
Ask HN: What's Wrong with My Resume? - faizshah
Hi HN,<p>Over the years this community has given me amazing advice and support that I can&#x27;t thank you enough for. I&#x27;m now looking for jobs&#x2F;internships and I&#x27;m having a rough time.<p>I&#x27;m about to graduate this semester from college and in the past two years I have applied to over 150 internship&#x2F;job apps but I get a frustratingly low interview rate.<p>The hiring process at tech companies is frustratingly opaque, I have no idea what I&#x27;m doing wrong.<p>Could you guys give me some constructive&#x2F;actionable criticism of my resume?<p>Here&#x27;s my resume (with phone and address removed): [redacted]
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topmonk
Put relevant coursework at the bottom or, better, get rid of it entirely. It's
already understood you've taken classes relevant to your field of study, and
no employer is going to base whether to hire you or not based on which
specific classes you took. Your internships are most important and it should
look like what you value the most. This makes it seem as if you are excited
about working and felt you did good while working.

As far as projects, they're all school homework assignments, right? I'd get
rid of all them except the ones you really are proud of, and if possible have
a link to the source code on the resume. Otherwise it looks like your
desperately padding.

It's alright to have a short resume. If you are straight out of college, it's
expected, and some employers _prefer_ younger, less experienced workers
because they are more likely to do what their told. What isn't cool, though,
is to try and make it look like you have more experience then you do, and then
when someone reads your resume more closely, they discover that you've been
trying to look like something you're not.

~~~
faizshah
Thanks for the advice. Last time I went with with a shorter resume and from
like 20 or 30 applications (with cover letters) I got 2 interviews. So this
time I went with a different approach I added every significant project to my
resume (in my major every coding class has a 2-4 person, 6-8 week final
project).

So last time I got some feedback that they were “looking for someone more
experienced” (for an internship) so this time I just went with enumerating the
coding experiences I had.

I’ll cut it back down, thanks!

------
jppope
couple of things:

\- first, I would highly recommend to stop blindly submitting resumes... go
talk to some people. Meetup is great for it, but there are all sorts of ways
to network with other developers, they can refer you if they like you.

\- it looks like you literally put everything that you've ever done with
computers on that resume. This makes reading it tedious. It also doesn't leave
much to the imagination.

\- The vast majority of your resume are projects and coursework (physically it
takes up 2/5) cut that down to the most important stuff.

\- Your linkedin needs to be fixed asap.

\- Whether or not it is true... you have a massive amount of frameworks,
languages, and libraries on there as well... for those of use that have been
in the industry for a while its kind of a red flag that you don't know any of
them particularly well. Try honing it into your best skills and your favorite
technologies... it will help when you interview.

~~~
faizshah
> It also doesn't leave much to the imagination.

I never thought of it this way, thanks! Last year I went with a short resume
without the coursework and I got 2 interviews from 30 apps with a cover
letter. I managed to get feedback last time that they were “looking for
someone more experienced” so this time around I tried to enumerate my
experiences...but I guess I overdid it.

> Whether or not it is true... you have a massive amount of frameworks,
> languages, and libraries on there as well... for those of use that have been
> in the industry for a while its kind of a red flag that you don't know any
> of them particularly well. Try honing it into your best skills and your
> favorite technologies

Thanks! I didn’t think about this, I basically tried to write out a summary of
what languages/frameworks I used in that project. I guess I should cut it down
to be less specific like just python, SQL, google cloud instead of going into
particular libraries and technologies.

Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate the time and perspective!

