I never look too hard for red flags in a resume - the candidate has already spent hours carefully removing them. Interviews are much more interesting in that regard.
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Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?
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Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's your definition of "short stint"? Less than 1 year?
It depends on how many jobs you've had and how old you are. If you have 3 jobs each being 1 year that would be a red flag. If you have 10 years of experience, 1 job for a year and the other 2 split across 9 years I would be less concerned. An outlier versus a pattern is where I see a bad situation versus a concern for hire. Personally, spending <18 months in a company or on a team doesn't yield enough time to accompl…
It also highly depends on where you were working. Bouncing between Google and Amazon and Cisco and IBM at 9 month intervals is a pretty big WTF. Going between a few series A startups in the same period of time might be perfectly explainable.
Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?
#231. 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, one in gaming, without specific pursuit of interest.
4. Have a big, long "technology used" for a project. For example, "technology used" in a project includes "Python, Java, Javascript, HTML, CSS, jQuery, SQL, C#, Django, Messaging, C, Bash.."
5. Too specific on trivial details in a large project, such as "work on JSON network request and return error codes to frontend".
6. When sending your document, try sending a PDF but not a .docx
Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?
#24In general, anything that is a red flag is probably something I would just clarify in a 20 minute phone screen. Most of the time, what looks like a red flag on a resume has a good explanation. That being said, the two that come to mind that I've seen the most of are:
- Not taking direct ownership of achievements (e.g. I was part of a team that did x). I don't care what your team did, I care what you did even if it's less impressive.
- Recent Coding Bootcamps. Not necessarily a no go, but I've had very mixed results with this one, some good, some bad. This will probably get me to look at what you did prior to software development and evaluate if you are a capable person in general.
Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?
#25- 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…
> 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. This is a self inflicted problem across all companies. As long as companies are not willing to pay the market salary, people will move elsewhere. > - poor formatting. If they don’t care enough to make their resume look clean and neat, why would I expect them to care enough to be tho…
> This is a self inflicted problem across all companies. As long as companies are not willing to pay the market salary, people will move elsewhere.
Why do you say this? Surely underpaying people is one way to make them leave but not the only reason. Some people think “the grass is always greener” elsewhere. Others don’t last long because they are not easy to work with. Others are not great employees and so are encouraged to move along sooner rather than later. Lots of possible reasons. Most do not signal the type of person I want to hire.
Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?
#26Anything containing Ninja or Wizard
Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?
#27* Lots of typos. One is fine. Too many suggests someone who is poor at English communication. It doesn't matter how good someone is, if they build the wrong thing.
* Generic boring template-ish resume. Usually these guys don't care much for craftsmanship.
* Too much specialization. 80% specialization is fine, just not 100%.
* For startups, a history of only working at big companies. Especially at the management level, where they tend to overspend and frustrate programmers.
* For larger teams, someone who has a history of only working solo. Some of these guys refuse to communicate, attend daily stand ups, or do daily commits.
* Putting a salary history in your resume.
Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?
#28Experience in Microsoft products. Joking not joking
Is c# a microsoft product? You are missing plenty of people if that's the case.
Do not underestimate the importance of Unix familiarity. I encounter engineers every day that don’t understand command-line flags or how to use the shell, and a big reason for this is people coming from a IDE/Windows/MSFT world that does not teach these skills. There’s a considerable gap of training between “C# developer who has only used windows” and “developer who has used C# and has used a command line”.
Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?
#29The most recent entry being your own one-man shop that you’re president and CEO of. Github accounts with recent “my first project” forks. Gaps in employment. Buzzwords. Expert in too many things.
Why would you treat gaps in employment as red-flag ? Do you expect everyone whom you are interviewing to be like you ?
Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?
#30I used to hire at a startup. Following are the things I usually looked at. These are not sorted by severity, some are red flags but others are just irrelevant. * not following instruction in the job advert * CC resume to many recipients * weird sender name in email * compressed resume * begging for job in the cover letter * photo * "career objective" * personal information * broken links * clear lack of personalizati…
> "career objective"
is interesting to me because that's usually one of the first things I'm asked when interviewing.