

A word about résumés. - ggualberto
http://www.atalasoft.com/cs/blogs/office/archive/2011/02/17/while-we-re-on-the-subject.aspx

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gamble
The problem with resume advice is that everyone who does interviews eventually
develops their own set of strongly-held, essentially arbitrary beliefs about
every aspect of the hiring process. It's all ultimately about finding reasons
to toss resumes in the trash, until you get down to the handful of candidates
that can be reasonably evaluated by one person.

~~~
maxbrown
I agree with you, particularly about interviewing - that the hirer will often
have arbitrary beliefs and standards. But I'm not so sure about resumes. While
inevitably there is some arbitrary nit-picking and subjective preferences, I
would be willing to bet that there are a good few universals. For a business
resume, I think no more than a page is one of them. I've edited many resumes
and there's a number of guidelines for success that I make sure people follow.

Also, I bet if you were to take a large number of different recruiters for the
same type of position and hand them a stack of resumes, they would mostly pick
out the same few as stand-outs.

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bhousel
Ah the great resume debate. In fact there are 3 kinds of resumes that are
appropriate depending on job you're looking for.

If you are applying for most jobs, the employer wants to know _what you know_.
Get it all on one page in list format and be succinct, because they are
probably sorting through hundreds of resumes quickly looking for keywords on
who to call in for the next round.

If you are applying for some higher level jobs, like executive, some
management, higher level engineering, consulting, then the employer wants to
know _what you've done_. For these, you need to tell a story, because these
resumes will be picked apart and read carefully. You're almost _expected_ to
have at least 2 pages, otherwise you look inexperienced.

The third kind of resume is for artistic jobs like design, then the employer
wants to know _who you are_. Having a personal brand will set you apart from
other candidates, and you don't need to follow the traditional resume format.
Pages aren't so important, but a good designer can do a lot with one page.

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jasonjei
Something always bothers me when I see two é's on résumé. Yes, it's probably
the correct way of saying it, but neither the English nor the French (not even
the French!) use the word "résumé." There's a certain level of douchebaggery
when I see two accented é's rather than the term "CV," which is used in France
and most of Europe.

~~~
glenjamin
Judging by the pronunciation, I can't see how _both_ 'e's can be accented.
Unless you say "ray soo may".

~~~
copper
Um, that's actually how I've always heard it said. How is it pronounced,
otherwise?

~~~
glenjamin
Oh, I'd only heard it as "res oo may", with the first e soft.

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tptacek
Less than half the resumes we've received have fit on a single page. I simply
do not believe anyone who says they discard anything after the first page of a
resume.

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jarek
Every candidate thinks their resume format is superior, every company thinks
their job posting is perfectly clear, and every screener thinks they have the
one true resume format figured it.

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unshift
the only piece of solid, indisputable resume advice i've heard is to never,
ever send it to anybody in MS Word .doc format. only in pdf. otherwise all
sorts of recruiting agencies will add and subtract things before sending it
out, which typically results in the whole thing being a huge waste of time for
you.

even better advice is to avoid agencies all together.

~~~
parfe
I've been sending out resumes recently looking to move to a new position.

So far I've seen multiple companies outsource their application tracking
systems. When it comes to submitting the resume the options available are
either Doc Upload or Copy and paste text into a textfield.

I went to an interview and they had printed my resume from the text field.
Formatting made the thing unreadable and unfortunately I don't own a printer*
so I didn't have a nicely formatted copy with me.

I'm going to invest in a copy of MS Word. OpenOffice just doesn't cut it and
exporting to Doc is unreliable, even reopening the same file in Oo.org. There
are too many companies I'm interested in who don't take PDFs that it's
becoming a problem.

Meanwhile I'm interviewing candidates for an open position at my current
office and I love the people who submit PDFs.

* Didn't even remember getting rid of it. I must have thrown it out years ago. Hello paperless office.

~~~
prodigal_erik
You don't have to license your own copy just for this. I have no other
interest in using Word, so when someone wants my updated résumé only in .doc
format, I just pay a couple bucks to do that on one of Kinko's machines. Some
libraries offer this as well.

~~~
parfe
The problem is that I need to maintain the resume in doc format. Copy and
Paste from OpenOffice into Word screws up the formatting so I need to spend
time correcting that, but then adding or changing information also requires I
have Word. Might as well just shell out the money.

Also, FYI: OpenOffice.org exporting to Word Doc includes the revision history.
Make sure to clear that if you don't want potential employers snooping your
resume back in time.

------
joshsegall
With electronic resumes the number of pages is less relevant, but I agree that
you should limit the content to what's relevant and can be read quickly. I
review a lot of resumes and two is about my limit before I give up. If I can't
tell by then if you're qualified for a phone screen then it's not usually
worth reading pages 3-6 (yes I've seen those, even up to 12!)

Honestly, you shouldn't really need a second page unless all your Nobel Prizes
don't fit on the first.

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epynonymous
i disagree--two pages of content is quite sane for someone who's worked let's
say over 4-5 years. if you read a resume that says:

Google, Principal Software Engineer, 2006 - Current Python, git, gerrit,
responsible for Gmail

is that really enough for you to make a decision to spend time on a phone
screen?

i've scanned over tens of thousands of resumes and agree with you that making
things concise is important. however just because a resume has additional
information should not mean that that person's not qualified, it simply
implies that it's harder for you to scan.

so simple rule for those updating your resumes, keep it concise, but don't be
afraid to elaborate. a) it tells me a little bit about your communication
ability and b) it gives me more information that i can _optionally_ read if i
want to know something. that also means my phone screenings are a lot more
efficient because i know which questions to ask.

another piece of advice is to have a quick summary somewhere in your resume, i
keep mine at the top. this is for the impatient (or over burdened). i've never
dropped a set of resumes because they were too long, but to the contrary i've
dropped resumes because they were too short too many times.

~~~
rdouble
_if you read a resume that says: Google, Principal Software Engineer, 2006 -
Current Python, git, gerrit, responsible for Gmail is that really enough for
you to make a decision to spend time on a phone screen?_

Yeah.

~~~
epynonymous
not if you're looking for a C++ developer, or not necessarily if you're
looking for a performance tuning engineer...

the point is that it doesn't really tell you anything, i could be wasting my
time on a phone call if i find out he was only writing python tools to help
with packaging and deployment when what i want is a rockstar python developer
to help create highly scalable wsgi compliant rest servers.

~~~
rdouble
It tells me he already got through Google's notoriously thorough hiring
process.

~~~
epynonymous
granted--google is quite thorough--but it doesn't directly translate into this
candidate being a match for your company based on motivation nor skill set.

------
ig1
I want to know why any tech company would still be doing resume reviews on
paper ?

Page breaks are much less meaningful when you're scrolling through a document.

~~~
bhousel
Lots of people still like to take notes on them...

~~~
ig1
At the CV screening stage? - most companies get hundreds of CVs, printing them
all seems like a huge waste, I can't imagine many companies do that.

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toadi
Well I have a CV. The first page is the summary and normally you have a good
feeling of my competences and you could toss the rest in the bin.

But generally as a consultant people recruiting me look if I have done a
similar project. So all the rest is summing up all the projects I have worked
on. If you're interested you can read it.

------
amchang
The most important think about a resume is that the recruiter or manager who's
offering the position has or will not put a lot of effort into reading your
resume. If it doesn't fit what they are looking for, even if your amazing,
they will ignore you.

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xteemarie
Hi-- I'm the author of this blog post. I just wanted to say that I really
enjoy the discussions on HN, so thank you!

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vacri
The best resume format I've seen is this: list your job duties in a plain
English paragraph or two without getting too verbose. Directly after that,
stick all the keywords for that particular position in a box. Move on to the
next position and do the same.

This way the mouthbreather HR folk that just run off dot-points and couldn't
give a fuck get their keywords, and the folks next in line who want to
understand what you actually did and can understand what you're talking about
can hear you describe it in your own words (plus refer to keywords as
necessary). Short, plain English paragraphs speak volumes as to your skill in
communication and that is picked up by those who care (ie: not HR)

------
nika
Back when I still deigned to work for other people, I had an extensive and
successful resume. I started out with a one page resume, and kept it that way
for the first 5 years of my career. Then at some point, I kept getting asked
silly questions by recruiters (not in house but the independent agencies) and
they'd often say "you should put this on your resume. You should list every
language you've worked with, all your skills. And tells us more about each
company you worked for.

I was able to hold the line at a 2 page resume, but I optimized the hell out
of it.

Finally, I got really irritated and re-worked it again to be a single page.

The resume looked something like this- . . .

MYNAME@gmail.com -- huge letters across the top. the only contact info on the
resume

Summary 18+ years of software development experience.... going on for about a
paragraph, that really gives my "value offered" rather than "this is what I'm
looking for". This was succinct and compelling and I think many people never
read further.

Then a cronological list of jobs in this format:

JOB TITLE @companydomian.name date-now Patent #444,444,444 "Title of Patent",
sole inventor One-two sentences highlighting significant accomplishments
there. Ruby on Rails, Javascript, Perl exit: need more challenge

and at the bottom: copyright - do not forward or alter this resume, no agency
may represent me. . . .

This worked really well. Let people see the tech I used, why I left each
position, what I did there, and what my title was.

That last line was because I was constantly finding my resume retyped (very
poorly) by agencies that wished to send it out, often who got it under
fraudulent terms (they made a job posting pretending to be the company rather
than an agency). They'd do this just to remove my contact info at the top lest
the company contact me directly.

Eventually I stopped dealing with agencies.

In fact, don't give your resume or even talk to anyone who isn't a hiring
manager, or a friend of yours at the company. HR people are just going to
prevent you from getting a job. Agencies are just going to say things like
"You built a search engine? that's nice. Were you using Oracle 15?" "No, I was
working in Java, and some SQL, I think the backend was Oracle 14" "Oh, sorry,
they really want Oracle 15 experience".

And of course, when a bimbo airhead (often male with some sort of ego
involvement) has decided that you're not qualified because your buzzword
compliance is 6 months out of date, there is no convincing them.

So, I decided they just got in the way, and started networking.

This was so much better-- stopped getting jobs and job offers, but
opportunities. Started interviewing for CTO positions rather than "Sr.
Developer".

YMMV.

