A treatise on resumes

As someone who has read thousands of software engineering resumes and collectively thousands more across adjacent roles like product management, product design and data science (and, frankly, still hundreds of others for classmates, friends, etc) since 2012, I have a lot of opinions — as do many people in similar positions.

The biggest caveat about this entire article is that our opinions may (probably?) differ, so choose whosever you resonate with the most — or gets you the most results.

Other caveats

I loathe resumes

I am thrilled to see resumes starting to fall out of favor because:

• Resumes are often the epicenter of hiring bias — positive and negative — particularly against those with different backgrounds from the people (or software) screening them (and particularly for those with similar or “impressive” backgrounds). Using bias-removal software (ex. here) that scrubs identifying details from resumes can only go so far.
• The “signals” resumes emit that hiring teams (and algorithms) find valuable are often markers of privilege, such as competitive internships or prestigious universities, time-consuming personal projects or expensive hobbies, hackathons or student groups. Most signals aren’t inherently bad, and they often can indicate that a candidate might perform well in a given company’s interview process better than other assessment methods that team has tried. But signals aren’t causative. They’re just data points.
• The bigger problem with privilege is candidates whose resumes have these signals often receive even more privilege from companies throughout the process — at the application stage via campus visits from company representatives, faster response times, and higher priority interview scheduling. During the process, too: stronger interviewers, and sometimes even special events hosted for all the candidates interviewing from a particular school. At the offer stage, these signals may even push candidates into a higher salary band — not based on interview performance alone, but for attending a top-tier university (this can also work against a candidate who performs poorly compared to peers with the same background — rather than receive a lower offer commensurate with their interview performance, they’re less likely to get any offer*).
• All that’s to say: the gap between candidates with and without those backgrounds only grows when hiring teams use resumes to 1) screen for signals that favor people with the means to achieve them and 2) prefer and prioritize those candidates.
• Resumes are inherently meaningless at best, and ethically bad at worst. There’s no singular format and no objective grading criteria or actually predictive signals — many successful engineers I know had terrible entry- AND mid-level resumes riddled with typos, poor grammar and other mistakes, while countless carefully crafted, perfect-looking resumes are entirely overlooked. What’s the point?

I have a current conflict of interest against resumes

• Although I’ve wanted to write this article for a long time, I didn’t get around to it before I started a new job.
• My employer lets candidates submit resumes, but since they are themselves a hiring marketplace for software engineers based on a background-blind technical screen, the things I might say here about resumes are less relevant.

Resume vs. Curriculum Vitae (CV)

These are quite different, but many people seem to use them interchangeably or meet somewhere in the middle, which is just confusing. If a company asks for a resume, send a resume. If they ask for a CV, send a CV.

In both cases, ensure the format of the digital copy is .pdf (keeps your formatting in tact) and that the file name includes at least your full name, but potentially also the role and month/year (some even include company name, if you’re tailoring to the job descriptions for each).

Resume (or resumé, depending how fancy you want to sound)

Key distinguishing factor: is usually one page.

Opinions vary on this, but multi-page resumes are just asking to lose the n+1 page— because I’ve seen it happen. Whenever a company prints a resume for an interviewer, or starts delimiting giant PDFs containing online resume “books,” or scans and processes a bunch of resumes from an event, multi-page resumes are the first to get split apart: a staple jams the copier/scanner, the scanner doesn’t do double-sided scanning, etc… batch processing and multi-page resumes do not play nicely.

• “What does a company want to see?” Each company varies, but in general, hiring teams want to see relevant qualifications for the job that resume is supposed to be for. If you are transitioning careers, this can be tough, but in that case shift the focus to highlighting translatable skills and what you’re currently learning.
• “But how can I possibly fit all my amazing experience on one page?!” Hint: the answer is not “squeeze everything into size 8 font with 0 margins.” Instead, approach your resume like the Cliff’s Notes of your career story.
• “What are the most important details to highlight?” Tailor what you share toward the opportunities you want to convey interest in. Refer to the job descriptions and the mission/values statements at specific companies for inspiration — stay authentic to you, but use unconscious bias to your advantage and see where you can show how your skills and experience match their needs. A one-page resume makes each piece of real estate on your page much more valuable — so every word helps craft the impression you want to give in the 30 seconds your target audience will read it.
• The narrative you craft can be individual to each company where you apply (a lot more work) or can be general, but either way it should be clear what you want to do and why you’re qualified to do it.

Curriculum Vitae (CV)

These are primarily used in academia and employment outside of the United States. In theory they list comprehensively everything you’ve ever done, in a mostly standard format, including work experience and publications.

I don’t have strong opinions about these, you should just know they’re different from resumes and most companies in the tech sector are looking for a resume (unless you’re an academic looking for a niche mathy tech job whose primary asset is the research and/or patents you detail on said CV — even then, you can probably summarize the key points in resume form and your recruiters will thank you).

Necessary Evil

Resumes aren’t going anywhere for a while. Systemic change won’t happen overnight, or during your job search, your next job search, or maybe even your career.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make change, and there are sincere efforts to lessen their impact, including:

• LinkedIn is basically also a resume in a standardized format, but still has its problems. Even though more companies ask for profile links as part of the application (or in lieu of one), candidates haven’t consistently adopted it in useful ways, typically because the experience is so noisy.
• Blind recruitment practices or software that hide commonly bias-ridden details on resumes or applications (such as names or education) are gaining traction, but aren’t fully adopted by companies and don’t address bias in the rest of the hiring process.
• Skills-based hiring practices aren’t perfect either (besides mixed adoption, the common pitfall here is hiring managers often prefer skillsets of candidates with the privilege to attend four-year universities or expensive full-time bootcamps, although free, low-cost or income-share alternatives like freeCodeCamp or Lambda School are growing in popularity and as the costs of recruiting at universities rise, hiring teams are getting “more creative” about their candidate sources.

One day, I hope all of this will be unnecessary. Until then, I also hope the tips I’ve shared will help job seekers write or polish their resumes.

…And if you “eat resumes for breakfast” (real tagline on the LinkedIn profile of a recruiter I did not hire), I urge you to reconsider this kind of gatekeeping. Your frustrations about not being able to find the right candidates could be due to your own hiring practices.

*I’ll remind readers that this is a blog, not a commissioned article with a paid fact-checker who will help me with citations. I know this section would benefit from real research, which may or may not exist on this precise point (because I doubt many companies would share freely their strategy) but I’m speaking from anecdotal experience instead.

About me: I used to be a technical recruiter and intern program manager at Yelp. Then I was a Talent Manager at Triplebyte helping software engineers get jobs. Over my 8+ years in the tech industry, I’ve noticed a sizable gap between how tech companies describe and execute employee experiences, from hiring processes through their last day. This gap means candidates and employees often succeed despite (not because of) the employer’s efforts — and this is a big problem if we hope to make real change in equal opportunity hiring and inclusive work environments.

Today, I consult with companies to narrow those gaps by strategically optimizing their internal processes (hiring, onboarding, offboarding, etc) and building or improving employee engagement programs.

I’m based in San Francisco and a sucker for public transit, tasty cheese, fun facts and juicy novels. I’m on Twitter @keeterooni and LinkedIn.