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Non-suck resums
Ive spent a lot of time in the past few years reading resums and interviewing people.
A really surprising fraction of those resums have been really lousy; either
uninformative, or full of meaningless junk, or just plain illegible. I tend to throw those
out. On the other hand, good interviews with competent people leave me in a better
mood all day so in the interest of getting more of those in the future, Im going to
post a couple of notes on good versus bad resums. (OK, to be honest: In the interest
of not having to slog through any more piles of really bad resums. It makes me feel
like my brains are going to leak out of my ears.)
Format: Stick your name and contact info at the top. Then have major
categories going down, sorted in descending order by what youre applying on
the strength of. (For instance, if youre a new grad, you probably want to put
education as the top category. If you have professional experience, or
internships, or research experience, thats way up there too. You almost
certainly want to put a list of your other job-related skills way at the bottom,
and other skills below that. Dont skip the other skills; sometimes there are
interesting ones there. Fluency in four languages is actually pretty interesting
no matter what job youre applying for, for example.)
If youre wondering if something is worth putting on your resume: Semirelevant job experience can be reduced to a bullet point or two under skills.
Completely irrelevant job experience, if theres a lot of it, is also a bullet point.
This document is meant to be read by humans. It doesnt need world-class page
layout, but it should be reasonably easy-to-read; that means well-spaced text,
clear fonts, etc. Avoid things like tables with grid lines unless youre a
proficient graphic designer and know how to make them legible; 95% of tables
arent, and they do more harm than good. Also, a resum is an excellent place
to demonstrate that you have full command of the language that youre
applying in. If you dont speak like a native, run your text by someone who
does.
Bullet points versus paragraphs: Either is fine, so long as its informative. A
long list of papers youve published is surprisingly uninformative, although I
know some resume readers like it. A few lines explaining what youve been
working on for the past couple of years is completely critical; no matter how
many paper titles you give, I wont be able to fathom anything useful without
that.
The person reading your resum is not necessarily a specialist in your obscure
sub-field. Telling me that you implemented the G87 patch to the GRU echoing
transformer1 is kind of meaningless unless you give me some hint of what the
hell those are.
Those objective statements I dont read them. I dont know anyone who
does. I suppose theyre traditional, but unless they say To crush my enemies,
see them driven before me, and hear the lamentations of their women, theyre
pretty much just visual decoration. Do not stress about getting them perfect.
People say your resum needs to fit on one page. Damned if I know why; Im
perfectly able to turn a page. Although if there isnt something on the first page
that makes me care, I probably wont bother.
Really, unless someone is hiring on the anyone whos at least marginally
competent and/or has a pulse rule, whoever is reading your resum is looking
for one good thing, not a critical mass of so-so things. So padding with a lot of
boring stuff doesnt really help; one good explanation paragraph of something
cool even if its nontraditional, even if its just some wacky project youve
been doing in your spare time can.
1
This is gibberish, not CS, in case you were wondering. At least, I thinkits just
gibberish.
Heres a sample of a decent resume, with comments interspersed.
Joe R. Hominid
100 W. Aardvark Dr., Buggersville, CA 94043
tel: 1-415-555-1212
jrhomind@cs.buggersville.edu
http://www.joerandomhominid.net/
Objective
Education
Professional
Experience
Publications
Technical
Skills
Massively relevant? No. Shows that hes got a range of interests, can probably
think about things other than the narrowest details of his field, and is generally
kind of neat? Yes.
Disclaimer: This is not the official position of my employer, or anyone else except
me. I offer no guarantee whatsoever that if you follow this, you will get interviewed,
hired, even noticed by a potential or current employer, or even not be shot at by them.
Nor is any warranty, express or inferred, offered in conjunction with the reliability or
usefulness of this advice.
About these ads
Today's scientific question is: why are the resumes of programmers so uniformly awful?
And how do we fix them? The resumes, that is.
If you've spent more than approximately seventeen kiloseconds as an industry
programmer, you've had to review bad tech resumes. It's just part of the job.
Programmer resumes ultimately have to be gauged by programmers it takes one to
know one. So it winds up being a kind of karmic revenge on you for bad resumes
that you've written. C'mon, you know you've done it. You even knew it was bad when
you were writing it. Admit it! You listed HTML under programming languages, didn't
you? Argh!
So why are tech resumes so bad? You know what I mean. You see the craziest stuff on
resumes. Like the candidate who proudly lists every Windows API call she's ever used.
Or the candidate who lists every course he took starting from junior high school. Or the
one who lists college extension courses he took while doing time for armed robbery.
Or that really dumb guy who accidentally listed "work at IBM" as the objective on his
Amazon resume. Ha, ha! What a dork!
Oh wait that was me. D'oh. I sometimes refer to it as my "million dollar typo". It's
kind of a painful story, especially for my eardrums, since whenever I tell it people
predictably point at me and scream with hysterical girly laughter. Dammit. Not to
mention the fact that it cost me a fortune in stock-option valuation because I
applied before the IPO and was quite understandably ignored by Amazon recruiters
until I re-applied long after the IPO, this time saying that haha, no hard feelings, my
bad, I actually wanted to work for Amazon. Ahem.
But hey, I deserve what I got (in a word: "nothing"), because I was, if I may employ the
common parlance, an idjit. I think almost everyone's been guilty at one time or another
of idjicy when writing a tech resume, although maybe not quite as flagrant as mine was.
And if almost everyone's guilty of it, then they must be hard to write.
I think there are multiple root causes. One is that nobody teaches us what companies are
looking for. And we don't write resumes very often in our careers, so we don't get much
practice at it.
Another root cause is that much of the advice on resume-writing from other industries
doesn't necessarily carry over to tech resumes. I'll cover some of these mismatches in my
tips below.
Another minor, yet oddly persistent problem is that many candidates are raving
pathological liars. You'd be amazed at how many candidates tell me: "Oh, I just put that
buzzword on there for the recruiters." Needless to say, this response leads directly to the
time honored end-of-interview transmission code: DYHAQFM? ("Do you have any
questions for me?")
In spite of all these problems I hold out hope that it might be possible to get at
least somepeople to write better programmer resumes by giving a few free tips. You
never know. After all, I can't ask my favorite phone-screen questions anymore
candidates tell me they've read my blog. So maybe someone will pay attention to these
tips, too.
I'm just talking about software engineer resumes today, and specifically just the subset
intended for applying to companies that build their own software. I have no idea how
much (if at all) this stuff applies to resumes for other kinds of positions, or companies.
Maybe not much. Sorry!
Anyway, here are my resume-writing tips, which I'm giving directly to you, free of
charge, with no strings attached, because I care about you so much.
Tip #1: Nobody cares about you
Ha, ha! Saw that one coming, I'll bet.
Well, let's be a bit more precise: nobody cares about you yet. Not during resume
screening, anyway.
Resume screening is just pattern matching. People are trying to figure out if you have
the skills they're looking for. If they could do this reliably without human intervention,
so much the better. Screeners will like your resume best if it's easy to scan visually, and
stories about you and your fun-loving personality and fiercely loyal carnivorous
parakeet and year-long hiking expedition in Tibet and blah Blah BLAH just don't scan.
The output of the resume screening step is a decision: should they proceed with you or
decline you? Once that go/no-go decision is made and entered into the system, the
screeners want to forget all about you. Seriously. They need their cache cleared for the
next pattern-matching session. So anything you say about yourself anything that
differentiates you from a machine that can crank out beautiful code is just an
annoying and potentially harmful distraction. At best, the screener will ignore it. At
worst, they'll get mad at you and start grading more harshly.
So your best strategy is to avoid talking about yourself. All your hopes, fears, goals,
dreams, ambitions DELETE. (Your resume's going to get a lot shorter from these tips,
in case you were wondering.) Your cover letter? DELETE. Nobody cares! Your little
clever in-joke in your objective? DELETE. Especially that one. Resumes are not a time to
be funny. Believe me, your resume is probably already funny enough without any
additional effort on your part.
But what about your precious hobbies section, which identifies you as a well-rounded
and socially adjusted person of taste and culture? DELETE! Unless you have relevant
hobbies, that is. If your resume is borderline, and you say you're a World Origami
Federation grandmaster, then you obviously don't have enough time for programming,
so it'll likely get eighty-sixed. If your hobby is writing code, or administering a website,
or doing anything remotely computer-related, then it might tip the scales in your favor.
Otherwise, just don't mention it!
Face it: all the traditional advice about trying to convince the hiring manager that you're
a plucky, scrappy young individual from a farm in Alabama who's destined for greatness
on account of your Uncle Ted having given you that pep talk after you fell off your horse
when you were a kid that advice may as well have come from the back end of your
horse, because the hiring manager just wants to profile your current skill set. Mr. Plucky
goes into the Round File.
Don't get all depressed about this tip. People will start caring more about you as a
person in later phases of the recruiting process, particularly if you're one of those
candidates who doesn't really like showering.
Vice?F???**??didn?t?do?sh???for?ten?yea???
So write it in plain text. Yes. Text. You know. Like from a typewriter, or Windows
Notepad. ABCs, not PDF.
Don't expect any whitespace to make it through except newlines and single spaces. And
don't assume your resume will be viewed in a fixed-width font. If you make a nice pretty
formatted table using tab characters, it will look like ascii-art smoke signals by the time
a human being looks at it.
The maximum amount of ASCII art you can get away with, and even this is stretching it,
is hyphenated lines and bullets. For instance, this might be OK:
Education
--------* B.S. Computer Science, University of Wherever, 1997
* M.S. Resume Writing, 2003
graduated .357 magnum
element that makes you sterile if you accidentally ingest it. "Led" is the past tense of
"lead". Example:
* 1995-1996: lead a team doing blah blah blah.
we were...
The date is long past, and rest of the paragraph is in the past tense, so this is clearly one
of those people who don't know "lead" from "led". That, or she was trying to sterilize her
team members. Either way, it doesn't look good.
Keeping the tense consistent between sentences in a paragraph is related to the
important grammatical notion of "parallelism", in which you try to use the same
structure for clauses in a sentence. For instance, you should never say: "Job
responsibilities: pretty much doing nothing and pick my nose." Screeners will be much
more impressed if you use the parallel gerund form, picking your nose.
None of this advice applies to blogs, of course. If you find spelling or grammatical errors
in my blog, it's because I put 'em there on purpose. Pshaw.
To finish off our spiffy lead/led example, I should note that you can also use "lead" as a
noun, as in "tech lead", but you risk having it interpreted as "wanker", so read tip
5 before you attempt it.
So! Spell check and grammar check. Gotta have 'em. What about style?
I could of course rant at length about style, but it's pretty open-ended: people constantly
find clever new ways to be unclever. So I will restrict my stylistic remarks to the use of
the word "utilize". "Utilize" has been scientifically demonstrated to be used only by
stupid people, so if you use it you could easily be mistaken for one. A stupid person, that
is, not a scientist. "Utilize" is one of the all-time classic Stupidity Indicators, right up
there with saying "choo-choo-choo" out loud when you're thinking. Ever notice how only
stupid people make train noises when they're thinking? "Oh gosh, lemme think, chsh
chsh chsh... hmmm, choo choo choo..."
Yup. They sound like Winnie the Pooh, who as you may recall "thinks" by pounding his
extensive experience with observing work occurring. If all you did was analyze stuff,
assuming it wasn't some sort of rigorous statistical analysis worth bragging about, then
just take that whole item out of your tech resume.
Resume screeners keep an eye out for non-weasel words, aka Productivity Words. These
are words that you can't weasel out of when someone asks you about them. The best are
synonyms of "got real stuff done", including "coded", "implemented", "developed",
"delivered", and "launched".
It's perfectly OK to use "designed", as long as you follow it up with a Productivity Word.
If you design something without implementing it, then it's just a synonym for
"Proposed". If you prefer to design things that other people ultimately implement, then
you're quite possibly outstanding material for a company full of kneebiters. But a real
tech company like Amazon or eBay or Microsoft or whoever isn't going to hire you,
because they can find plenty of people who can both design things and implement them.
"Tech lead" is, sadly, another weasel word if you're applying for an individual
contributor position, because it's all too easy for your tech skills to rust into oblivion if
you spend long enough as a tech lead without helping with the coding. It's especially a
red flag for college hires who are talking about their group projects; weaker
programmers often gravitate towards the coordinator position on their project, and
wind up not having any real knowledge to show for their effort. Hence, if you're applying
for a programming position and you were a project leader of any kind, make sure to call
out whether you did any coding on the project, or screeners will assume that you did
none.
Tip #5: Avoid Wank Words
Wank Words are words that inflate your perceived importance (e.g. using "architected"
rather than "designed"), or words that have simply become synonyms, such as "Rational
UML Process", for the so-called work done by people who sit on their asses and don't
know how to code anymore.
Wank Words are worse than just devoid of content; they're active indicators of total
inactivity. Resume screeners either delete Wank Words or replace them with the word
"wank" (e.g., "Certified Wank Master"), which makes the resume a lot easier to scan.
"Advocate" is a common wank word, when it refers to a title or position. If it's a verb
then it's just a weasel word, but if you think it's your title, then you've inflated yourself
into Wanker territory. Either way, if you're walking around advocating stuff, it means
you're not working. Also, it means nobody listens to you, because if you possessed actual
leadership, people would just do what you recommended and then you wouldn't need
advocate it anymore. So "advocate" just means "wanker".
"Consultant" is often another absolutely outstanding synonym for "wanker". Now let me
just add, before I get stabbed to death by eager members of the heavily armed
Consultant Industry, that some consultants are great. The problem is that the odds are
completely stacked against you in tech resume screening. It's like fast-food experience
when applying to be a waiter at a fancy restaurant. It might have helped you hone your
waiter skills, but the odds are against it, and a lot of the art of resume screening is about
weighing odds.
The problem with "consultant" is that it has two meanings. It can either mean "person
who was hired on a contract basis to fill a coding need in the organization", or it can
mean "person hired to 'consult', aka 'wank', because the hiring organization is too
clueless to solve their own problems and too incompetent to retain even one full-time
staff member capable of helping them, so they turn to paid self-help." When you see the
word on a resume, it can be hard to distinguish which kind it is.
The all-time worst Wank Word is probably "Methodologist". It will definitely get your
resume circulated around at tech companies, but not for the reasons you were hoping.
Any sort of amusing synonym for "Methodologist", such as Scrum Master, generally has
the same effect.
Wank Words are a bit like the adjectives on restaurant menus meaningless fluff words
added in an attempt to make the dish sound tasty. You can get a much clearer idea of
what the hell it is that you're contemplating eating if you take all the adjectives out,
including nouns and noun-strings that serve as adjectives. For instance, House Cured
Spice Rubbed Apple Smoked Line Caught Columbia River Coho Salmon, when all the
Wank Words are removed, becomes "Salmon", which is of course the only part of the
description that you're actually eating. Depending on how you feel about what that
winds up being, you can replace all the adjectives with either "icky" or "yummy", e.g.
"Yummy yummy yummy yummy yummy yummy yummy yummy Salmon", or "Icky icky
icky icky icky icky icky icky Eggplant."
Hence, many wank-filled resumes wind up looking, after the screeners have marked
them up a bit, like this: "Senior wanker wanking for the Wank-Wank Institute of
Wankology on the wank wank wank project during which I wanked successfully with
seven other wanky wankers."
Well, "senior" is also kind of a wank word, but you get the idea.
Tip #6: Don't be a Certified Loser
Don't ever, ever use the word "certified" your resume. It's far and away one of the most
prominent red flags in resume screening, bordering on a dead-giveaway round-file 86that-bad-boy no-review-required situation, if you know what I mean. (If you don't know
what I mean, well, you know the old saying about not knowing who the sucker is at the
poker table.)
Certification is for the weak. It's something that flags you as a technician when you
really want to be an engineer. If you want to be a television repairman, you can become
certified in TV repair. If you want to work for Sony and design their next big-screen TV,
then you clearly don't need a busy-working-adults course on how to repair the fugging
things.
Same goes for tech certification. It means you had to take a course to learn something
you could have read in a book. If you know something, just say you know it, and then be
prepared to answer questions about it during your phone screens and/or interviews. If
you feel compelled to add that you're certified in said skill, it's just broadcasting that you
lack confidence in your own self-assessments, which doesn't help you in the slightest.
Seriously. Take all mentions of certifications off your tech resume. It's actively hurting
your chances of getting an interview.
Tip #7: Don't say "expert" unless you really mean it
The term "expert" makes experts' eyes glow red. It doesn't bother me personally, but I
know enough interviewers who care vastly about it that I'm advising you to steer clear. If
you say you're an expert in something, many interviewers take it to mean you claim to
have a bigger penis than they do, metaphorically speaking of course, and they're going to
pull out their still highly metaphorical measuring stick during the interview and size you
up. I employ this metaphor in its most gender-neutral possible interpretation, needless
to say.
A friend of mine at Amazon once told me that he takes resumes that list "expertise" and
he tells the candidate something along these lines: "Wow! You don't often find true
experts in fields like this. I feel like I've found a kindred spirit here. I don't often do this,
but I'm going to pick one of these technologies you're an expert at, and we're doing to do
an incredibly deep technical dive on the subject. But before I start, is there anything you
want to take off the resume?"
He says it's like truth serum. (Hi, H.B.!)
Tip #8: Don't tip your hand
Resume writing is just like dating, or applying for a bank loan, in that nobody wants you
if you're desperate. And there are dozens of sure-fire little ways to let it slip out
accidentally that you are, in fact, desperate, such as (just as one example) using the word
"desperate" on the actual resume. Don't do that.
Ideally you want to appear confident and competent. Regardless of your overall skill
level, from "Magna Cum Laude" to "Platyhelminthes", you'll want to appear confident
that you can function effectively at that level.
One way of sounding really desperate is to apply for 18 jobs in one sentence. "Objective:
Highly personable, results-oriented programmer seeking opportunity to lead or
contribute individually on projects or programs involving e-commerce, 3D multiplayer
gaming, b2b, web programming or client/server networking with database or other
persistence strategies while utilizing my broad background in problem-solving to do
pretty much any menial job you'll give me oh please please please hire me, I'm d-d-desdesp-waaaaaaah!" Works like a charm!
You can apply for 18 jobs, but you should send 18 different resumes, each targeted at
that job, and you shouldn't send them all at once.
Another really obvious sign of desperation is saying you're eager to learn. Never, ever
say "eager to learn" on a resume. In the ancient and occult secret rosetta-stone decoder
language of technical resume screeners everywhere, "eager to learn" means "unskilled
labor". Let's face it: if you were really eager to learn, you'd have done it by now.
"Fast learner" definitely another bad one. Doubly so, because it combines desperation
with ignorance; you wouldn't need to call it out if you could demonstrate something
concrete that you've already learned. If you have some true demonstration that you're a
fast learner, such as entering college at age 14, then sure, call it out. But the phrase "fast
learner" is a fast track to the Big Resume Bin in the Sky.
"Motivated" is another resume-screening synonym for "desperate". Don't say you're
motivated. It's like wearing a suit to the interview. It'll turn people off, guaranteed.
The best way to sound non-desperate is to be non-desperate. You can do that by
lowering your expectations, tightening your belt, and not applying for that job you know
you're not qualified for. Failing that, just make a nice clean resume that sticks the bare
facts about your skills and accomplishments.
This
to a DOS machine, but who have blah blah BLAH lather rinse repeat.
Resumes aren't a time for storytelling. Your goal, as a resume writer, should be to cover
your entire academic and professional career in a way that makes it as easy as possible
for screeners to match up your skills and accomplishments with things they recognize.
It's basically a checklist.
Don't go overboard on me and make a resume with so little information that nobody can
figure out what the heck you did on any of your projects I've seen that too. When in
doubt, provide more information, not less. There's nothing wrong with a long-ish
resume, despite what you might have heard from other industries. Just try to leave out
stuff that can be found through a search engine.
Tip #10: Don't be a lying scumbag
See, it's like this: you'll get caught. I'm still amazed at how many candidates think that
the resume game is some variant of bingo, wherein all the words on your resume have
optional invisible stars indicating whether you actually know something about that
word, and you just cross your fingers hope the interviewer shouts out Bingo! after
randomly selecting five starred words.
The weird thing is that so many people do it. Maybe they had to write a 10-line program
in Forth back in approximately fourth grade, so they shrug and list "Forth" in their
programming languages section, squeezed in at the end right between "HTML" and
"English", in the hope that it looks good but won't be selected for Interview Bingo. That,
folks, is tantamount to lying.
I do realize that "lying" is a rather harsh criticism, so I'm willing chalk it up to a
gentlemanly misunderstanding over the definition of the number "five". Many people
who rate themselves in some skill as being "average", or "intermediate", or "passably fair
to middling", or 4 through 6 on a 1-10, have redefined those terms to mean "have been
briefly exposed to the concept, but don't remember a single thing about it now except
the name." Really. I'm not making this up.
Seeing as candidates are redefining the number five to mean "one", I figure I can
At the risk of boring you to death, I'll reiterate that I'm not speaking for Google here. It's
not actually possible to speak for a whole company on a subject as diverse and
opinionated as resume writing (or screening), but even if it were possible, I wouldn't be
doing it.
This concludes today's little set of free, personal tips on writing programmer resumes.
Thanks for reading!
DYHAQFM?
P O S T E D B Y S T E V E Y E G G E AT 9 : 1 7 P M
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https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-get-my-resume-shortlisted-by-Google-for-theposition-of-software-engineer
4 Answers
There's nothing special about Google that wouldn't apply to Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook,
or another major tech company. So that's the good news.
There are really three parts to this answer: getting the right experience, creating a good
resume, and submitting it the right way.
Getting the Right Experience
If you come from a good school / work for a well respected company, that'll help you a ton.
But anyone can boost their resume with some projects.
Build some iPhone apps, web apps, whatever! Honestly it doesn't matter that
much what you're building as long as you're building something. Good
languages include Java, Python, Ruby on Rails, C++, etc. I would encourage you
to stay away from .NET. Not because .NET isn't a perfectly good tool, but there's
a stigma.
Doing these projects is especially important if you're, say, a programmer for
CitiBank. You don't have the right "pedigree." But projects will help you a ton.
You can build a fairly meaty project in one weekend. This means that with about
3 - 4 weekends of work, you can make your resume go from so-so to fantastic.
Seriously -- I've seen lots of people do this.
Participate in hackathons.
Build a website / portfolio. Show your experience.
How can I get my resume shortlisted by Twitter, Quora and Airbnb for the position of
software engineer?
What should I do to get my resume shortlisted by Amazon and Google (Canada) for
an IT project manager position?
How can I make my resume get shortlisted in Google for job? I have 5 years of IT
Service Industry experience in Java/J2EE, Struts, SQL, Androi...
Cosmin Negruseri, ex Google engineer, worked on Ads, Search and Google Code Jam
Written May 19, 2012
The easiest way as of now, is to perform well in Google APAC university hiring program.
Or you can also get your resume shortlisted, by getting reffered by one of the current google
employee.
If you have some technical experience under your belt, and you get lucky, your resume
might also get shortlisted from their public job portal. Keep checking their job portal from
time-to-time.
10.4k Views View Upvotes
This applies to all positions and all companies. It is not just specific to your requirement.
Hope it helps.
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