Every year I find myself on Upwork or Indeed looking for new staff. Either for me or for clients asking for help. It’s a long enduring task that accomplishes little and we have to make snap judgements over hundreds of applications. It is these snap judgements that I want to address for people.
There are literally 100’s, so we can’t spend days reading 5 page resumes. The first “round” is always a culling of people who obviously won’t work.
What to do and what to avoid
Targeting
The thing is, they may know C# very well, but if your resume is targeting jobs with Angular, you clearly want a job doing Angular and I don’t want to hire someone who doesn’t WANT to do the job, but simply wants to HAVE a job.
Experience
If I put out a job for a Beginner developer and I get people with 10yrs experience and a masters degree, the ONLY thing that will save you from being culled immediately is a cover letter explaining why you are applying. Still, as team member, the last thing you need is to have your good happy developer with 5yrs experience being put in charge of a guy who is clearly more experienced and more educated. The “good” dev may see it as a threat rather than an opportunity to lead.
Broadness.
“Full Stack Developer” is a pet peeve. Of COURSE you are a full stack developer. But if I put out an add for a specific language skill and you have 50 different languages and are an expert in every stack there is, then you probably suck at some of them and I have no idea which. If there’s no clear targeted skillset, then I’m not interested. (And if you believe you ARE very skilled in all of them, then it becomes more of a “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know”. eg. I’ve been in the profession for 20yrs and I still consider myself a novice in some languages I’ve spent years programming in)
Fancy Resumes
If you are looking for a programming job, don’t give me the equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation. I We’re looking for Dates, and Specifics of past employment. Put them top-down and in order. We’re in the world where Mark Down is becoming a standard. If I have to dig around a bunch of tiles and guess where the last job was, I’m annoyed. After hours of digging through resumes, I really don’t have time for a puzzle.
Unexplained Promotions
If you went from an intern at company A to Senior Software Engineer at company B, something is up. You’d better lead with “Promoted quickly” and explain why. Otherwise I’m going to assume it’s BS.
Grammar
Maybe I’m a grammar nerd, but when I get disjointed sentences or horrific spelling errors, I can’t help but think you’re going to do that in your code as well. Have someone else read your resume before you send it to 100 people.
Triggers
Some words will get you jobs and some words will get you bypassed. If you have religion or politics in any way on your resume, I dump it. Seriously, even if I agree. I’m also annoyed by people who think being a veteran or a mason is a job qualification. Go ahead an add it to some section of the bottom of the resume or in a cover letter if you need to press it, but it’s not some kind of secret handshake.
Direct Contact
I always get a few people who think it’s a good idea to track me down on the internet and contact me directly. “Hi, I applied for your job on Indeed, ….”. I literally track down their application and reject it immediately. I’ve got hundreds of people organized there and I allocate time to work on it at that time. Having you come at me directly is annoying as hell. Sure, you think you took extra time and effort to give me direct attention, but I’m sorry, I’ve discussed this with other employers and very few people respond well to it. If you have something to say, add it in a note with the resume so I have it all together when I get in there and go through my final choices.
WHAT IS GOOD TO DO
Don’t write a thesis or even some generic “My Cover Letter that I send to Everyone”. A quick note will always get you past the first round. The last job I posted, I got 200+ resumes. I got down to about 30 people. Every single one that wrote me something (even a few sentences) stayed on that second round. Every Single One.
Cover Letters
Why the F do you want this job? Seriously. TURNOVER SUCKS. It kills businesses. So, you want employees who want to be there. People can learn and grow into a job, so having done the job for 20 years means you’ll be capable, but you might also hate what you do and just need a paycheck. If you write a letter saying how your experience may – or even may not – help you in this position, but you really are interested and really want to be in this position or this field, it makes a HUGE difference. If you’ve had a kid and been raising them for 5 years and been out of the work force – programming has changed completely. Then again, in 5 years, it will again, so your experience gap isn’t really that big a deal for a lower level position.
Nicknames
This sucks, but if your name is Widizyridqwefsnziwjawn Kahankskwka, you’d better introduce yourself as “Windi” or something like that. I speak 3 languages and I can barely pronounce a lot of these names. Your name may be common in your home country, but think about where you’re applying. When I introduce myself to Americans, I use “Dan”, but when I introduce myself in Spanish, it’s, “Daniel”.