Why You Didn't Get The Interview, Part II

I wouldn't waste my time on the formality of a traditional cover letter with all the "To Whom It May Concern" garbage. Just a few sentences, keep it loose.

In some cases, maybe, but there are genuinely people who have worked in lots of technologies, and others who have stuck with the same stack (in other fields, this is also known as the fox vs. hedgehog paradigm). Making both types list the same number of technologies elides an useful distinction.

I also find it somewhat naive to advise “selectivity” and “focus” in resume writing, if said resume is then filtered by machines or humans doing keyword spotting for specific technologies (and implicitly assuming you could not possibly learn them if you haven’t listed them on your resume).

What I’d try to do is an expansive listing, but providing perspective. In my case, I’ve written C++ pretty much every day for the last 25 years; I wrote a substantial amount of Tcl/Tk for 3 years, 15 years ago; I used PostScripts for 2 smallish tasks, both of which left the customer amazed and happy. I feel entirely justified in listing all three languages, as long as appropriate qualifiers were added.

Resumes are not the future of search for devs. Hiring managers want to see other things beyond your self-assessed experience levels and a laundry list of buzzwords. GeekRez aggregates data from a handful of places like GitHub and/or BitBucket, Stack Overflow, Meetup, LinkedIn as well as other relevant links a job seeker would provide (publications, blogs, etc.).

This is all brought into a single page with collapsible tabs as a public profile for a potential employer (or even someone you might be doing a side project with) to review.

Devs can use it as a way to differentiate themselves from the competition and show off the strength of these accounts - obviously there would be no advantage for devs that have weak associated accounts to use the service.

It is also set up so a manager could view several profiles side-by-side, to compare say 5 candidate profiles at once. Instead of looking at 5 PDFs and clicking on a handful of URLs in each PDF to get the full picture, it's all brought together on one screen.

Feel free to check it out now, whether you are a dev or someone who will be hiring them. I'll post about it here on HN when we launch officially.

The news a couple weeks ago about Google and their alleged use of trick questions and such hopefully raised awareness of the problems surrounding tech interviews, the value of GPAs and majors, etc., for all the other companies. Google is one of a handful of shops that shape how others think they should do things.

As I mentioned in another comment, managers today are more keen on seeing code. A resume can make whatever unverified claims you want to make. I mentioned a project I'm working on (http://geekrez.com) that is hoping to change how talent represents themselves to hiring entities and somewhat trying to replace the resume submission process with items managers want to see.

A Stack Overflow reputation score is not a self-assessed expertise in a specific technology, but rather something that is assessed by others. Saying you write good code is one thing, but let's see what you have in your GitHub or Bitbucket to prove what you are saying. These are the types of things that will get devs hired in the years to come.

Personal references are a whole other story. If someone can't find 3 people to say something nice about their work, they shouldn't be in the industry. The only thing that is valuable about references is when a handful (3-5 usually) of people provide very consistent information - to be more specific, consistent with both positive and negative items. I know when I hear a few people share the same strengths and weaknesses about a candidate that I'm probably getting a pretty good and honest assessment (or they have all been superbly prepped).