at a career fair
(~30% chance they're technical).

I have a variety of side projects I've hacked on, but it's very hit and miss
-- some recruiters care a lot, others care more about my GPA and what classes
I have taken.

What can students like myself do to best position ourselves in these
situations, especially when we can't have multiple resumes for every company
there is (and are forced to generalize)?

~~~
RogerL
I can't speak for everyone, but we get it (that you don't have experience to
show). You are a student at the beginning of your career. Just be honest and
enthusiastic. As the parent says, blathering about your experience selling
coffee is pretty pointless. Hey, if you started a coffee cart, that could be
interesting to tout.

If you don't have anything for your resume, all you can be is smart and
engaging.

If you still have time in school, picking up an interesting project is very
worthwhile. We could do side projects for credit. I don't really care if you
wrote it in Javascript, if it is web enabled, or you did math with matlab;
just give me something to talk to you about, and I can figure out if the
several fairly well defined projects I have in mind could be tackled by you.

In other words, I don't look for a college grad with no work experience to be
able to lead a team, design a product, and so on. I have a bunch of 'turn the
crank' work, and a few challenges to throw out as well. I don't want to
babysit you, but I also want you to ask questions and learn. Part of interning
is giving back to the community, but part of it is I have work I need done.
So, when I read your CV and/or talk to you, I just want to figure out if you
can perform at that capacity.

If there is nothing left to talk about I resort to asking about your
coursework. 'What courses are you taking'. 'Blah, and foodle, and a compiler
course.' Okay, can you tell me what a recursive descent parser is? uhh...I've
never heard of that" That is an actual conversation I had with somebody
recently. I blame the school more than the person, but no offer was made. I
wasn't going to have the candidate code a parser for me, either for the
interview or the job, but I just wanted to have a conversation about
_anything_ where I could probe knowledge (less important) and ability (more
important). Find an area that know something about, find the limit, inject a
new piece of information, and see if they can assimilate it. If they can,
that's an offer. If not, probably not.

To be fair, you'll probably get a lot of "code 'delete_node' for a binary tree
type questions, so like it or not brush up on that crap.

Beyond that, for me at least, the CV isn't very important. If everything you
list is about networking and databases, and I am looking for graphics
programming, I scratch my head as to why you are applying and probably move to
the next resume. A fit in interests is important, after all.

------
pera
> Sorry, you need JavaScript experience, but all I can see in the web
> development section is AngularJS and jQuery

This actually happened to me a couple of weeks ago, and I do have JavaScript
listed in my languages section...

~~~
herge
Good, if a company deals with a recruiter that dumb, imagine the quality of
the rest of the staff you would have to deal with!

~~~
theVirginian
A large company might have an HR department that is insulated from any of the
'technical' branches that company might have. Imagine if they had to have all
sorts of knowledge about what every individual branch of the company does?
It's their job to be gatekeepers that make sure the people coming in for
interviews are not raising any red flags, further along in the hiring process
skill will be determined.

~~~
PublicEnemy111
recognizing the "JS" in AngularJS or the name of a library which has all but
become synonymous with JavaScript does not require intricate knowledge of the
technical branches of a company. Furthermore, if a recruiter is filtering
candidates based on a technical skill, they need to know more than just that
single keyword. This is not necessarily a failure on the recruiters part; it
could be a failure of the hiring branch to adequately prepare the recruiter.
However you look at it, it is a failure.

------
peteretep
I wrote this. It's a tiny bit Perl/UK-centric, but I think you could easily
apply it to other markets. Happy to answer any questions...

~~~
izolate
Why are you perpetuating the myth that frequent switching of jobs is somehow
detrimental to your career? Maybe that's true for corporate megacorp, but in
the startup world I feel it's par for the course. At least all the best
engineers I've worked with never stuck around long.

~~~
ryanackley
As someone who has done a lot of interviewing and hiring, I can say that
frequent switching of jobs is a negative and a red flag in general.

If you had a business, would you want to hire someone who is probably going to
jump to another job in a few months?

~~~
FLUX-YOU
So what's the threshold for 'frequent'? Less than 1 year?

~~~
peteretep
Rule of thumb is two years. You're allowed to have one or two where you've
left after three months - not every role works out.

But more than anything: get comfortable talking about _WHY_ it didn't work
out, in a way that doesn't bad-mouth the company and still makes you look like
a professional.

An advantage of applying through a recruiter is that they can have this chat
with you first, and then make your case to the employer (who they will have a
relationship with). As a Hiring Manager, I've said no to candidates, only to
have a recruiter persuade me (rightly) that actually I should talk to them,
even though there were things that spooked me about their CV.

------
pjmlp
Behind a corporate firewall, so I cannot read it.

One thing I have been noticing lately with HR drones, is that unless you have
stated specifically that you worked in technology X on a project at work, it
doesn't matter how many off work projects you might have done in the said
technology.

Even if there are other people using the said projects.

They just go top to bottom looking for keywords.

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
Speaking as a hiring manager this feels perfectly reasonable so I'd be
interested to know why people might think it isn't.

I write a job spec which lists what we're looking for which is advertised and
passed to recruiters - if you're interested in the job you've almost certainly
seen that.

Assuming you do have the experience, using the spec you should be able to
tweak your CV in about 5 minutes to highlight the key things we're looking
for. If you do that, you've cleared this (very low) bar with a very small time
investment and it's not a problem. If your CV makes it past the recruiter (or
HR department or other non-technical screener) I then know that the CV I'm
looking at is worth my time and the following interview is more focused as I
know a bit more about what you've done where.

Yes you are having to spend time but, as I say, this should be a very short
tweak to your existing CV so it doesn't feel like a big ask given that I'm
going to spend longer than that reading it (and hopefully interviewing you
about it).

Obviously if there is no job spec then this doesn't work so well but there's
usually something, even if it's just stuff you've gleaned from the advert or
conversations with the person you learned about the role from.

As an aside, please don't ever try to get round the keyword thing by listing
everything you've done or used. I had a CV the other week which listed 43
skills, tools and technologies for one nine month role. From that I have no
way of knowing what you used in passing and what you really know - you've
provided so much information it just became noise. My rule when I'm working
out what to put - if you put it on your CV you'd better feel happy answering
(proper) questions about it and I don't believe that you passed that threshold
with 43 things in a nine month period.

~~~
couchand
There's one very simple reason that this strategy fails: good developers can
and do learn new technologies quickly. It's far more important to find someone
willing and able to learn than someone who can copy and paste a few keywords.

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
But it doesn't fail. I've been recruiting solid teams who deliver software for
a decade now.

The right current skills and the ability to learn future skills aren't
incompatible. After all, how do you think those people got those current
skills? I don't have to choose one or the other and I've rarely met anyone in
IT who isn't willing to learn new skills.

Generally I have two or three core skills I'm looking for for a role for and
the rest are nice to have. To me it's a given you'll basically be smart and
that you'll need to learn stuff but I also know from experience I can get
smart people who have a core set of knowledge which will make them productive
early on.

I certainly have no interest in someone who can copy and paste keywords and if
that's all you'd done you won't get past first interview. All I'm asking is
that you present your experience in a way which is most relevant to me to help
me understand.

~~~
Retric
You have little idea what your opportunity costs are.

However, it’s unlikely that the best fit is going to have your ideal
background and be willing to spend much time jumping through your hoops.

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
My hoops? Did you read what I wrote? I suggest _5 minutes_ of CV tailoring.

You think that's jumping through hoops?

~~~
Retric
Yes, my last job search consisted of posting my resume on one and only one job
board. I then received a deluge of phone calls and multiple job offers soon
after that.

In the end if you’re depending on people reading a job posting you’re already
missing out on a lot of highly qualified applicants. If you then want tailored
resumes your mostly excluding the type of people you actually want working for
you.

PS: And no I will not show up to an interview if you don't list a salary
range.

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
CVs posted to job boards (in the UK at least) aren't looked at by companies
but by agencies. Those agencies call you and do all the pre-screening (and CV
tweaking) before they send the CVs to people like me.

When I've looked for a job I'll always say to the agent I'll tweak my CV
myself because I'd rather I did it than them (I've seen some horribly
butchered ones come through - in those cases I can normally tell it was the
agency and don't hold it against the candidate but sometimes that may not be
the case).

Essentially I suspect everything I asked for happened with you, it just may
not have been done by you.

Salary I totally agree on - I post a salary range for the role (usually a
range but also dependent on experience) and want to know candidate salary
expectations before hand. If we're not happy with what the candidate is
looking for based on what their rough level of experience I wouldn't
interview.

------
Bahamut
"...did you wear a suit"

I guess it might depend on the industry, but at most interviews I have done,
the expectation has been to just wear jeans and whatever. I usually go with
jeans and a polo shirt for safety.

~~~
magoon
It may seem like you were dressed OK, but do you really know? Does anybody
ever say "we can't hire that guy, he dressed up?"

~~~
MrScruff
They wouldn't say that, they'd say 'I'm not sure if this person is a good
cultural fit for our company'.

~~~
bshimmin
I really don't think so. If you went to a first interview in a suit and
everyone were dressed extremely casually (flip-flop casually) and then you
dressed _the same_ for a second interview, definitely questions might be
asked. But on the whole in the UK I would say it's pretty common to dress
smartly for a first interview unless you have specific information (eg. from a
recruiter or hiring manager) that you should not do that.

If I were interviewing in finance, I would definitely wear a suit. If I were
interviewing at a startup or a digital agency, or equivalent, I would wear
smart trousers (maybe smart jeans) and a shirt. That's playing it safe.
Sometimes I interview people who are wearing jeans and a t-shirt and generally
look pretty scruffy - I know that they know that that is probably the attire
most of their potential future colleagues will be wearing, but it certainly
doesn't impress me much. But maybe I'm just old-fashioned.

I thought there was a lot of good advice in those slides, incidentally.

~~~
outworlder
Doesn't hurt to just ask, to whoever your contact is, "hey, is there a dress
code?"

~~~
bshimmin
Absolutely right. If I turned up to a job interview in a suit and everyone
else was in beach attire, I'd absolutely ask about the dress code and make a
joke about my own attire.

------
alistairjcbrown
"Your CV should be about three pages" \- I had always been told, keep your CV
to two pages, so you can print it on one sheet of paper (both sides).

I like it as it ties back into the main message of these slides: "reading CVs
is a chore" so keeping it condensed helps me to focus with showing only the
most valuable information.

~~~
spindritf
I have been told that it should be one page unless you have had a really long
career. Was this bad/outdated advice?

~~~
Bahamut
Probably outdated - for my first job search, a recruiter shopped around a
beefed up version of my resume that spanned two pages instead of the one I had
it. I was surprised that the old adage was not used in practice.

~~~
vonmoltke
Probably outdated but still parroted relentlessly in resume advice.

------
tempodox
On slide 16:

    
    
      Shows you actually care about programming
    

I have yet to meet an employer that is actually looking for this. Caring about
programming only gets in the way of the atrocities my employer needs me to
commit to make things work. Now. One of the differences between academia &
real life, I guess.

~~~
robalfonso
I am a hiring manager. I do want my people to "care" about programming, more
specifically I want them to care about the quality of their work. Not all
managers in all companies realize the costs incurred by doing garbage work and
the follow on consequences. For those that do, it makes sense to have
employees that care to do that level of work. If you are constantly committing
atrocities, it may be time to seek out employment where you don't have to do
that (I admit, that is far easier said than done)

~~~
tempodox

      ... easier said than done
    

That's just it. An employer who understands those hidden costs and the
consequences of software quality (and its lack) seems to be rather rare.

~~~
robalfonso
Agreed, to clarify my comment. One will not find that company working at the
sucky company they are at. Might as well quietly network/research those
companies in an effort to make the jump.

------
WatchDog
Am I doing something wrong or is this website horribly non-functional, after
20ish seconds it just goes blank and tries to start loading a new page, if you
try and download the slides it just pops up a blank modal.

~~~
natejenkins
I encountered the same thing and pasted in the following in the console to
disable all timers(1):

    
    
      // Set a fake timeout to get the highest timeout id
      var highestTimeoutId = setTimeout(";");
      for (var i = 0 ; i < highestTimeoutId ; i++) {
        clearTimeout(i); 
      }
    

(1) Taken from: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3847121/how-can-i-
disable...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3847121/how-can-i-disable-all-
settimeout-events)

~~~
aidos
Ha! I'd never looked at at the value returned from setTimeout to see what it
was. Obviously it was going to be some sort of ID but it never occurred to me
that it was a simple counter. Neat trick.

I just hit ESC a bunch of times as the page was loading and it seemed to stop
the offending code from getting a chance to execute.

------
georgeecollins
Great tip: HR is just matching technical words they don't understand as a
filter. They also do this for titles. So they might be looking for a "Project
Director" but think you are a poor fit because your last title was "Founder".
And for past employers. You may have done marketing at Intel. They will see
Intel and think you were an engineer. Etc.

Also, peer interviews are very important and often the least thought through.
Try to connect to your potential co-workers. That is where qualified candidate
usually stall.

~~~
vonmoltke
As a former non-IT systems engineer[1] I have this problem frequently. I get
pings once a month or so for DevOps and SRE type positions from in-house
recruiters or various companies, but never anything for embedded development
(which I was actually doing at the time I was called a "systems engineer").

Now that I have more than a couple years if NLP experience the contacts are
getting more relevant, though less frequent. Unfortunately, I don't want to
make a career out of NLP.

[1]
[http://www.incose.org/practice/fellowsconsensus.aspx](http://www.incose.org/practice/fellowsconsensus.aspx)

------
goombastic
Also, never ever apply through one of the career portals companies setup
(taleo and the like).

Having applied for tens of perfectly matching jobs at MS, Google and others
through their portals, all I can say is they never call you if you apply
through their online resume management system. Taleo etc are a resume
blackhole, and once they have your resume in their DB, the third party
consultants cannot help you either since your phone number check turns up a
duplicate on taleo.

If Satya Nadella were to apply via taleo, he wouldn't even be called.

~~~
simi_
I can only speak for Google, but I did get an interview for a SEng internship
with them after applying online. However, for big companies it's virtually
impossible to not find a friend of a friend who works there in order to get a
direct introduction.

------
pm90
Recently coming out of a Job search, sending out even the perfect resume won't
get the attention of recruiters as much as you physically talking to them or
someone from the company. They are much more likely to remember a good person
than an excellent resume.

Of course you should make your resume as nice as possible, all I'm advising to
job-seekers is that it isn't enough, and it would probably be worth your time
socializing rather than making your resume absolutely perfect

------
SubuSS
I don't know how effective it is to go via a recruiter. But it is indeed
effective to talk to a technical person directly and establish a rapport.

For example, if you wanted a job with Amazon and are qualified, I would say
send me a mail. Or go to an Amazon show like RE:Invent and show off your
programming skills in a boot camp. You will meet Amazon engineers there. Get
their cards and send them a resume. There are github repositories where teams
from companies like Amazon (AND twitter/fb/google/ms) actively contribute. Go
see how you can improve them and submit a pull request. We not only have
systems work happening in AWS - there is work in every aspect from web
programming to documentation to distribute systems. IMO, it all comes down to
initiative.

I have switched about 4 teams now between MS and Amazon and not one of them
were via a recruiter. There were extremely talented recruiters who handled the
interview logistics, but the jobs themselves happened because people on the
ground knew me.

Good luck.

------
ep103
hi all. Could I ask a question about job advice?

I spent 2.5 years at my first job (effectively moved from junior dev to
senior). I then took a job at a traveling consulting company (where I was
officially promoted, and ran a huge project), but left after 1 year because I
couldn't stand traveling that extensively. Then I moved to my current company,
where I've been for 9-10 months, but will likely be fired by the new
management team that came in, because I'm part of an overbudget project.

Am I fucked? My current plan is to just wait and see if I am let go or not
(probably will be), and then go travel for a few months (I'm burned out). But
the very first page of this slideshow is that hiring managers look for red
flags about multiple short time roles and employment gaps, and I'll have a 1
year, and a < 1 year on my resume.

~~~
peteretep

        > Am I fucked?
    

No. Write the reason you left the travelling job - that's legit. It's also not
your fault if a company makes you redundant.

People want to hire people who will stick around. Leaving a job because you
were made redundant, or because of exceptional circumstances (large amounts of
travel) don't make you a flight risk - but again, mention the reason right
there on the CV so it's obvious.

------
dunk010
Thanks for sharing! Lots of great information in here. I've been a hiring
manager for a role more than once and I can attest that it's all true. It
would be nice if more people made CVs as easy to read as the tips here would
produce. I even picked up one or two new ones for my own CV :-).

------
ma2rten
I really wouldn't wanna work for company that:

1\. Is "too lazy" to deal with visa stuff.

2\. Where the recruiter doesn't hire you because you have jQuery and Angular,
but no Javascript experience.

3\. Doesn't hire people because they didn't wear a suit.

4\. Interviewing developers did not prepare for the interview.

~~~
ape4
How many perl programers wear suits? I think the Venn diagram of people who
wear suits and perl programmers would not show any intersection.

------
nraynaud
I'm still debating whether working for a company where the HR people does the
initial filtering is worth working for. It's certainly something I was not
doing when I was hiring, I was getting my resumes directly.

~~~
peteretep
I think it's common enough that it doesn't provide you a good signal for what
working for the company will be like

------
kruk
What's your view on listing multiple positions in the same company?

I've joined a company as a "Software Developer" during my final year in
university. When I graduated I got promoted to "Senior Software Developer" but
I left a month later to move halfway across the world (my employer knew I'll
be leaving soon but chose to promote me anyway). How should I present this on
my CV?

I feel like categorising the whole year as "Senior Developer" is bending the
truth but splitting it into two takes too much space. Plus my responsibilities
didn't really change, only my title did.

------
hanula
As I am currently looking for work, I had to update my resume, but then I
decided simple text processor would be just boring and I created themed
HTML/PDF resume generator in Python that takes simple YAML data file. It
worked pretty good.

There is already JSON Resume [0] initiative but YAML feels much more natural
when writing semi-structured text.

Here's the source if anyone's interested:
[https://github.com/hanula/resume](https://github.com/hanula/resume)

[0] [https://jsonresume.org/](https://jsonresume.org/)

------
agumonkey
I remember an awful confrontation with a first stage HR employee that was
particularly nitpicking with my resume while not knowing the difference
between Java and javascript. Ha.. keywords.

~~~
nemanja
An awful confrontation is definitely not a way to go. May want to try coaching
approach, politely explaining the difference. For all you know, it may have
been an intentional filter.

Bottom line though is that it helps you to use the same keywords they are
looking for, to the extent you have the relevant experience.

~~~
agumonkey
Intentional meaning her toying with me to test my stability ? Any way I failed
hard, I was in a bad place and immature. Of course I would do everything
differently. Acceptance of the game instead of anger.

~~~
nemanja
Yeah, it's possible - HR should screen for cultural fit and sometimes they may
pull a trick or two like that.

I've never toyed with applicants per se, but would occasionally ask them to
explain me something that is either very simple or that they know very well,
to test for condescension and arrogance. Bottom line is that if someone shows
arrogance in an interview, they will likely suck to work with and unlikely to
be good mentors to juniors.

~~~
agumonkey
It's funny, because I'm rarely arrogant in the workplace, I love sharing, but
when I'm denied very simple job offers by someone who doesn't seem to
understand what we're talking about it rapidly grind my gears to that sad
point.

------
philangist
> If you can't be bothered to dress up a little bit for your interview, the
> hiring manager knows that you're going to be a pain in the ass to manage.

I wonder how common this sentiment is in the UK. I know that most developers
I've met/interviewed/been interviewed by in NYC don't care (at least outside
of finance). Can anyone on the other side of the pond give me their thoughts
or experiences?

~~~
bitwize
It's true everywhere. Always, ALWAYS wear a suit to your interview, even if
the hiring manager says he doesn't care. It presents a crisp, professional
appearance and shows the hiring manager that _you_ care.

~~~
logfromblammo
No. This is horrible advice for software professionals in the US. In a lot of
places, it will show the hiring manager that you are an alien to their
culture. You should simply wear what you would ordinarily wear to work when
clients are expected that day in the office.

If the software professionals there actually wear suits, you can also wear one
to interview, but be mindful that you probably won't enjoy working there much.

~~~
bitwize
If on the job you are expected to wear casual or business casual clothing, by
all means do so. But only once you have the job. During the application and
interview process, making a good impression is paramount. A suit is clothing
literally tailor made to make a good impression. I have yet to meet the hiring
manager who would dock a candidate for overdressing to the interview, even if
overdressing on the job would raise a few eyebrows.

~~~
Guvante
Don't discount his advice about culture, finding people who culturally fit is
important and if they are using dress as an indicator you don't want to fail
it.

The advice I have heard is to ask the hiring manager. If they say they don't
care feel free to wear a suit, however if they say something like "nothing too
formal" listen to them.

------
lazyant
I agree pretty much with these ideas and I actually follow them, still from my
dozen or so jobs in the past only one or two came from a "send us your resume"
process; the best resume is no resume.

------
tortos123
Sorry It was nice and made nice points but it seems like you just want to
advertise your own business by offering to rewrite CV's and a link to your
site.

~~~
kasey_junk
"seems like you just want to advertise your own business by offering to
rewrite CV's and a link to your site"

So? Just because the author has a business reason to present this great free
content, doesn't make it any less great and free.

------
allsystemsgo
So I used a service called CareerCup and got great results. I highly recommend
them.

------
hbgary
Thanks for the memes, now I know this is bullshit.

