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

While I've never been a recruiter, I've been a hiring manager at some mid-sized companies and worked closely with their recruiters. Side projects or attempted startups are great, but I've seen countless resumes where they get completely overlooked because of how they appeared on the resume.<p>Ultimately whether I saw a resume was dependent on some sort of subjective pattern matching done by the recruiter. This pattern matching is usually primitive and generally is just a check on whether your "years of experience" is within striking distance of whatever was in the job listing (e.g. "Senior Software Engineer" that required 5+ years of experience, the recruiter would filter anyone with less than 3 years), and (sometimes) would check whether your resume contained enough buzzwords. Yes, this is awful, and no, not every organization does it this way, although a lot do.<p>So while listing side projects on your resume is good, it's important to get it past the recruiter screen <i>by translating those side projects into years of experience.</i> Rather than just a single line in your resume like, "Side Projects: Enguarde.ly, a Link-Sharing Site for Fencers," find some way to list Enguarde.ly as experience. For example, list the time you worked on your side projects as experience as a "Web Consultant," put Enguarde.ly as a 'portfolio project' and describe the technology you used to build it.<p>Once your resume actually gets to a hiring manager, everything the OP talked about is much more relevant, because you'll actually have someone who can evaluate your resume. Although I think this post overstates how much your undergrad degree matters. I am a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, typically considered a very prestigious school, but the engineering school is ranked 27th according to US News and World Report rankings[0]. I know many hiring managers who would much rather interview someone with an interesting set of portfolio side projects than someone who went to a prestigious school. Your alma matter can sometimes provide a small bonus as a small signaling effect, but I consider software engineering a discipline where a formal education is only loosely correlated with skill.<p>[0] <a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/engineering-majors/1213609-usnwr-2012-best-undergraduate-engineering-programs.html" rel="nofollow">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/engineering-majors/12136...</a>

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.<p>If you've coded anything that does something interesting, you should have no problem finding interviews, and frankly offers.<p>If you haven't coded anything interesting, then why would anyone hire you? Build something or work on an open source project.<p>I suggest taking your own project from start to production - this is the type of general knowledge and competence startups look for.

Surprisingly, I have the opposite trouble: how do I stop recruiters trying to recruit me? I have about 15-20 recruiters contacting me per week however what I put it down to is:<p>1. Location. Since I moved to SF the job offers have increased <i>substantially</i>.<p>2. Skill set. Fortunately I'm skilled in some "popular" languages.<p>3. Years of experience. I'm in the "hot spot" - not too old, and not too young (sorry - it does seem to be a factor...)<p>What I find however that recruiters don't necessarily look for anything BUT the above things. I've been approached for the weirdest jobs (considering my experience) from what I believe as a simple keyword search. When it comes to interviewing, the recruiters typically have no idea what they're talking about. This means that they're more interested in forwarding the resume from a brief "do you know this, have you had experience in this" as opposed to really understanding the position. Fortunately, I have had enough experience to interview the recruiters as opposed to them interviewing me.<p>My advice for developers struggling to get jobs (from how I hire...):<p>1. Have experience - whether professional or hobby. If it is a hobby: open source it.<p>2. Show initiative. You need to show you have the ability to actually <i>think</i>.<p>3. You don't need to know the answers. It's all about the approach to the problem.<p>4. Try to stand out amongst the resumes. I feel bad to say this: but unfortunately it's true. Given 100 resumes, you're probably only going to really look at 10.<p>5. Show charisma<p>I'd recommend other's to add to this: it's just a list I made from what is off the top of my head. But in regards to the article I disagree with:<p>1. Startup experience. It depends on what type of job you're going for - some will admire the drive, some will fear it (will you leave after a year)<p>2. School. I don't give a flying f* if they're from MIT or the University of Waikato. However I would give SOME preference to them studying at a school which includes algorithms and memory management (but that is me). Believe me: that (unfortunately) isn't a given...<p>I'm sure I'll probably get down votes for this; but please comment if you do disagree :) I'm only speaking from my experience as both a student (always) and as an employer.

The resume review process isn't intended to find the single best candidate. It's intended to whittle a big pile of resumes down to one that can be reasonably covered by the next stage of the process. Coming from public listings, the pile of resumes is enormous, and most of them are utter garbage. There may be thousands of resumes where the goal is to find a couple dozen candidates. At some point, the only way to do this is to apply really broad filters: "Went to Stanford, MIT, CMU...", "Worked at MS, Google, FB, Apple...", "Proficient in Scala, MongoDB".<p>I didn't really appreciate this until I was on the other side of the massive pile-o-resumes, but it's really the only option.<p>I hate saying this, because I generally believe that "problems solved" are far more indicative of success than any specific school, company, or technology. I have at times used a resume that doesn't do the whole buzzword-bingo game with very limited success - It basically never got pulled from a big pile-of-resumes unless I had a friend on the inside, or was applying to a job on my school's job board (where clearly everyone passed this "filter").

I'm not sure UIUC and UT-Austin are great examples for second-tier schools, as both are top 10 for graduate CS departments.

I think the single best thing you can do is tailor your resume/cover letter for the job you are applying for.<p>Every company wants to think that you really want to work for them and only them. If you send out an obviously standard cover letter and resume, it's very easy to get brushed over.<p>Spend 10 minutes on their website/blog reading about them and tailor your application to match. Include some comments that show you have done so.<p>You can't change what education/experience you have (well you shouldn't), but you can definitely show that you made an effort.

Articles like this tell me there is a strong need for improvement in tech recruiting. If a candidate truly is "a great coder, easy to work with, and knows data structures and algorithms backwards and forwards" then he/she should have no problem landing a job regardless of his/her background.<p>I only hope there are firms that see through this elitism and realize that there are undervalued tech wizards out there waiting to be given an opportunity.

Very sound advice. Having been to a top school is indeed important (even though not necessary). A while ago, I was offered a very well paid freelance gig just because I went to a French top engineering school. I didn't know anything about the technologies I had to use but they didn't give a damn.<p>Of course not everyone thinks like that, but it's puzzling that some people actually do.

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)<p>I think they are more applicable to early career.<p>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.

Does anyone have some examples of resumes they've used successfully; or from the hiring side, resumes that stood out to them?<p>Anyone A/B testing their resumes?

During hiring, I have looked through dozens, if not hundreds of resumes over the years, mostly for Unix systems administrator positions.<p>You can tell a lot about what someone knows just by how they put together their resume, over and above the work experience. A question I used to ask on interviews was, "Have you ever worked with Gnu programs, like gcc, Gnu make etc.?" Hiring Unix admins in 1998, when you couldn't get your hands on an experienced one, you'd be surprised how many blank looks I got at that question. Once I got a resume which was very well-written, and he even had the Gnu tools he knew listed. Considering how dismal prior candidates had been, I almost wanted to hire him sight unseen just seeing that. We did make him an offer, which he turned down. It's more than just what buzzwords to put, it's knowing what buzzwords to put and not to put. Most of the time, people who don't know what they're doing don't even know what will sound good on a resume, even if their resume is BS.<p>In terms of my own resume, in 2000 I had a lot of buzzwords on the top. But then people would ask me detailed questions about some of that software, some of which I had not touched for three years. So I removed those words from the top of the resume so as to avoid those questions. But then I stopped getting as many calls. So I put them back. Better to look dumb in an interview then never get the interview I figured.<p>For you young ones - tech guys like me generally just care if you know the stuff or not. Managers, HR etc. are generally more formal - they want to know what degrees you have, they like to see buzzwords and several years of experience, especially at large companies, hear from references, know why you have a gap of two months in your employment record and so forth. Non-techies have no gauge to tell how well you know your stuff.<p>A caveat about large companies - at startups, an older person who has worked a long time at a big company - this can be held against you. You have to make clear you'll be OK with the fact that there is not yet a backup system, or code revision control system, or whatever. You have to say, "I understand you don't have this stuff, and I am fine with you not having it yet, I'll help you build it out as the company grows".

Technical recruiting is hard, but I think good technical recruiters approach things differently than this. Its not as black and white, everything lives in the nuances:<p>We are looking for some sort of external validation: A really popular module on CPAN? Graduated with a 4.0? Graduated from Stanford? Hired full time by Google? That is all external validation, and it is something that shows me that other people / organizations think you are good. I really need just one piece of solid validation for me to speak with a candidate and this can take on a lot of forms. In lieu of this, we can administer a coding test if someone is on the cusp.<p>The second thing I look for is passion: Is this person a 9 to 5 code monkey in it for the solid and consistent paycheck? Or do they love the work they do and constantly push themselves to further their craft? You can almost always get to the bottom of this question on the phone. Journeymen programmers are fine for a lot of jobs, but not for the jobs we are talking about here.<p>If both of those line up then the candidate is good, and we will represent them. We can't promise a placement, but I would be surprised if someone with both of those boxes checked didn't get at least one offer. They are really hard to find.

I'm not so sure about this bit:<p><i>&#62; Resumes should be summaries, with more detail for recent positions, less detail for more distant ones. If you’ve been in industry for ten years, you can have a second page. No one needs more than two.</i><p>I agree with this in principle, and strongly 'implemented' this approach as well in an earlier version of my CV.<p>[To be fair, I'm looking for a product management role, and not a dev job, so maybe it's different here?]<p>But recruiters just kept asking me for a more detailed version so often, that I just gave up and made a 2-pager. I personally believe it goes into far too much detail than is necessary, but the difference in response is quite stark from both startups and BigCos alike.<p>From the other side of the issue, when recruiting PMs or analysts, I always made a conscious effort to ensure that CVs that fell afoul of 'industry standard guidelines' weren't overlooked solely for those reasons. As in, I honestly didn't give a shit if it was one page, or two, or six, as long as it gave the information I was looking for. (However, I suspect I may have been in a minority then..)

I'm not sure what the deal was about the schools. An expectation of a top tier school is mostly useless. Yes a solid education is important, however just because you have credentials from a "top" school doesn't mean you'll be: 1. a good worker 2. motivation to perform the tasks 3. experience. Secondly, anyone who depends on a big name school to get by fails to understand economics. Yes you might be able to get a small premium for the name. However, the market can't afford to choose only the top names. Theres more work that is needed than the small group of "top school" names can fill.

"If you’ve had five jobs in the last five years, why should the recruiter think this time will be different?"<p>Maybe because who is hiring is supposed to be better than the others? There are far too many terrible companies, especially the big ones, and honestly I would never stay in a company just for the sake of it.<p>If recruiters think that this is a problem, it means that who is hiring is not confident enough or worse, the company IS really terrible like the others.<p>IMHO, nobody leaves a company if he feels good, stimulated and paid enough.

This is great advice. As a person that is normally labelled as a job hopper (6 in the past 5 years) I finally settled down and got into tech by attending hackathons and helped ship apps (mostly android) it has given me the opportunity to work for a YC company and I am very happy here. It's just ironic that startups have been the most stable positions rather than corporate or bigger tech companies.<p>Hackathons are relativity cheap (time wise) investments, but make you stand out from the crowd.

Just out of curiosity, does the undergrad/grad ranking apply to other (non-CS) engineering careers as well? I ask because I went to a top 5 undergrad but never did any research so I'm not attending a top 5 grad school. However, I think the research I am doing now is possibly eye-catching, so how much does what-research vs. which-grad school matter?<p>(By the way, I actually like my grad school significantly more than my undergrad so ranking of course isn't everything).

I mostly - for seniors - look in the experience and what projects the person did. I don't believe any skills in a skill section.<p>This is the first screening, followed by a programming task during the the telephone interview, interview with me, interviews with developers, followed by practical programming work.<p>So yes it is important to get through the CV screen (have experience), but it's only the first step.<p>Side note: Hiring for Junior positions is different, for me the CV here is mostly irrelevant.

I’m wondering what’s your opinion about how does it affect to have on your resume some great places to work at, but that might not be so well known in the US tech world as they’re not the usual Google, FB etc.. I’m talking about places like CERN, Fermilab, Max Planck Institute for Physics or the MIT Medialab. Do you think these matter as much as Google on a resume?<p>How about having ‘old boring’ companies like IBM or Oracle on your resume?

A lot of this advice goes for those who are looking for their first co-ops and internships, too. If you haven't built experience yet, your GPA becomes a critical flag for how you dedicate yourself to the work you've been given. Combine that with interesting projects, and you'll be well on your way to getting the internships that will make you stand out later.

I've been on the hiring side many times and I never look at a resume's education section. I suppose if I were hiring someone fresh out of school that'd count a little more, but experience is much more important than what school they went to or what they studied.<p>But maybe I'm biased because I have a grad degree in music, so I just assume other degrees are equally worthless ;)

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