
An experiment in A/B Testing my Résumé - chanux
http://paulbutler.org/archives/experiment-in-testing-my-resume/
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imack
Having screened many, many resumes from co-ops and interns, I buy the shorter
resume arguments. A lot of people put crap that some job counsellor told you
will make you look more rounded, but the sad truth is that I care about your
ability to not mess up the code base so much more than the fact that you
volunteered on 'campus day'.

It also makes you stand out in a very basic way. In the stack of 30 resumes,
you'll be the one person who could articulate in 1 page where everyone else
took 2.

~~~
AdamTReineke
How many two page resumes do you get? I'm in college, and I've never seen one
of my peers take a two page resume to the career fairs.

~~~
freiheit
Really hard to fit years of relevant experience on a single page; you'll see a
lot of two page resumes from people with more than a few years of experience.
Of course college students don't have two page resumes, they don't yet have
enough material that actually needs to be on a resume: they typically have a
skills section, an education section, one or two short-term relevant jobs, and
maybe enough fluff to fill the rest of the page.

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latch
If I could, I'd hire the guy based that blog post alone.

~~~
andrewmunn
Sorry, Facebook already did.

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derefr
Could the fact that his "conversion rate" went down when people were given
outbound links be explained by the fact that _they would rather visit those
links than keep reading_? I know that if I saw a resume with both a link to a
GitHub profile, and to a blog, I'd ignore the blog, stop reading the resume
(though perhaps downloading it first in case I needed to contact them) and
start reading their code.

~~~
riffraff
also, if the reader is a recruiter, accessing the linkedin profile may be more
useful.

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krobertson
I'm surprised at the comment about wanting to drive clicks to his blog rather
than other sites (namely Github).

When I'm interviewing someone, I am far more interested in a github link thank
a blog. Everyone has a blog and most aren't very interesting. But their github
account.... if I am hiring a developer, I'll be very interested in what code
they've written, projects they're working with, etc.

~~~
freiheit
Looking quickly at both, his blog is more interesting than his GitHub page, I
think. Also he can track traffic to the blog and every page of the blog has a
link to his GitHub page anyways.

~~~
paulgb
Precisely. I use GitHub as a tool and my behavior would change if I started
using it as a portfolio.

I've heard from dozens of recruiters through my blog, but I can't remember
ever being contacted for work from my GitHub.

I also have pretty specific interests (data and data science). I'm pretty
picky about the type of work I'll do, so I'd rather be hired for the stuff I
talk about on my blog than my GitHub.

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rb2k_
Does he mention how many hits he actually got in total? I can't seem to find
it in the post

~~~
paulgb
I didn't, because I vaguely remembered reading that discussing CPC could get
your account terminated. Now that I look at it, it seems like that applies to
AdSense, not AdWords.

I did this a while ago so I don't remember the exact number, but it was on the
order of 300 clicks.

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evgeny0
I'm glad to see the longer/shorter resume results are consistent with the
first piece of advise given by Manager Tools on resumes: "one page".
<http://www.manager-tools.com/2005/10/your-resume-stinks>

I've followed this advice and found that most recruiters and employers love a
one-page resume. A few hate it, but that's fine by me: I'd take love/hate over
indifference any day.

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colanderman
He seems to miss calculating the _total_ visits to his blog based on links
included. Seeings as it looks like 5x the number of downloads with a LinkedIn
link, but only 1/4 the blog view rate, he actually gets a higher absolute blog
view rate (5/4 the number of people) as without a LinkedIn link. The effect is
even more pronounced with GitHub (2x absolute number of views), although I
agree he should leave Twitter off (1/3 the number of views).

~~~
paulgb
The denominator for the "blog view rate" is the number of times the landing
page was shown, not the number of downloads (the landing page showed the
entire resume and had the same outgoing links.)

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troels
Interesting idea - Thanks for sharing your findings. I'm not sure how useful
the data is though. You drive a lot of traffic to your site with ads. That's
not necessarily very representative for the people that you would normally
have read your resumés.

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rorrr
"versus", not "verses"

