Sorry if this post is against the rules.

I am a hiring manager and have been going through lots of resumes. Please put your full name as the name of the file you attach.

FirstLast.pdf

I receive large groups of resumes from my recruiter and when I am looking at 100 resumes, at least 25 of them are labeled as “resume.pdf”, or some other basic title. This makes it hard to find and share your resumes. Also, please don’t put “final” or any version number either.

Even better if you put the title in the resume too.

First Last Engineering Technician.pdf

I saw that once and I liked it.

Best of luck out there!

A girl I work with recently got laid off and she was willing to share and discuss her salary with the other 2 of us on the team. We all have the same job. She was getting paid $67/hr ($12 more than me) and she can barely work a basic Excel function. I started thinking, I wonder if this girl is gassing up her experience on her resume so I went on LinkedIn to check. She lists this past role as a "Senior Data Analyst & Product Owner" - we are just data analysts and her functional skills are marginally above beginner level. All past data analyst roles are listed as Senior Analyst, which I can tell now that's a lie. Lists her degree as Clinical Psychology - only took me about 5 clicks and 3 webpages to see that her college didn't even offer that as a degree.

Just needed to vent. I feel like this happens way more than we think.

I made a huge mistake and I’m freaking out.

I lied on my resume by changing my titles (Customer Success to Event Marketing, Brand Marketing to Growth Marketing) to sound more aligned with the role I applied for. I also omitted my current company. I got the job, and everything seemed fine.

Then they asked for a background check and I had to come clean. I saw the background check, and it showed my true titles. I haven’t even started my first day yet – I start in 3 weeks – and I don’t know what to do.

Am I screwed? Should I just prepare for the worst and start looking for a new job? Has anyone else been through something like this? How did you handle it? What do I do if they ask for documents?

Any advice would help. (but please save your morality for another post. I fucked up, I know, no need to pile on)

I told HR recruiter that I was still employed at previous job even though I was laid off 6 months. I did this cause i've heard that having unemployment gap makes it harder to find jobs and the market is pretty bad right now. I finally got an offer, contingent on background check.

USAhire came back showing my end date with previous company was 6 months ago. They are asking for an explanation for why it does not match. Apparently, USAhire interviewed the HR person from my previous company which I did not expect them to do if I was still currently employed there. What do I do?

UPDATE: I did not expect this to garner this much attention. I lied that I was on salary continuance as suggested by one person and they did not say anything and just wanted to follow up on another prior company I worked for since the background check could not reach them. So I guess they are okay with it and still want to hire me. I only need to confirm my other position with some proof that I was an employee there.

TLDR: Lying about being employed is FINE!!!! Just make sure you don't forget to tick the "do not contact employer" box like I did.

Just wanted to share the resume that got me a job after being laid off mid April. It took me 3 months and 200+ applications but I finally landed one! Going from 60K > 87K salary. I hope it helps.

I've been helping people on this subreddit for months and have seen people use terrible off-the-wall templates for non-art related jobs and figured those that have been successful and getting interviews and jobs should start sharing what their resume looked like to get them to that position.

I used this format to apply to about 8 jobs. Of those 8, 6 emailed me within days of applying for an interview. A CEO of a small contracting company also reached out to me when I added my resume on Monster. I'm not saying my resume is perfect (looking at it now, there are small things I want to change on it), and I'm not trying to brag. I just want to show that I must have done something correctly to just about get an interview anytime I applied, and I think it is because my resume is ATS-friendly and not cluttered.

So here is ONE of the resumes I created. Note that I actually made multiple resumes. For those that just made ONE resume and are trying to shotgun it to every job listing you see on Linkedin, or any other job board and have not heard a peep from any company, You might want to reevaluate our approach. You should be tailoring your resume to the job post. The Wiki mentions this, I believe.

If anyone would like, I can go over how exactly I created my resume according to the job post, either here on in a separate post.

Now I will explain my resume format:

TITLE

The title of your resume should be your job title. Plumber, Senior Electrician, Front-end developer, McDonald's Shift Lead, whatever. Generally, it's something people can understand from reading alone. My job title is what I had in the military and I couldn't think of a better one to use to cover all the radio things I've worked on so I kept it in. Normally the job title is also what you are applying for.

Summary

Summaries are supposed to be a short 3-5 line "elevator pitch". I strongly recommend you use a summary as it helps highlight and explain who you are and what you provide to the company. After I finished my interviews, I asked what helped my resume stand out and everyone said it was my summary. It's a little long, but I wanted to capture just exactly what I work on and also tailor it to the job post I was applying for. *Notice how I DO NOT have personal pronouns in my summary.*

Hard Skills

So the section with bullet points is where I put my hard skills. Hard skills are abilities that let you tackle job-specific duties and responsibilities. Hard skills can be learned and are job specific. They are NOT personality traits such as hardworking, organized, or time management. Those type of skills belong in a summary, in my opinion. You DO NOT type out a sentence for each skill. I keep seeing new people try to write a paragraph for each skill trying to explain how they got it or how they demonstrated it. Ideally, your work bullets will reflect some of these hard skills. A job post will have some listed that you can add if you're paying attention. I have slightly different summaries on my other resumes as well.

Certifications

This field all depends on your career field. I cannot tell you what certifications you need. You should know what certification your career field requires or wants. If you don't know, start researching. If you do have a certification, you just put the name of the cert, followed by the company that issued it and then the year you obtained it. That's it. If it is expired, renew it or remove it from your resume.

Professional Experience

Nothing out of the ordinary here. I have the company I worked for (United States Air Force) and the location. I then have my job titles under it because my duties changed over the years as I promoted and moved to other locations. Your most recent job should have the most work bullets. Your oldest job and shortest job should have the least. YOUR JOB BULLETS SHOULD REFLECT THE JOB POST. If the job post is talking about working with or interacting with customers, you should mention something like this in your resume. Same for Engineers and developers. Again, creating bullets about an art project when you are applying to be a plumber makes no sense and should not be on there.

EDUCATION

This is self explanatory. List the degree relevant to the job. A Master's degree in underwater basket weaving isn't going to do you any favors when applying to manage projects or write code. The job post will mention what degree the company is looking for as well as how much experience you need for them to waive not having a B.S. degree or M.A. degree. Some companies are very strict about it and will throw your resume away if it doesn't meet their requirements.

Technical Competencies

This is where I would list things that I work with and am competent using. Here is where the specific radio equipment I've worked on will be listed as well as other equipment. For Networking personnel, this is where you mention the Cisco Switch, cable testers, Linux operating systems, and other things. You could also use this section for languages (code and spoken languages), software, or just anything you are competent with. THE JOB POST TELLS YOU WHAT THE COMPANY IS LOOKING FOR.

As I said before, this is only one of my resumes, but the format is exactly the same for all of them, even the master resume I pull my bullets from. My resume itself isn't perfect, but I believe it is easy to read and can give some new people writing a resume an idea of how a good one can or should look like. I currently have a job so I am not too focused on fixing up my resume write now, but I will add on to it over the years and tweak it every now and then so I am ready in case I need to use it again.

Feel free to let me know your thoughts and I will be happy if I can help at least one person on here. Job search isn't always easy, and I want to help everyone succeed as long as they are willing to put in the work. Sorry in advance for typos, I'm just getting off shift and about to go drive home.

I was a former recruiter and this is my favorite application I came across.

• Objective statements/summaries are dead. Use a short tagline for yourself under your name instead

• (For students especially) Hard pass on including GPAs on resumes: Your success is not/will not be defined by a GPA.

• Delete your Skills section: If anyone can say it, don't say it. Instead, make it clear what your skills are by describing your accomplishments/day-to-day in your work experience section

• I know this one likely depends on industry, but it's still a hill I will die on: No headshots on your resume.

• Start the document with work experience, not education. Put education after work experience.

• Don't use colors. White paper, black text, that's it.

What else? Do you have any resume hot takes? Let's hear them.

Hey Redditors,

As a long-time contributor to this sub and a Certified Professional Resume Writer, I want to share the most common resume mistakes I still see applicants making. These aren't listed in any particular order but are significant enough that fixing them can dramatically improve your job search outcomes.

#1 Wrong Layout

I can't believe I'm still writing about this, but I frequently encounter resumes formatted incorrectly. Let me say it loud and clear: Avoid two-column layouts if you're applying through job boards or company websites.

Why is this important?

Short answer: Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) have improved, but they still aren't great at reading complex layouts.

Longer Answer: Modern ATS platforms parse your resume from top to bottom and left to right. Two-column layouts, graphics, images, or overly stylized templates (even those claiming to be ATS-friendly) often confuse these systems. This can cause important information to be missed entirely, resulting in your resume getting overlooked, despite your qualifications.

My recommendation: Stick to a simple, single-column format created in Microsoft Word or Google Docs. There's still a helpful basic Google Docs template pinned in our wiki—[link here]—for your convenience.

Also, even though Canva, Adobe InDesign, and Overleaf (LaTeX) have become popular for their visual appeal, I still strongly recommend avoiding these platforms for your main resume document due to compatibility issues.

#2 Generic content

To begin, let me first define the term 'context' which is going to be key here. Context is specific information that makes your resume and the descriptions within it unique to you. It allows the reader to understand and appreciate your story. A resume with zero context will sound generic - a lot like a job advertisement. Here's an extreme example:

Generic Statement: "Achieved excellent sales results".

Specific/Contextualized Statement: "Earned top spot in the company's 2019 national sales rankings for achieving 220% against annual sales target".

The second statement is much more informative and tells the audience not only what the achievement was, but also why it was earned. This is a good example of how you can use context to ensure your descriptions are quantified, specific, and informative.

In general, a good description will address three informational goals:

• A challenge or problem to be solved. This doesn't always need to be explicitly stated. For example, in the second statement in quotes above, the problem is implied - to meet and exceed sales goals and rank high as possible on the sales charts.

• The action(s) you took to address that challenge. What did YOU do specifically. I don't care what your team or your boss did.

• An outcome that resulted as a direct result of your actions. What did your actions produce? It doesn't always need to be a monumental, earth-shattering impact, but it does need to be there.

#3 Failing to curate your resume to your targeted role

If you were to walk into your local car dealership looking for an off-road vehicle for travelling through muddy terrain and the salesperson tries to sell you on a two-door Volkswagen beetle, you'd think they weren't very good at their job.

So why would you do that to a prospective employer? By submitting a resume for a role it wasn't written for, you're demonstrating one of two things:

• You don't understand the requirements of role you're applying for, OR

• You're too lazy to tailor your resume to the role.

Both of these are equally bad and often result in being ignored by the company.

How do you tailor your resume to the job?

• Step 1: Read the job posting carefully. Identify what they're looking for in terms of experience/responsibilities, skills, licenses/certifications, and education.

• Step 2: Put yourself in the recruiter's shoes. How quickly can you identify any given prerequisite from the job advertisement on your resume? Is it easily identifiable or do you need to dig in for several moments to find it?

• Step 3: Does the language used in your resume match that in the job description? Are you using the same terms?

Example 1: Company A is requesting at least 5 years of experience doing X. Your summary (if you include one) would begin by saying 'X Professional with 5+ years of experience in X'.

Example 2: Company B is requesting CPR, AED, ACLS, and PALS certifications. You would include a section labelled as 'Certifications' and list these (exactly as they're presented in the ad).

DON'T DO THIS

• Copy and paste the job description into your resume - it's very easy to spot and is disingenuous.

• Lie and/or embellish your accomplishments. You may get away with it, but if a clever hiring manager puts you on the spot, it'll be obvious (In my experience as a recruiter, I was privy to many of these situations during interviews and it doesn't look good - trust me).

I hope you guys find this useful!

My day job is resume parsing, the same kind of text extraction applicant tracking systems run on every application, and I see the raw output that candidates never get to see. Not posting any link, the rules here are clear and I agree with them. Posting the data because I think it is useful and I have not seen it anywhere else.

Last 17 days, 3,835 resumes. 81 percent had at least one thing that damages them in parsing. These were the most common, in order.

1. Skills section flattened into one blob, 41 percent. Skills laid out in a table or grid come out as "PythonSQLTableauExcel" with no separators. A recruiter searching for SQL will not find it. Fix: one plain line, items separated by commas or bullets, no table.

2. Name not detected, 26 percent. The parser could not work out which words were the candidate's name. Usually the name is in a header region, a text box, an image, or split across styled lines. Fix: name as plain text on the very first line of the body, nothing above it.

3. Em dashes, 19 percent. The long dash that Word auto inserts. Several parsers read it as a random character or drop the text either side. Fix: use a normal hyphen.

4. Icon bullets, 18 percent. Arrows, checkmarks, custom glyphs from templates. They come through as garbage characters at the start of every line. Fix: the standard round bullet.

5. Two column layout, 11 percent. This one is the worst when it hits. The sidebar gets read in the middle of your work history, so a skill list lands inside a job and dates attach to the wrong role. Fix: single column, always.

6. Ambiguous dates, 9 percent. "2019-21", "Summer 2022", dates in a different column from the job. Fix: Mon YYYY to Mon YYYY on the same line as the title.

7. Smart quotes, 8 percent. Curly quotes from Word. Mostly harmless but some older parsers mangle them. Fix: straight quotes, or just avoid quotes.

8. Name merged with the next line, 8 percent. "MUHAMMAD TANZEELHAYDER" style, because the name and headline were in a text box that lost its spacing. Fix: same as number 2.

9. Missing section headers, 8 percent. Creative headings like "Where I have been" instead of Experience. The parser cannot classify the section. Fix: boring headings. Experience, Education, Skills.

One more that does not show in the list because those files fail before they can be scored. Roughly one upload in ten is a scanned image or a photo of a resume. The text layer is empty, so the system receives nothing at all. Five second check: open your PDF and try to select the text with your cursor. If it will not highlight, you have a picture, not a resume.

What I would take from this. The top four problems are all template decisions, not content decisions. People spend hours on wording and lose the application to a skills grid they added in thirty seconds. Single column, plain text, standard headings, normal bullets, hyphens not dashes, export straight from Word. That is the whole list.

Happy to answer questions on any of these.

Edit: a few people asked whether the numbers are real. They come from a live counter that updates with every file parsed, not from memory. As of tonight it reads 3,951 files, 82 percent with at least one issue. Happy to explain how each one is tallied if anyone wants the detail.

I graduated a few years ago from Harvard College, and recently left my position at a tech startup (amicably). Currently looking for roles in tax/accounting.

While applying for jobs, I’ve had several recruiters use my education against me - “this entry level job wouldn’t suit a Harvard graduate like yourself”, “how can you not have a job lined up if you graduated from Harvard”, assuming my desired salary to be out of their range, etc.

I might be playing the world’s smallest violin here, or I may not be leveraging the advantage everyone’s telling me I have. Thoughts?

I’m sharing in hopes this may help other folks. I’ve been job hunting for months, applying to upwards of 50 or so jobs, and realized I was using a very poorly made and terribly laid out resume. So I came to this subreddit and researched and compared many resumes and suggestions, as well as researched ATS friendly resumes and I ended up making this one from scratch to fit my own needs. I applied to a position a few days ago and got the job today. This layout is tailored to my specifications but feel free to give advice on what could be different if anything.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BnjJ4RLSiykE4xt8eTrw7fdpYCyR5A-MDMQ4Ac43z_0/edit

I've been a hiring manager for most of the last 30 years. I usually operate as a manager of Individual Contributors but have also occupied the next rung up in the ladder, managing other managers. I've screened thousands of resumes over the years, done at least a thousand interviews, and have been involved in (or been the person responsible for) the hiring committee at a number of companies large and small. I’ve written the hiring policy for companies of 200+ engineers and been the final say on how interviews were conducted time and time again.

Most of the resumes I see on this sub aren't even making it past HR. If your strategy is to put together a resume and spam it out to as many potential employers as possible, you're going to get nothing. I want to lay out some general advice that will help considerably with your job searches. Whether you agree with all, some, or none of it is irrelevant to the fact that every one of these points has tripped up scores of resumes everywhere I've ever worked. If you disagree with the way a company does its hiring, you’ll disagree with the way that company will be run and you won’t be a good fit. You’ll be unhappy. Part of being a successful professional is understanding what the people you disagree with are thinking and finding ways to tailor your efforts to meet them in the middle as much as possible. Everything in this essay is a (very, very brief) lesson in that skill.

Your resume will likely go through an auto-filter of some kind. This part is pretty unfamiliar to me, but you can bet that some keywords or phrases are strong red flags. If the phrase “remote work” shows up on your resume, someone in HR/Hiring will likely be looking to see if you’re hoping for remote work or if you live far away. Don’t mention your criminal history in your resume. Don’t explain why you were laid off or fired. For the love of FSM, don’t mention how desperate you are for a job (I’ve seen this.) Don’t explain gaps in employment. Stick to positive facts.

When I say facts, I mean facts. If your resume has some bullshit about having leveraged agile techniques to spearhead something or other, you’re just playing buzzword bingo. One of the managers who used to work for me just burst out “fuck off!” in the middle of the day once. It turned out that he was reading a resume that was a bunch of subjective buzzword fluff. Don’t do it. EVERY LINE of your resume should convey three things, that the work described was hard, that it was impactful, and it should honestly convey your role in it. I’m sick to death of seeing Junior or Senior Software Engineers who claim to have led a program of 20 engineers doing…. whatever. Save leadership language for when X number of people were working full-time on a project you were responsible for. Be honest about your level of responsibility or some Hiring Manager’s going to be telling you, indirectly and not in so many words, to fuck off.

I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. First, you should understand how your resume is "read." 

The first person to read your resume is someone in HR or Hiring. Maybe that person is following up on a flag that was raised by the auto-filter saying that you might not be able to work in the US, or your criminal history might preclude work in the company (this is true for some branches of finance, government, military contracting, etc.) Who knows what else…. Whoever the recruiter is, they’ll trash your resume for any of these reasons. If you survive that first level, they’re going to try to figure out if your talents match the job description text they were given. IN MOST CASES, this person hasn’t the foggiest idea what any of your resume’s technical jargon means. You still need to convince this person that you are sufficiently qualified to get your resume handed on to an actual Hiring Manager.

The way we do this is by spoon-feeding the Recruiter with a handy cheat sheet. The job description almost certainly has something like this in it:

• Must have a Bachelor’s or similar in Computer Science or Computer Engineering

• Must have 10+ years of professional C++ experience

• Must have 5+ years of professional embedded software development experience.

• Previous experience with application of AI in the embedded space is a plus.

(It’ll likely be much longer.)

If the Recruiter has no idea what this all means, how do you spoon-feed them the notion that you have what they are looking for? You write a cover letter. Yes, an actual cover letter. It seems old-fashioned, but one way or the other your application will stand out if few or none of the other applications have one. Your cover letter is going to look like this:

[All the usual business letter header stuff goes here.]

To Whom it May Concern;

I found your posting for the [job title] on [place you found it] and would like to submit my credentials for consideration. I clearly meet or exceed all of the requirements for the position;

• I have a Bachelor’s in Computer Science from [wherever.]

• I’ve been working with C++ in a professional context for 15 years.

• I’ve been doing professional embedded programming for 10 years.

Notice the language. I didn’t say that I have 10 years of experience with microprocessor control systems, nor did I say that I have a degree in EE. The person reading my cover letter may not understand that these phrases mean the same thing as what the job posting says. Your cover letter should mimic the language of the job description. Throw the recruiter a bone and make sure that you respond to their bullet points in the same order as they appear in the description. If you don’t have one of the qualifications, leave it out without comment. If you have something related that you believe meets the criteria, just say, “I have N years of experience with [X] which means I meet the requirement for [Y].” Don’t explain it. Just state it as a fact. The Recruiter will probably take you on faith. At worst, they’ll ask the Hiring Manager if X and Y are really the same.

Wrap up with, “If my experiences are a good fit for the position, please feel free to contact me at [email address/phone number] at your convenience.”

It’s VERY short, so it’s practically been read the moment it’s been looked at. But it says a lot about you. First, you’re not just blasting out your resume to everyone without thought. You actually spent time on making this connection personal. That first paragraph is there to make it clear that this is not a copy-paste letter. It’s a form letter, of course, but we’re hoping they won’t notice.

If you actually meet the qualifications for this position, making the Recruiter’s job this easy means your resume is far more likely to end up on the desk of someone like me. And that’s a huge win. It means you’ve actually gotten past 80-90% of the field.

Let’s talk about your actual resume now. If you think about how long it would take to read your resume top-to-bottom, then multiply that time by the many dozens of resumes received for a given position, you'll understand why your resume isn't read that way. Especially in the current job market, the number of applications I get for a given position is staggering. Remember what I said about making every line convey three important points? I don’t read your resume, I read a random sampling of lines.  If I see that every line contains those three points in a believable language, I’ll keep scanning. If I hit a buzzword bingo line, you’re already done. You’ll get no further with me. By the time I’ve decided to give you a phone screen, it’s rare that I’ve read more than half of your resume. If I’ve decided to junk your application, it’s because 2-3 lines gave me enough bullshit fatigue to give up.

• A quick side note, and this is just me so take the advice with a grain of salt, but I always read a section about non-professional interests when it’s there. I LOVE to see that someone is a fully-rounded individual. When I interviewed at google, one of the interviewers spent more than half the interview talking to me about whitewater rafting. I got the offer. When I interviewed at Midway, the hiring manager noticed that I had Juggling on my “Other Interests” section, pulled a bag of clubs out from under his desk, AND WE CONDUCTED THE INTERVIEW WHILE THROWING JUGGLING CLUBS BACK AND FORTH. I got the job. If you have non-technical interests, it can really help to use 1-2 lines of your resume to show them off. It can’t hurt.

Don't have just one resume. Most professions have dozens of sub-specialties, but I see engineering resumes all the time that are a general coverage of the individual. These resumes are a waste of time and they get junked quickly simply because so much of the space is wasted on information that is irrelevant to the application. If you are applying for a position as a frontend developer, 80% of your resume needs to be bullet points about HTML/CSS/JS/HTTP/SSL/TLS. If the job is a graphics engineer, lose as much as you can about everything else and focus on your graphics experience. If I’m trying to hire someone who can sit down and be instantly productive writing 3D graphics in GLSL, a resume full of HTML/AI/AWS/Python just tells me that the candidate been spending a lot of their professional time NOT in graphics and should be a second choice to someone who’s been doing it full-time.

You need several resumes. Use the one that is appropriate for each application. If you want to apply for a job that you don’t have a decent resume for, create a new resume for that subject. 

I’m seeing a lot of resumes on this sub that say they’re looking for remote work. If the job description doesn’t say it’s a possibility, mentioning a desire for it in your application will get you ejected immediately. Even at a company that is remote-friendly, you’ll still be a second choice if you convey that desire up-front. We can argue the pros and cons of remote work elsewhere - this is a discussion about how to get an interview, not a debate about Return To Office. The inarguable point is that if the company wants in-office workers, the only chance you have to work there (remotely) is to convince them you’re the right person for the job THEN bring up remote. If you open with the issue, you won’t get far enough to have the discussion.

I’ve trimmed this down a lot. There’s so much advice I’d like to add that would extend this to 20 pages. I’ve written too many essays on hiring, interviewing, bootstrapping, etc. There’s always more to be said than can fit the space an audience will tolerate. I feel like the tight space has made this sermon a little harder to follow, so I’ll atone for that sin with a epilogue that will take you far:

Read the resumes that get posted on this sub. Read them the way I described. Read them before reading anyone’s comments. Be honest with yourself whether you’d spend your own time and money to interview and hire that person. Learn from their mistakes. 

(Damnit. One more.) Don’t let a “professional resume writer” touch your fucking resume. Those things stick out like a sore thumb - especially in tech. You'd be better off asking an auto mechanic to do your heart transplant. If someone's writing other people’s resumes for a living, theirs can’t be very damned impressive.

Edit: Fuck. Yet another one. If you don't have 8-10 years of experience, you get ONE page for your resume. Unless you are Alexander The Great, The Dali Lama, or The Second Coming, you don't get three pages.

Edit: If you're interested in the same advice about sitting interviews: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1dwav1z/30_years_of_experience_as_an_inquisitor_packed/