Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 138 posts

Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?

#121

Post by cimmanom »

bb88 wrote: post #113
matt_the_bass wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your follow up. 5 jobs in 22 years doesn’t seem that extreme to me, especially if you had a legit story to go along with it. Do you think the company you work for now only wants you for 1.1 years? Out of curiousity, in what region do you live?

I'm in the Pacific Northwestish area. I'm a consultant these days, so yeah 1.1 years is actually a long time.

As a consultant, I suggest not putting each job on your resume as a separate gig. List "2012-present Software Engineering Consultant" and then bullet out your most important projects and achievements under that.

Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?

#122

Post by cimmanom »

Orthodoxy wrote: post #76

> "many short stints of employment" I change jobs all the time because I work on what is interesting or highly paying for as long as it entertains me or makes me a killing. Startups go bankrupt all the time, and big companies will fire tens of thousands of people at the drop of a hat. Pensions will be canceled, jobs restructured, and bonuses occasionally distributed in lieu of raises. The company has no loyalty to yo…

It's your prerogative to move on. It's my prerogative not to end a 3-month search by hiring someone whom it'll take 4 months to get up to speed on our codebase when they'll be gone in 9 months and I'll have to do this all over again.

Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?

#123

Post by viraptor »

scarface74 wrote: post #106
viraptor wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's good information! One thing I don't really agree with is: > Keyword stuffing. This typically means the candidate is writing their resume for a search engine. If you're applying to a larger company, your CV is likely to be imported into their internal system, often semi-automatically. Sometimes the keywords are not for the public search engine, but for the initial HR's sorting.

If you are dependent on submitting your resume to an applicant tracking system and hoping it will stand out to someone in HR, you're doing it wrong (tm). I haven't blindly submitted a resume in the 20 years I've been working. I've always used recruiters or an inside contact.

In some situations you can. In others you move 11 timezones, have no local network, and need to find a job. It's not the best way, but it's not wrong.

Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?

#124

Post by ManlyBread »

matt_the_bass wrote: post #3

- lots of short stints employment. It costs a lot to find, hire and on board someone. Ideally I’d like them to stick around for a while. - lists of buzzwords without clear descriptions of what they actually did. I don’t care about “fashionable” terms. I wanted heard about concrete things they’ve done. - poor formatting. If they don’t care enough to make their resume look clean and neat, why would I expect them to car…

I have two "short stints" on my resume.

Staying in these companies would hurt me a lot more in the long term. It's hard to convince the next employer that you're worth hiring when you're out of touch with modern development practices and your relevant experience is limited to personal projects you did after 8h of wading through mountains of spaghetti code.

Last 6 months I have been working on a system which uses SQL stored procedures for everything (including business logic and reinventing parsing of XML and JSON - poorly). Every single time I mention this solution the interviewers raise their eyebrows. Not a single interviewer has expressed any positive feelings about the solution.

Am I really expected to stick along working on such an atrocity just so I could put >1 years of a resume?

Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?

#125

Post by zimpenfish »

handbanana wrote: post #116
bwang29 wrote: post #23

1. Some links on the resume (github, portfolio, linkedIn) return 404 or access denied. This is suprisingly common. 2. Little facts / actual performance data, and over use of words such as "passionate", "strong", "self-motivated", "success", "thrive", etc when describing themselves in the resume. 3. Changing jobs very frequently and no consistent theme in jobs, say 5 jobs in 5 years, one in A.I., one in e-commerce, on…

Workaround for #4. List all relevant tech at/near the top of your resume under a section called something like "Skills" or likely a better name than that. Try to be as concise as possible and avoid going too granular (listing just SQL vs TSQL, MYSQL, XYZSQL). I do something similar and avoid listing the tech used for jobs. If I was versed in many stacks/frameworks, I might have a bullet point/mention under each posit…

> Try to be as concise as possible and avoid going too granular (listing just SQL vs TSQL, MYSQL, XYZSQL).

Tried that. Got endless calls from recruiters who assumed I knew Oracle, Sybase, MSSQL, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?

#126

Post by handbanana »

zimpenfish wrote: post #125
handbanana wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Workaround for #4. List all relevant tech at/near the top of your resume under a section called something like "Skills" or likely a better name than that. Try to be as concise as possible and avoid going too granular (listing just SQL vs TSQL, MYSQL, XYZSQL). I do something similar and avoid listing the tech used for jobs. If I was versed in many stacks/frameworks, I might have a bullet point/mention under each posit…

> Try to be as concise as possible and avoid going too granular (listing just SQL vs TSQL, MYSQL, XYZSQL). Tried that. Got endless calls from recruiters who assumed I knew Oracle, Sybase, MSSQL, etc.

What did you do, upload your resume somewhere lots of recruiters have access to?

Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?

#127

Post by handbanana »

cimmanom wrote: post #120
handbanana wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Workaround for #4. List all relevant tech at/near the top of your resume under a section called something like "Skills" or likely a better name than that. Try to be as concise as possible and avoid going too granular (listing just SQL vs TSQL, MYSQL, XYZSQL). I do something similar and avoid listing the tech used for jobs. If I was versed in many stacks/frameworks, I might have a bullet point/mention under each posit…

Single page resumes made sense when it was typical to stay in the same job for decades. They're not much use for explaining 20 years of experience and growth with 2-4 years at each stop.

I guess this goes back to being concise. I comfortably fit 5 jobs and volunteer work on mine. I have no issue getting interviews or offers. I know others who stick to 1 page that have decades of experience, and similarly don't have issues finding work.

Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?

#128

Post by scarface74 »

viraptor wrote: post #123
scarface74 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are dependent on submitting your resume to an applicant tracking system and hoping it will stand out to someone in HR, you're doing it wrong (tm). I haven't blindly submitted a resume in the 20 years I've been working. I've always used recruiters or an inside contact.

In some situations you can. In others you move 11 timezones, have no local network, and need to find a job. It's not the best way, but it's not wrong.

Even in that situation, I would reach out to a local independent recruiter I. The area where I was looking for a job.

Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?

#129

Post by cema »

reitanqild wrote: post #84
jchung wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make sure you are only including positions that help you. Common mistake I see is including tiny 2-3 month long positions, without considering whether including them is additive or not. It's often not.

What should you do about the time in between then? Personally I'd consider undescribed gaps of 3 months in between the interesting projects unusual. In fact I'd rather see "waiting tables" rather than nothing.

  I'd rather see "waiting tables" rather than nothing
But why? Maybe the person used that time to study technologies, to update her skill set. Maybe she used that time to relax and get a long deserved vacation. (Or a myriad other possibilities.) What is wrong with that?

Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?

#130

Post by walrus01 »

sdfhbdf wrote: post #119
walrus01 wrote: post #64

If the person has a personal domain such as firstname@lastname.net: no tls1.2 smtp transport negotiation in email headers. No evidence of proper spf and dkim setup.

Wow so you just expect everyone to be an email expert?

If they're going to run their own email server, yes, otherwise they have the easy choice of pointing the mx record for their domain at office365, Google, fastmail or another third party service that will handle all the complicated smtp administration for them.

Either doing their DIY properly or outsourcing it for $8/mo to someone who can do it properly says they actually care about mail delivery working, and their domain not ending up in peoples' spam traps (ex: try sending mail to someone from a domain with no spf record).

Post reply on HN