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Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

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Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#161
Dude, you made Hapland!

Hapland aside, out of 5 conventional sections - Executive summary, Education, Skills, Work Experience, Miscellania - you have only one. It's not clear what you are looking for, what it is that you know and at what level. Single page is a good format, but it's secondary to the info presented and it's incomplete.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP may not be constitutionally capable of finding little nuggets of positivity from the midst of huge failures. Already responded to someone else, but the OP was told to add the outcomes, not just what they did. Sometimes there are no positive outcomes to list, and listing negative ones just drags everyone down. Putting "implemented $FOO" may be all you can reasonably put in writing.

Sure, I have one 6 month job where all I can reasonably list is "implemented audit logging across all our projects to ensure HIPAA compliance." It was the most demoralizing job I've ever had, and I'm grateful that I WAS laid off (easy to say now that I have a new job). Making every line on your resume a banger may be impossible. But if you've got job after job of "implemented SAAS app in Django", it starts to say som…

> The outcome of the Salesforce failure above was millions of wasted dollars. The outcome of my refactoring our data model was a cost savings of $350k/year.

How did you learn about that number? Where did you pull it from?

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#163
post #44
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great advice, not negative at all. Thanks so much!

Not the OP, but yes - your CV should convey impact , not just you reliably showed up for work.

This is like saying your CV should be an equivalent of a million dollars which you could literally exchange in a bank for money.

In other words, it would be good to clearly show impact - it would be so useful for the reader to have the final result without having to figure that out himself - but unfortunately it's usually hard enough to find good data for such claims, so anybody actually putting them there is automatically suspicious.

Unless, of course, there's a plausible algorithm for getting such data which I'd like to hear.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#164
post #158

The worst thing about your CV is the non-chronological layout and the second item the "University of Bedfordshire" A lazy recruiter will see that as a watermark as your education and assume the rest is amateur stuff. This makes it look like you have less than one year experience. For some companies/recruiters they often like to see month and year for each position. It can be a red flag as it looks like hiding of care…

> The worst thing about your CV is the non-chronological layout CVs used to have a choice of layouts, you write in a form you prefer. What's wrong with non-chronologicals now?

I have over 200 resumes to go over this week for an open position. If I have to decipher your narrative it's going in the 'no' pile. Effective communication is a critical skill and evaluating that starts here.

I'm not calling anything "wrong" but I definitely don't have time to have tea with your branding or whatever.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#165

Your CV doesn't tell me anything you accomplished, it just lists things you did. Hiring managers want to know the impact of your work, not a page of bullets that all say: "I did a thing." Picking one at random: "Worked on frontend and backend systems for this health tech company." OK... and what impact did your work have? Can you cite a qualitative improvement on the business due to your work? If not, can you at leas…

Why do hiring managers like such claims? They're all fake.

Because if you can or are willing to BS to make yourself look good, then you can or are willing to BS to make your manager look good.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#166
Your 2022 work experience is so well written and impressive, which is partly why last year you had no trouble finding employment. Now, contrast that with the 2 bullet points in 2023; "Used C#, Unity." is an uninspiring way to describe your year of work. In 2024, your 2023 section will weight more than your 2022 section.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#167
post #52

No way you are the author of Hapland, thank you I had lot of fun. I don't have anything more to say than what has already been said in this thread, I would just recommend modernizing your CV by using Canva [1] , the site has lots of free themes and they are generally well done. [1] - https://www.canva.com/

I couldn't find "Resumes" on that site, and it seems to be for things with lots of graphics?

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#168

I do hiring in the US not the UK, but I'm only (I'm guessing) a few years older than you so you probably had the "keep it to one page" rule pounded into your head. I get a lot of resumes, and that is definitely not the case anymore. Two to three pages is perfectly fine. I would suggest: 1. Add a list of skills and/or technologies you're particularly good in. You can include stuff you've used but aren't current in, bu…

Having #1 and #2 on the first page seems to work well for my resume.

I added a bullet point list of groups of related technologies, each group paired with a number of years of experience. I had feedback from several headhunters that this list had really helped them promote my resume.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#169

You aren't. The economy is absolute garbage right now. I'm in the US and the situation is similar here. I've never had an issue finding a job before either, but I've been unemployed since the middle of 2023. Assuming you aren't under financial hardship, my advice is to spend more time on your hobbies and check back in around July/August. That is when the layoffs are projected to drop and hiring is expected to keep up…

Every time I bring up this uneasy feeling of everything feeling like it's going to crumble soon, I get employment data hurtled at me and the stock market thrown in my face. Maybe Canada is worse due to how insane housing is but for the average person life does not feel anywhere like it used to pre pandemic at least.

Numbers are very easy to manipulate, and are almost never predictive when removed from the original context.

Low unemployment means nothing without also referencing workforce participation rates. Economic data is also effectively useless if, for example, inflation data excludes common expenses like groceries, housing, used cars, etc.

I don't think this was always the case, but economic data today is so easily gamed that its little more than political theater.

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