from Hacker News

How to Create a Software Engineer Resume Hiring Managers Will Love

by rileyt on 7/15/20, 5:18 PM with 36 comments

• by knute on 7/15/20, 6:52 PM

  One thing that's not on here: Proofread your resume. Have a friend look over it for you. Spell things correctly. I don't care if you use "JavaScript" or "Javascript" but pick one and stick with it. If you're a software engineer, the ability to type and attention to detail are important so show it in your resume. The number of resumes I've seen with glaring mistakes is too damn high.

• by colanderman on 7/15/20, 7:34 PM

  Most important to keep in mind is the immediate goal that each recipient of your resume is trying to achieve.

  The hiring manager is trying to narrow down a (potentially large) field of candidates. Make it easy for them to spot on your resume the reasons they should consider you.

  Your interviewers (i.e., future co-workers) are looking for things to talk to you about, ways to connect with you. Include on your resume conversation starters which will provide you the opportunity to connect positively with them and demonstrate the value you will bring.

  I have not been a hiring manager, but I am often the "future co-worker". Often we are handed your resume minutes before interviewing you. If I cannot quickly find anything interesting to ask you about because your resume is too difficult to scan, contains too much jargon, or has too much extraneous information, you may not get the opportunity to tell me those interesting things.

  The classic writing advice applies: remove anything unnecessary to convey your message and help the reader achieve their goal.

• by raghava on 7/15/20, 7:50 PM

  Before a human reads it, a machine will read it.

  It is 2020, every other HR who wants to squeeze out a little more time for themselves (may be to use it to browse insta/whatsapp/FB) would end up using some shit "AI/ML tool" sold by some snake oil vendor portraying it as suberb intelligent automation that aguments recruiters' intelligence for recruitment, at scale.

  Every one first has to please the API/ML-model even before a human casts a look at the resume.

  Tune resume to be read easily by a machine.

• by stonecharioteer on 7/17/20, 9:03 AM

  I have a question that I haven't seen answered. How do I put mentoring skills in a resume?

  I am currently mentoring 2 interns, two new college graduates, 3 new college grads from last year and a few others that I met over at other companies or online.

  How do I put those skills on a resume? Because I've seen that my colleagues aren't very good at this. They're neither patient enough nor expressive enough to mentor someone and share learning resources, sympathise with newcomers, or slow down their pace and not make it seem so obvious that mentoring or pairing with an inexperienced engineer sometimes does slow us down.

• by jedberg on 7/15/20, 7:16 PM

  Do a lot of employers still ask for resumes?

  I haven't applied to a job in a while, but as a hiring manager, I usually just ask for their GitHub and LinkedIn, making the resume optional if it's more up to date than LinkedIn or the don't have LI.

• by cosmotic on 7/15/20, 9:52 PM

  The post says to use a 'modern font'... what is that?

• by bcrl on 7/16/20, 1:01 AM

  I still prefer to send my resume as a plain ASCII .txt file.