I Read 'The Tech Resume Inside Out' and Updated My Resume

After posting a request for Gergely's book on the tech resume, I decided to try to write what I learned from it to both demonstrate what it's helped me with and to help other folks who are in a similar position as me: hitting that wall of at least 3 automated rejections on a good day, usually on Monday or Sunday evening (if it's from Indeed) and wanting to eject from the industry as a whole. I'll go through this via its major parts; the hiring process, writing the resume and reflecting on examples and inspiration.

Part I: The Hiring Process Off rip, what I've known to be true is mentioned earlier, that "the average recruiter spends around 7 seconds to scan a resume and decide if it’s a reject, or if they'll read further". This knowledge made me not want to spend so much time on something that's treated very cheaply. It continues noting the differences between a journeyman, good and great resume. The resume I had prior to this book could definitely be classed as that of a journeyman; listing the things I've done at different organizations, not explicitly signaling any sort of growth outside of job title-based promotions through company transferals. What I do appreciate mentioned is something that only a few folks and friends that I've spoke to about this process can admit to be a factor; one I think that contributes the most to it: luck. I got lucky to get a job at Lyft while living in the Bay during its phase of high growth. Having visibility in the scene as well helped me nudge past my skillset as I wasn't the strongest Python developer before joining but working there shot my aptitude up because of the ability to both see more production use of the language and being able to work with folks who contributed heavily to that. Luck also means that there's no precise formula behind this; it's being at the right place at the right time. Something that I found interesting was his note that "as much as both the resume screening and the interview process can seem like a black box, it’s run by people who try and do their best". This is something that I've noticed to not be true in some very few cases.

What I did find refreshing was this graphic of the application funnel. But it also reminds me of the chances to just make it to an offer reflect the difficulty of landing a job anywhere. The chances of getting a job here are lower than being killed by a car in the United States, though coming from a smaller sample size. That aside, apparently the notion that ATSs are not automatically rejecting folks is true. Perhaps the use of mainly four of five of them by many of the companies I applied and the lack of the change of language in rejection messages has contributed to the mass idea of this.

Part II: Writing the (Damned) Resume So, the thing to challenge is making sure that we as job hunters pass "the first glance". Remember, we're only given less than 25% of a minute to determine if we're worthy of a callback. Keeping skill-based relevancy after tenures is important as these are seemingly the two things that can make or break it for a candidate. Outside of that, everything else fights against me; a lack of an academic background, no huge open source contributions of note, for example. One thing I'm calling bullshit on is this advice that a recruiter mentioned that says:

I’d stress how what really makes you stand out is having a tailored CV for the position. If you are applying for 20 different jobs, you should have 20 different CVs. Each one should be different and specific for that role. And while this might sound a “bad” thing to do, it’s not. It’s a necessary thing to do.

What I've done instead is lean on soft "keyword stuffing" with skills adjusted to be the most relevant to that role. Having to rewrite each region after optimizing it runs the high risk of making my resume sound less useful and wastes the effort of editing that I've gotten from many people. I asked folks on Mastodon about this:

The methods that felt the most sustainable were the following:

This recruiter's advice makes even less sense if I'm only applying for the same class of role across different companies. I can see the need to adjust the technologies, perhaps, but a different resume? 🚫 Tangentially, this makes me feel like I don't have much to say that doesn't seem applicable in a super-specialized context. I keep work journals and those help contribute to my resume building. One thing that people have mentioned is the split of a resume across industries or roles. Gergely links to Charity Majors' blog about the topic and this makes way more sense than generating a new resume per role, especially if the roles are the same.

Something that stuck out to me was the suggestion to always have a "current" position even if you're not employed full-time. That led me to changing my LinkedIn profile to the such because not having it apparently reduces your ranking in its algorithm, which seems so counter-intuitive. That's until I considered that companies are more willing to attempt to poach talent than work on nurturing talent. I've decided to use that to be more candid about the "side projects" I'm working on now, which will put some fire under my butt to even consider turning parts of it into a product somehow (we'll see). You'll see my projects page linked from my LinkedIn now as my "current position".

Apparently, since cover letters are so rare in the space, I've resigned myself to begin writing them for roles that I have a stronger sense of attachment to. It seems to be a chance to bolster things but I'm also treating it like buying a dollar scratcher; nothing's guaranteed and at worst, I lose ten minutes writing one. Ten minutes for a chance to gain stability sounds pretty cheap to me.

Part III: Inspiration My resume's format follows the recommended structure (as monochromatic as possible, top-to-bottom reading and prioritization of content) so I didn't have to make too many changes there. What I did do is make some parts more adjustable for editing so I can generate more refined forms of my resume for particular roles. This didn't take too much time and was easier for me in the application process from editing a "primary resume" and adjusting it accordingly. I did adjust some of the styling to make it more lean when it's as a PDF. One thing I'm not happy to do but willing to is changing my email address to not be my vanity on, because of the chance of someone who's reviewing this resume to be more reserved.

What I've Taken Away After reading this book, I'm realizing that I have been engaging in a bit of a scatter-shot approach to job hunting. My hope/anchor was that by optimizing my resume to be generic but focusing on my teamwork skills and productivity as a autonomous full-stack developer that I could apply at more places. It's a naive approach that I think I took for granted during the "hot" period of the market prior to COVID; although I don't like to blame it solely on COVID, I still managed to find roles. However, one of those were secured via a referral (to Code for America via a former coworker) and another through discovery (on the Fediverse). In both cases, my resume wasn't as important for the hot screen. Some changes I made to my resume that you can see now:

Clear time windows of how long I've worked with a particular skillset: I get asked this a lot by recruiters and this seems to be something that non-technical recruiters want to know as well. Explicitly having multiple resumes: for sake of optimizing my chances, I have a resume for full-stack and back-end development. Those are the two spaces I thrive in the most.

Here's a link to the new resume versus the old one. A bit more confidence in my skills, formatting to make it more friendly for scanning and the like. I spent a lot of time waddling it down and adjusting the type, reviewing my notes from my time at each company and the like to adjust the copy.

That said, I'm open to having more conversations with folks who can't say that they have an immediate open role at their organization but is willing to talk to me for 30 minutes over tea virtually, just to get a better sense of connection. Without conferences being a binding factor for this kind of networking, this is as good as it gets for me; especially since the cost of travel, lodging and ticketing for conferences have never been cheap.