prater's blog

I have been reading resumés lately in a couple of different capacities, and let me tell you all something: They suck.

The Conventional Wisdom Makes you Look Conventional

The conventional wisdom of resumé writing has you buzz-wording up your achievements and relating everything you’ve ever done in terms of crushing those KPIs and LOOK AT ALL THE MONEY.

This isn’t bad advice, but it tends to result in a whole lot of largely indistinguishable pablum. A resumé that performs all of the standard tricks is like a Ford Focus - servicable, but unexciting. (Full Disclosure: I drive a Ford Focus. It’s a fine automobile, but I don’t get excited about driving it. Your goal in applying for a job is get your future teammates excited about working with you.)

The kind of resumés I get to read are obviously for software developers and the ones that get rejected fall into two basic categories.

1. All Computers I Have Known
2. I Am A Self-Directed Learner Who Likes To Solve Hard Problems

As a human, these are the ones that make my eyes glaze over and skip to the end where I can plausibly say I’ve reviewed your resumé and then throw it away. Please do not make my job hard. If you make my job hard before I’ve even hired you, you have violated the One Commandment of Getting A Job:

Convince your future teammates that you will make their life easier.

Interestingly - I find that senior resumés tend toward the first type while the junior resumés are clustered around the second. I get that the plural of anecdote is not data, so take that with as much salt as you need.

Let’s talk about these two failure modes and what you ought to do to address them.

The Conventional Wisdom is Actual Wisdom Tho

But first, an aside: I kinda ran down the “conventional wisdom” back there, which was a little unfair, because there’s some good stuff in there. I’m guessing you all know or have heard of these, since we all have Google and we’ve all looked up “why does my resumé keep getting rejected?”

So quick recap:

1. Action Words - make it sound like you’re the star of this story, because you are!
2. Measurable Outcomes - All these graphs go up and to the right, because that’s where the future is!
3. Please, please, please proofread - You probably won’t get dinged for dangling participles or whatever, but consistent misuse of words or a lot of common grammar mistakes (they’re, there, their) are Bad News.

Now onto critiquing the bad resumé you may have already written.

To All The Computers I’ve Known Before

Let’s start with How To List your Skills. This is very, very straightforward.

1. Copy them from the job ad

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Copy each of the technologies listed in the job ad over to your resumé, then delete them if you’re not comfortable with them. If you know something adjacent then you can put that in instead. Like you can put down “Cloud Formation” instead of “Terraform” if you don’t have Terraform.

Now if there’s no overlap at this point, then maybe consider that this isn’t the job for you.

Let’s try one on for size (modified from an actual listing):

• Experience with Processing.js
• Experience with Python, Ruby, or Node
• Strong knowledge in OOD, domain-driven design, and microservices
• Experience working in Agile Teams

Skills I might write down:

• Ruby
• Python
• NodeJS
• Software Architecture including DDD, OOD and microservices
• Agile Methodolgies including Scrum and XP

Note how I skipped Processing.js because I have never used it. With this amount of information it’s not possible to know how important Processing is to the job, so we’ll just leave that part out.

I tend to put these in a little list right under my name, so that people can read my resumé and see the intersection between what they’re looking for and what I have right away. That way, they don’t have to read several pages of responsibilities, or things like this:

Created custom dashboard for Elatic Monitoring for RHEL 6.4 clusters written in Processing.js and Graylog

I don’t know what half of that means, and I have to read your resumé really carefully to come up with the answer to my question “Does this person know Processing.JS?” - if the prime directive of job interviewing is showing how you will make your team’s life easier, start by demonstrating this by making the reviewers job easy.

If you by some chance find yourself writing a bulleted list of technologies longer than like … 5 then just stop. Back up and write down the interesting ones! I’m sure it’s interesting to the right audience that you used some Java program I’ve never heard of to do a task I don’t understand, but this is a Python shop and I just wanna know if you can AWS.

You are unique, just Like every other self-directed learner who likes to solve hard problems

Next to “I’m sorry sir, but that’s our policy.” - this has got to be my least favorite sentence in the English language. It’s almost entirely content free and everybody knows that you’re either lying or dissembling.¹

For the love of dog, if you have this sentence in your resumé or cover letter, please remove it unless you know for a hard absolute fact that you are talking to a machine. It is the platonic form of “telling not showing” in writing. Like the sentence “Sir Gilroy the Fair is the hero of this story” - it only really works as satire. You need to find a way to demonstrate this truth to your reader without just baldly stating it.

Think about this: What’s an engaging way of telling this story, without resorting to asserting it free of context? Start by telling a story about a time it was true of you:

“This one time, I was supposed to make a poker game, but I didn’t know anything about poker, so I learned all about poker, and wrote a program that I couldn’t beat at poker.”

Now, if you’re a newish developer you might have to dig pretty deep on this one - and you probably only have a limited set of really good stories to draw on. But think about it - when was the last time you encountered a seemingly intractable problem you needed to do some research to solve? Last week? If you’ve never had to do this, then you might need to do some more training. Being a “self-directed learner who likes to solve hard problems” is a significant fraction of being a developer. Everybody has this.

Tell Me A Story

People tend to approach cover letters and job applications as opportunities to list a lot of good things about themselves, or to tell other people about themselves. I think this is exactly the wrong approach. Tell me a story with you as the hero. Make it engaging. Make it a thing that I want to read so that at the end of your resumé I’m having a The-End-of-Return-of-the-Jedi moment. “Yeah, that was awesome! What happens next? Let’s make a sequel! And not wait 30 years!”

Okay, RoTJ might be a bit of a stretch, and I’m not advocating for you to include tiny, savage bears in your cover letter, but please make your job application engaging. I read enough boring business writing everyday. I do enough work. Again, the main dimension people are hired on is “is this person going to make my life easier,” and if you begin by making me read a long, boring document then you’ve just demonstrated the opposite. STAHP.

All of that is easier said than done. Here are some actionable tips to make your resumé better.

1. Read. It. Aloud.

   Seriously do this one. This is like the secret to good writing. Read it aloud, maybe even to an audience and see if it sounds engaging. Perform your resumé like a one act play and make sure that you’re the hero.

2. Write the Resume You Wish You Had

   Do not send me lies, but write down a fictionalized account of your career up to this point. This shows you your values. Did you write “* Improved performance of page load 1000%” or “* Created a new process for gnarfling the garthok that saved the company $1000 per millisecond”? You have revealed the kind of thing you’d like to write down, and the sort of story you’d like to star in. Now go back to your “real life” and write the same sort of stories from your experience. “* Decreased page size from 20M to 150K” and “* Developed a Garthok Gnarfling Guide to share with other developers.”

3. Keep it short. Tailor it to every job.

   Every job is different. Get good at tailoring your experience and accomplishments to individual companies. Do not tell me how good you are at sword fighting if we’re going to get in a laser gun fight on Endor. This seems like a lot of work until you do it a few times and you find that you can remix a lot of the same content. A sentence here, a phrase there. You want to tailor it for every company because you want to keep it under two pages. I’m busy, and I have reasonable expectations about how exciting a resumé can be. Think Cat in the Hat not War and Peace.

4. Action! Excitement!

   A Jedi might not crave these things, but your resumé reviewer does. If you’re a clever person who likes to have a good time don’t be afraid to let that come across in your resumé. I mean, don’t try too hard, but don’t wordsmith your introduction to the point that it sounds like it was written by a lawyer. If you’re a detail oriented perfectionist (good for you!) then make sure your resumé reflects this - a single conservative font with perfect kerning!

   It is okay for your resumé to be a statement about who you are, that’s why we read it.

5. Read. It. Aloud.

   Did you just say “yeah sure” before and then not do it? I mean it. Do it.

Here is your Handful of Salt

So first off - this is not a “How to Get A Job” post - this covers just the resumé and cover letter section. There are several other steps you need to pass, all of which have higher signal. Interviews, code challenges, phone screens, etc. If you’re an asshole or you have no relevant skills, no amount of “kickass resumé” is going to overcome that deficit.

Second - I read the resumés of software developers, so if you’re applying for a job as a Marketing Manager, understand you’re outside my area of expertise. Some hiring processes are designed to remove as much personality as possible from the process (looking at you, academia.) So, while software hiring may be broken in many ways, so far we’re doing an okayish job at not reducing “Do I want to spend eight hours a day discussing math and puzzles with this person?” to a list of impersonal checkboxes.

Now, I’m sure there are companies in the world that get so many resumés that nobody reads them, and most of them are simply run through a keyword analyzer. So in that case, follow this advice anyway. The strategy of copying qualifications directly into your resumé ought to overcome simple keyword filters, and anything more complex than that is just a pile of linear algebra nobody understands anyway. Just ignore scare-mongering about automated systems. Those kinds of systems are designed to generate plausible deniability, not “find good candidates.”

Now, for a uncomfortable truth: There is a giant element of chance in getting past an initial screen. There isn’t a whole lot to go on in a resumé, so a chunk of what gets a reviewer to give you a thumbs up hinges on whether your resumé speaks to them. The Lord of the Rings is probably my favorite book of all time, but a lot of people find it terribly dull. You cannot write for all audiences, and attempting to do so will result in you writing for no audiences. Be yourself, tell your story in an engaging way, and you’ll land at a place where people want to spend half their waking hours engaging with you.

And, when you think about it, would you want to spend that much time at a place that thought you were just too interesting?

1. “But I’m not lying, that’s really true!” - You know, I’m sure it is, but have you ever said this outside the context of a resumé or cover letter? If not, you need to find a more engaging way of saying this that not every person with a pulse is also writing in their applications. If you have said this in “real life” … you need to go to better parties.