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

How to write a developer resume that will get you hired

slideshare.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–208 of 208 posts

Re: How to write a developer resume that will get you hired

#201

Post by RogerL »

FlyingLawnmower wrote: post #116
gedrap wrote: post #91

At our university, University of Manchester, we had a careers service drone telling us to list your experience working as a waiter and highlight skills you learned there ('communicating in stressful environment' and what not). Dear young readers. Seriously, don't do that. Waste of space at best. Looks just stupid at worst. It doesn't tell me anything about your ability as a programmer at all. Description about a week…

Do you (or anyone else reading this thread) have advice for current college students looking for internships or their first full time job? Unfortunately, I don't have the breadth of experience detailed in the slideshow to even justify a multi-page CV. In my environment, we work with a 1 page resume and I have a variety of side projects I've hacked on, but it's very hit and miss -- some recruiters care a lot, others c…

I can't speak for everyone, but we get it (that you don't have experience to show). You are a student at the beginning of your career. Just be honest and enthusiastic. As the parent says, blathering about your experience selling coffee is pretty pointless. Hey, if you started a coffee cart, that could be interesting to tout.

If you don't have anything for your resume, all you can be is smart and engaging.

If you still have time in school, picking up an interesting project is very worthwhile. We could do side projects for credit. I don't really care if you wrote it in Javascript, if it is web enabled, or you did math with matlab; just give me something to talk to you about, and I can figure out if the several fairly well defined projects I have in mind could be tackled by you.

In other words, I don't look for a college grad with no work experience to be able to lead a team, design a product, and so on. I have a bunch of 'turn the crank' work, and a few challenges to throw out as well. I don't want to babysit you, but I also want you to ask questions and learn. Part of interning is giving back to the community, but part of it is I have work I need done. So, when I read your CV and/or talk to you, I just want to figure out if you can perform at that capacity.

If there is nothing left to talk about I resort to asking about your coursework. 'What courses are you taking'. 'Blah, and foodle, and a compiler course.' Okay, can you tell me what a recursive descent parser is? uhh...I've never heard of that" That is an actual conversation I had with somebody recently. I blame the school more than the person, but no offer was made. I wasn't going to have the candidate code a parser for me, either for the interview or the job, but I just wanted to have a conversation about anything where I could probe knowledge (less important) and ability (more important). Find an area that know something about, find the limit, inject a new piece of information, and see if they can assimilate it. If they can, that's an offer. If not, probably not.

To be fair, you'll probably get a lot of "code 'delete_node' for a binary tree type questions, so like it or not brush up on that crap.

Beyond that, for me at least, the CV isn't very important. If everything you list is about networking and databases, and I am looking for graphics programming, I scratch my head as to why you are applying and probably move to the next resume. A fit in interests is important, after all.

Re: How to write a developer resume that will get you hired

#202

Post by S4M »

infinite8s wrote: post #199
S4M wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I put it because I thought it would be relevant, but apparently it wasn't. How could I know beforehand what will not be relevant or interesting to whoever will read my cv?

Well, if your github had nothing interesting why would you think it was relevant?

When I said "nothing interesting", it means that I don't have an open source project people are using, and I am not a massive contributor. However, I have some ELisp code to help me write Python a bit faster, a contribution in the Rust language - I dabbed with Rust once, stumbled into a problem, asked on IRC and they told me "oh, it's a bug, add this one line here and push it" - and couple of other stuff, so while it doesn't make me a top coder, I hope it proves I am someone curious and it would give the interviewer extra stuff to ask ("I see you that played with Rust, what do you think of it?"), just as the presentation said, but sadly that didn't happen.

Re: How to write a developer resume that will get you hired

#203

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

Retric wrote: post #179
Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hoops? Did you read what I wrote? I suggest 5 minutes of CV tailoring. You think that's jumping through hoops?

Yes, my last job search consisted of posting my resume on one and only one job board. I then received a deluge of phone calls and multiple job offers soon after that. In the end if you’re depending on people reading a job posting you’re already missing out on a lot of highly qualified applicants. If you then want tailored resumes your mostly excluding the type of people you actually want working for you. PS: And no I…

CVs posted to job boards (in the UK at least) aren't looked at by companies but by agencies. Those agencies call you and do all the pre-screening (and CV tweaking) before they send the CVs to people like me.

When I've looked for a job I'll always say to the agent I'll tweak my CV myself because I'd rather I did it than them (I've seen some horribly butchered ones come through - in those cases I can normally tell it was the agency and don't hold it against the candidate but sometimes that may not be the case).

Essentially I suspect everything I asked for happened with you, it just may not have been done by you.

Salary I totally agree on - I post a salary range for the role (usually a range but also dependent on experience) and want to know candidate salary expectations before hand. If we're not happy with what the candidate is looking for based on what their rough level of experience I wouldn't interview.

Re: How to write a developer resume that will get you hired

#204

Post by talmand »

DigitalJack wrote: post #181
talmand wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is helpful advice, to get a job from that recruiter. But what I'm saying is that this is an example of the games that job seekers have to play with different recruiters that have their own methods and agendas. It's also possibly a difference between Europe and United States hiring methods, which could be a misunderstanding on my part. But you've mentioned part of the problem, "Recruiters don't have the experience…

There is nothing magic about it. It's common sense. You first make it through a basic keyword search, then someone sifts through those results for basic relevancy, then you get an interview. You are the one seeking something here, lost in a pile of other seekers. Why wouldn't you do everything you could to make it easy for the person looking at your CV to pass it on to the next stage of vetting. Why would someone bot…

Basing selection heavily on keywords when the gatekeeper doesn't understand the keywords is a problem. That is the problem I'm referring to. I don't know how else to explain this.

I don't disagree with you that using proper keywords is common sense. I'm not complaining about that in any way. But, as it has been pointed out in many places, stuffing your resume with keywords is a bad idea. So, I simply cannot list off every single little thing I know, I have to cull it down somehow. If I didn't find the magic pattern required for the gatekeeper when choosing my keywords then my resume gets passed over. For example, if a developer specializes in AngularJS, among many other things, then they are likely to list that and leaving off Javascript. It's only common sense because AngularJS IS Javascript. Remember, too many keywords is bad. What if that developer happens to specialize in multiple Javascript frameworks? Remember, too many keywords is bad. If the gatekeeper doesn't understand that AngularJS is Javascript, but fails to see the Javascript keyword then they may disregard. That's a simple example but could easily be understood to be possible.

Another example, how many times has a recruiter mistaken Java and Javascript as the same thing? To me, that's a problem that potentially keeps good candidates from being matched to jobs they are good matches for. Good candidates that the hiring manager never even knows about.

Re: How to write a developer resume that will get you hired

#205

Post by simi_ »

FlyingLawnmower wrote: post #116
gedrap wrote: post #91

At our university, University of Manchester, we had a careers service drone telling us to list your experience working as a waiter and highlight skills you learned there ('communicating in stressful environment' and what not). Dear young readers. Seriously, don't do that. Waste of space at best. Looks just stupid at worst. It doesn't tell me anything about your ability as a programmer at all. Description about a week…

Do you (or anyone else reading this thread) have advice for current college students looking for internships or their first full time job? Unfortunately, I don't have the breadth of experience detailed in the slideshow to even justify a multi-page CV. In my environment, we work with a 1 page resume and I have a variety of side projects I've hacked on, but it's very hit and miss -- some recruiters care a lot, others c…

I do, I do. https://github.com/andreis/interview

Re: How to write a developer resume that will get you hired

#206

Post by talmand »

Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #153
talmand wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I get out of that first statement is that you do tend to disregard unless the candidate knows exactly how to describe the related subjects on their CV in a way that makes you happy. And you don't see the problem that developers might have with that? Especially when they don't know the secret method of describing things to make recruiters happy? As for the rest, I think it's reasonable to assume that a candidate…

I think it's OTT describing it as a secret. If a job spec lists a skill, highlight where you've used it so I can see your experience. That's not difficult or counter intuitive or unreasonable. Realistically I can't interview everyone and it wouldn't be in anyone's interest to do so. The current stats I have say I will first interview one in four screened CVs. Out of those about one in three will get a second intervie…

I'm not disagreeing with your first point.

As for interviewing people after the first selection round based off of resumes; that's a totally different situation and I can't say I disagree with your viewpoint.

Re: How to write a developer resume that will get you hired

#207

Post by agumonkey »

nemanja wrote: post #194
agumonkey wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intentional meaning her toying with me to test my stability ? Any way I failed hard, I was in a bad place and immature. Of course I would do everything differently. Acceptance of the game instead of anger.

Yeah, it's possible - HR should screen for cultural fit and sometimes they may pull a trick or two like that. I've never toyed with applicants per se, but would occasionally ask them to explain me something that is either very simple or that they know very well, to test for condescension and arrogance. Bottom line is that if someone shows arrogance in an interview, they will likely suck to work with and unlikely to b…

It's funny, because I'm rarely arrogant in the workplace, I love sharing, but when I'm denied very simple job offers by someone who doesn't seem to understand what we're talking about it rapidly grind my gears to that sad point.

Re: How to write a developer resume that will get you hired

#208

Post by simi_ »

goombastic wrote: post #133

Also, never ever apply through one of the career portals companies setup (taleo and the like). Having applied for tens of perfectly matching jobs at MS, Google and others through their portals, all I can say is they never call you if you apply through their online resume management system. Taleo etc are a resume blackhole, and once they have your resume in their DB, the third party consultants cannot help you either…

I can only speak for Google, but I did get an interview for a SEng internship with them after applying online. However, for big companies it's virtually impossible to not find a friend of a friend who works there in order to get a direct introduction.
Post reply on HN