5 ms·

A word about résumés.

41 points by ggualberto 16y ago

gamble 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.
- dschobel 16y ago
  Bingo. Also known as bikeshedding or more formally: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality
- loumf 16y ago
  The author made that point exactly at the end. I have found that extremely tailoring a resume and cover letter for the job works for me.
joshsegall 16y ago
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.
nika 16y ago
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.
jarek 16y ago
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.
unshift 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.
  - Andrex 16y ago
    Do it in Google Docs, then just paste the link in the text field. :P
    - jarek 16y ago
      This is an excellent way to get cut by the type of company that uses an external application tracking system that only accepts .docs and .txts.
  - prodigal_erik 16y ago
    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.
jasonjei 16y ago
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 16y ago
  Judging by the pronunciation, I can't see how both 'e's can be accented. Unless you say "ray soo may".
  - copper 16y ago
    Um, that's actually how I've always heard it said. How is it pronounced, otherwise?
    - glenjamin 16y ago
      Oh, I'd only heard it as "res oo may", with the first e soft.
  - raganwald 16y ago
    I pronounce it that way in speech.
  - glenjamin 16y ago
    update: I figured i'd see wikipedia for the answer: A résumé (pronounced /ˈrɛzʊmeɪ/ REZ-oo-may or /rɛzʊˈmeɪ/; French: [ʁezyme]; sometimes spelled resumé or resume) The IPA guide has a soft e in the first syllable, but still suggests an accented first e. How odd.
- hellomika 16y ago
  Frenchie here. Résumé is written with two "é". Otherwise it's a typo (e != é). In french, résumé literally means "summary", and it's anything but a synonym for CV. I'm not sure how it ended up being a borrowed word used that way in US english.
vacri 16y ago
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)
tptacek 16y ago
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.
epynonymous 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      It tells me he already got through Google's notoriously thorough hiring process.
amchang 16y ago
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.
toadi 16y ago
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.
ig1 16y ago
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 16y ago
  Lots of people still like to take notes on them...
  - ig1 16y ago
    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.
bhousel 16y ago
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.
xteemarie 16y ago
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!

41 points by ggualberto 16y ago

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 16y ago
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.
dschobel 16y ago
Bingo. Also known as bikeshedding or more formally: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality
loumf 16y ago
The author made that point exactly at the end. I have found that extremely tailoring a resume and cover letter for the job works for me.

joshsegall 16y ago

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.

nika 16y ago

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.

jarek 16y ago

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.

unshift 16y ago

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 16y ago
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.
- Andrex 16y ago
  Do it in Google Docs, then just paste the link in the text field. :P
  - jarek 16y ago
    This is an excellent way to get cut by the type of company that uses an external application tracking system that only accepts .docs and .txts.
- prodigal_erik 16y ago
  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.

jasonjei 16y ago

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 16y ago
Judging by the pronunciation, I can't see how both 'e's can be accented. Unless you say "ray soo may".
- copper 16y ago
  Um, that's actually how I've always heard it said. How is it pronounced, otherwise?
  - glenjamin 16y ago
    Oh, I'd only heard it as "res oo may", with the first e soft.
- raganwald 16y ago
  I pronounce it that way in speech.
- glenjamin 16y ago
  update: I figured i'd see wikipedia for the answer: A résumé (pronounced /ˈrɛzʊmeɪ/ REZ-oo-may or /rɛzʊˈmeɪ/; French: [ʁezyme]; sometimes spelled resumé or resume) The IPA guide has a soft e in the first syllable, but still suggests an accented first e. How odd.
hellomika 16y ago
Frenchie here. Résumé is written with two "é". Otherwise it's a typo (e != é). In french, résumé literally means "summary", and it's anything but a synonym for CV. I'm not sure how it ended up being a borrowed word used that way in US english.

vacri 16y ago

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)

tptacek 16y ago

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.

epynonymous 16y ago

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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    It tells me he already got through Google's notoriously thorough hiring process.

amchang 16y ago

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.

toadi 16y ago

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.

ig1 16y ago

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 16y ago
Lots of people still like to take notes on them...
- ig1 16y ago
  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.

bhousel 16y ago

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.

xteemarie 16y ago

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!