Why won't anyone talk to me? What recruiters look for in a resume

I've seen good resumes and had my boss say "but he only went to .." And I didn't even read the college section So education can matter until it gets to the right people. It's an easy filter, sort of, since rankings are pretty bogus anyway.

Wow, if you are skilled technically and aren't annoyed by constant recruiter outreach, you are doing something majorly wrong. I'd also say technical recruiters are also doing something majorly wrong if your resume reflects your abilities.

If you've coded anything that does something interesting, you should have no problem finding interviews, and frankly offers.

If you haven't coded anything interesting, then why would anyone hire you? Build something or work on an open source project.

I suggest taking your own project from start to production - this is the type of general knowledge and competence startups look for.

My solution to your initial problem is to have a "note to recruiters" linked prominently at the top of my resume (and linkedin). It covers what kind of places I'd be a good fit for and vice versa. Things like I am not going to update the recruiter's database, tell me company names, small companies/startups etc.

It becomes very apparent very quickly which recruiters have made any effort to read it and if they can't do that, they are unlikely to be paying much attention to their clients either. Since I run my own mail server, I then add the most egregious cases to a block list. (They also tend to be repeat offenders so that problem is solved too.)

When recruiting I look at the initial acronym soup. I especially like people who categorise what they are very good at versus ok. Then I look everything else for substantiation and to get a flavour of experience. For example is networking there, mobile, low level languages (eg C), web stuff, Python/Ruby etc. It is generally a good idea to include the acronym soup for each item in the resume (eg if doing a network server say what language and frameworks were used).

Open source stuff is excellent because it is actually concrete - something I can look at, and far more informative than generic text elsewhere can ever be.

What I am usually ultimately looking for is "smart and gets things done". (Joel has articles with more detail.)

The general bad things people do are what appears to be a bulk send, really long but irrelevant cover letters, and not substantiating things. I was looking at a resume this morning where C++ was listed as the first skill yet could find no mention of it anywhere else. It immediately makes me sceptical of everything else listed.

Yeah these points are valid (although it should be noted that they align with the author's background - sorry the TripAdvisor mention made me curious)

I think they are more applicable to early career.

In my experience, connections and relationships are way more powerful than any of the stuff mentioned with the baseline that you are competent and relatively easy to work with.

I feel you. For sure, most recruiters are basically trying to fill a position - they work for commissions, and the hiring company, not you. Expecting a recruiter who contacted you to represent your interests is like expecting the lawyer for a company suing you to give you legal advice.

I think your expectation is a little off, and you may view it differently if you viewed them as someone you are doing business with, not an advisor. When someone is trying to sell you a car, they will butter you up the same way.

There ARE humane recruiters who can be more representative of your needs, but they don't usually cold call with specific positions in mind. They build a network of good candidates and people who would have good referrals, then reach out to them when they have a position that's a good fit.

Of course, you've proved my point above :) It doesn't take much to get smothered by recruiters.

Frankly I think the original article is linkbait. It presupposes a problem that does not exist.