YO NA TA N ZU NGER S BLO G

FROM MACHINE LEARNING TO THE MIDDLE EAST

Non-suck resums
Ive spent a lot of time in the past few years reading resums and interviewing people.
A really surprising fraction of those resums have been really lousy; either
uninformative, or full of meaningless junk, or just plain illegible. I tend to throw those
out. On the other hand, good interviews with competent people leave me in a better
mood all day so in the interest of getting more of those in the future, Im going to
post a couple of notes on good versus bad resums. (OK, to be honest: In the interest
of not having to slog through any more piles of really bad resums. It makes me feel
like my brains are going to leak out of my ears.)
Format: Stick your name and contact info at the top. Then have major
categories going down, sorted in descending order by what youre applying on
the strength of. (For instance, if youre a new grad, you probably want to put
education as the top category. If you have professional experience, or
internships, or research experience, thats way up there too. You almost
certainly want to put a list of your other job-related skills way at the bottom,
and other skills below that. Dont skip the other skills; sometimes there are
interesting ones there. Fluency in four languages is actually pretty interesting
no matter what job youre applying for, for example.)
If youre wondering if something is worth putting on your resume: Semirelevant job experience can be reduced to a bullet point or two under skills.
Completely irrelevant job experience, if theres a lot of it, is also a bullet point.
This document is meant to be read by humans. It doesnt need world-class page
layout, but it should be reasonably easy-to-read; that means well-spaced text,
clear fonts, etc. Avoid things like tables with grid lines unless youre a
proficient graphic designer and know how to make them legible; 95% of tables
arent, and they do more harm than good. Also, a resum is an excellent place
to demonstrate that you have full command of the language that youre

applying in. If you dont speak like a native, run your text by someone who
does.
Bullet points versus paragraphs: Either is fine, so long as its informative. A
long list of papers youve published is surprisingly uninformative, although I
know some resume readers like it. A few lines explaining what youve been
working on for the past couple of years is completely critical; no matter how
many paper titles you give, I wont be able to fathom anything useful without
that.
The person reading your resum is not necessarily a specialist in your obscure
sub-field. Telling me that you implemented the G87 patch to the GRU echoing
transformer1 is kind of meaningless unless you give me some hint of what the
hell those are.
Those objective statements I dont read them. I dont know anyone who
does. I suppose theyre traditional, but unless they say To crush my enemies,
see them driven before me, and hear the lamentations of their women, theyre
pretty much just visual decoration. Do not stress about getting them perfect.
People say your resum needs to fit on one page. Damned if I know why; Im
perfectly able to turn a page. Although if there isnt something on the first page
that makes me care, I probably wont bother.
Really, unless someone is hiring on the anyone whos at least marginally
competent and/or has a pulse rule, whoever is reading your resum is looking
for one good thing, not a critical mass of so-so things. So padding with a lot of
boring stuff doesnt really help; one good explanation paragraph of something
cool even if its nontraditional, even if its just some wacky project youve
been doing in your spare time can.
1

This is gibberish, not CS, in case you were wondering. At least, I thinkits just
gibberish.
Heres a sample of a decent resume, with comments interspersed.

Joe R. Hominid
100 W. Aardvark Dr., Buggersville, CA 94043
tel: 1-415-555-1212

jrhomind@cs.buggersville.edu
http://www.joerandomhominid.net/
Objective
Education

Professional
Experience

A research-oriented position with a practical bent

Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of West Buggersville 2001-2006
Thesis Title: Sustainable Fishing with Bayesian Regression
(Expected)
Advisor: Prof. Moshe Zuchmir
M.S. in Electrical Engineering, University of West
2000-2001
Buggersville (GPA: 3.8/4.0)
B.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Southern
1992-1996
Turkmenistan Glorious University (GPA: 3.7/4.0)
Tells me: This guy is a fresh Ph.D., applying on the strength of that. Ive never
heard of Prof. Zuchmir, but that may just mean that I dont know him. Maybe
one of my colleagues does. Theres a time gap between his BS and his MS Ill
check the rest of the doc to see what he was doing then.
2002-Present: Research Assistant, University of West Buggersville, CA,
USA
In partnership with the Buggersville Fisheries Institute, developed a system for
continuously monitoring the nearby water ecosystem and directing fishing
vessels to optimize long-term sustainability of the fishery with minimal
economic impact. One team developed a cheap sensor that monitored eight
environmental variables; we deployed over 500 of these. I worked on
developing computer models based on Bayesian networks to combine
monitoring information with model fishing schedules to predict the long-term
health of the region. This included the theoretical development of the model,
implementing a working version in C++, and developing and maintaining the
system as we used it in real life. Fishery yields increased 15% during the time of
our project, versus a 10% decrease for neighboring fisheries.
This is a great paragraph, and Id pull him in for an interview on the strength of
it alone. Why is it good? It shows that the person knows what the overall project
is and why its important (a shocking number of people seem able to work on a
small piece and have no idea why theyre doing so), it explains what the
individuals actual role was (Im not so interested in a super-duper project if the
candidates main contribution was to sanitize the telephones), and it shows
evidence of several important skills: the ability to do the theory work underlying
a computer model, the ability to implement a real system and keep it running
(dont underestimate that! There are a lot more people with skills in theory than
the ability to build a real system. If Im hiring an engineer, rather than a pure
theorist, thats actually the critical bit), the ability to work as a significant part of
a larger project, and its a strong hint that the person must have some common
sense.
2001-2005: Teaching Assistant, University of West Buggersville, CA, USA
Teaching assistant for undergraduate data structures, undergraduate algorithms,
and the graduate machine learning intro. Duties included teaching sections,

Publications

Technical
Skills

developing problem sets, and grading papers.

Also good to know. Less critical than the research experience, so the text is
shorter.
1996-2000: Enlisted Sailor, US Navy
Served in the US Navy as fire control aboard a number of surface ships.
Honorably discharged at the rank of Petty Officer 3rd class (E-4).
Even though this isnt technically relevant, it tells me what was happening
during the four-year gap, and any serious job you held for that long is
interesting. For the purpose of this resum its mostly flavor, on a par with the
other skills, but it gives me a sense that this candidate is used to discipline and
professionalism potential strong points. E-4 is a bit of jargon, but PO3rd
class explains it partially and theres no other good way to encode that
information.
Etc. etc.
A big list goes here, I dont feel like making up a bunch of entries
Im not going to read this in detail, but if he has a range of publications thats
interesting to know, especially if theyre not all with the exact same list of
authors. (That would just tell me that the principal investigator of the group is
the kind of guy who publishes everything) If he has conference papers, invited
talks, etc., those should get top billing and maybe their own subsection.

Fluent in C++, C, Python, x86 assembler

Experience with machine learning techniques, especially Bayesian

networks and SVMs

Was sysadmin for a 20-machine Linux cluster for the ecology

department, 2001-2005.

Sysadminning is one of those partially relevant jobs. Its evidence of some

real-world experience, which is good, but for a research-type position it doesnt
get top billing.
Other Skills

Fluent in English, Mandarin Chinese, Classical Greek

Volunteer firefighter, Buggersville Fire Department, 2000 Present

Massively relevant? No. Shows that hes got a range of interests, can probably
think about things other than the narrowest details of his field, and is generally
kind of neat? Yes.

Disclaimer: This is not the official position of my employer, or anyone else except
me. I offer no guarantee whatsoever that if you follow this, you will get interviewed,
hired, even noticed by a potential or current employer, or even not be shot at by them.
Nor is any warranty, express or inferred, offered in conjunction with the reliability or
usefulness of this advice.
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Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Ten Tips for a (Slightly) Less Awful Resume
Objective: Obtain a position at IBM
-- some idiot applying to Amazon.com

WARNING: These are my own *personal* opinions, not Google's or Amazon's or

anyone else's. I do think you'll find that most resume screeners at tech companies
particularly tech companies that build their own software in-house, like Yahoo! or
eBay or Amazon.com or Microsoft or Google will agree with a lot of this stuff, on the
whole. But experienced screeners disagree on lots of the little details, and in the end
these are just my own opinions. These tips are not guaranteed to get you any better
results. Your mileage may vary. Do not use these tips in a bathtub or when standing in
a pool of water. Do not tap on the glass or the tips will be irritated. Do not feed the
tips. Etc.

Today's scientific question is: why are the resumes of programmers so uniformly awful?
And how do we fix them? The resumes, that is.
If you've spent more than approximately seventeen kiloseconds as an industry
programmer, you've had to review bad tech resumes. It's just part of the job.
Programmer resumes ultimately have to be gauged by programmers it takes one to
know one. So it winds up being a kind of karmic revenge on you for bad resumes
that you've written. C'mon, you know you've done it. You even knew it was bad when

you were writing it. Admit it! You listed HTML under programming languages, didn't
you? Argh!
So why are tech resumes so bad? You know what I mean. You see the craziest stuff on
resumes. Like the candidate who proudly lists every Windows API call she's ever used.
Or the candidate who lists every course he took starting from junior high school. Or the
one who lists college extension courses he took while doing time for armed robbery.
Or that really dumb guy who accidentally listed "work at IBM" as the objective on his
Amazon resume. Ha, ha! What a dork!
Oh wait that was me. D'oh. I sometimes refer to it as my "million dollar typo". It's
kind of a painful story, especially for my eardrums, since whenever I tell it people
predictably point at me and scream with hysterical girly laughter. Dammit. Not to
mention the fact that it cost me a fortune in stock-option valuation because I
applied before the IPO and was quite understandably ignored by Amazon recruiters
until I re-applied long after the IPO, this time saying that haha, no hard feelings, my
bad, I actually wanted to work for Amazon. Ahem.
But hey, I deserve what I got (in a word: "nothing"), because I was, if I may employ the
common parlance, an idjit. I think almost everyone's been guilty at one time or another
of idjicy when writing a tech resume, although maybe not quite as flagrant as mine was.
And if almost everyone's guilty of it, then they must be hard to write.
I think there are multiple root causes. One is that nobody teaches us what companies are
looking for. And we don't write resumes very often in our careers, so we don't get much
practice at it.
Another root cause is that much of the advice on resume-writing from other industries
doesn't necessarily carry over to tech resumes. I'll cover some of these mismatches in my
tips below.
Another minor, yet oddly persistent problem is that many candidates are raving

pathological liars. You'd be amazed at how many candidates tell me: "Oh, I just put that
buzzword on there for the recruiters." Needless to say, this response leads directly to the
time honored end-of-interview transmission code: DYHAQFM? ("Do you have any
questions for me?")
In spite of all these problems I hold out hope that it might be possible to get at
least somepeople to write better programmer resumes by giving a few free tips. You
never know. After all, I can't ask my favorite phone-screen questions anymore
candidates tell me they've read my blog. So maybe someone will pay attention to these
tips, too.
I'm just talking about software engineer resumes today, and specifically just the subset
intended for applying to companies that build their own software. I have no idea how
much (if at all) this stuff applies to resumes for other kinds of positions, or companies.
Maybe not much. Sorry!
Anyway, here are my resume-writing tips, which I'm giving directly to you, free of
charge, with no strings attached, because I care about you so much.
Tip #1: Nobody cares about you
Ha, ha! Saw that one coming, I'll bet.
Well, let's be a bit more precise: nobody cares about you yet. Not during resume
screening, anyway.
Resume screening is just pattern matching. People are trying to figure out if you have
the skills they're looking for. If they could do this reliably without human intervention,
so much the better. Screeners will like your resume best if it's easy to scan visually, and
stories about you and your fun-loving personality and fiercely loyal carnivorous
parakeet and year-long hiking expedition in Tibet and blah Blah BLAH just don't scan.
The output of the resume screening step is a decision: should they proceed with you or

decline you? Once that go/no-go decision is made and entered into the system, the
screeners want to forget all about you. Seriously. They need their cache cleared for the
next pattern-matching session. So anything you say about yourself anything that
differentiates you from a machine that can crank out beautiful code is just an
annoying and potentially harmful distraction. At best, the screener will ignore it. At
worst, they'll get mad at you and start grading more harshly.
So your best strategy is to avoid talking about yourself. All your hopes, fears, goals,
dreams, ambitions DELETE. (Your resume's going to get a lot shorter from these tips,
in case you were wondering.) Your cover letter? DELETE. Nobody cares! Your little
clever in-joke in your objective? DELETE. Especially that one. Resumes are not a time to
be funny. Believe me, your resume is probably already funny enough without any
additional effort on your part.
But what about your precious hobbies section, which identifies you as a well-rounded
and socially adjusted person of taste and culture? DELETE! Unless you have relevant
hobbies, that is. If your resume is borderline, and you say you're a World Origami
Federation grandmaster, then you obviously don't have enough time for programming,
so it'll likely get eighty-sixed. If your hobby is writing code, or administering a website,
or doing anything remotely computer-related, then it might tip the scales in your favor.
Otherwise, just don't mention it!
Face it: all the traditional advice about trying to convince the hiring manager that you're
a plucky, scrappy young individual from a farm in Alabama who's destined for greatness
on account of your Uncle Ted having given you that pep talk after you fell off your horse
when you were a kid that advice may as well have come from the back end of your
horse, because the hiring manager just wants to profile your current skill set. Mr. Plucky
goes into the Round File.
Don't get all depressed about this tip. People will start caring more about you as a
person in later phases of the recruiting process, particularly if you're one of those
candidates who doesn't really like showering.

Tip #2: Use Plain Text

Your resume is going to go through a bunch of automated transformation tools and will
be mangled horribly along the way. Any non-ASCII character, such as those
nonstandard Microsoft Word bullets, or any accented character, or (heaven help you)
Unicode will be turned into our old favorite, the question-mark character ("?").
You don't want your resume to look like this:
Resum? for Bob?T???Moblin
?Experience
1997?Present?

Vice?F???**??didn?t?do?sh???for?ten?yea???

So write it in plain text. Yes. Text. You know. Like from a typewriter, or Windows
Notepad. ABCs, not PDF.
Don't expect any whitespace to make it through except newlines and single spaces. And
don't assume your resume will be viewed in a fixed-width font. If you make a nice pretty
formatted table using tab characters, it will look like ascii-art smoke signals by the time
a human being looks at it.
The maximum amount of ASCII art you can get away with, and even this is stretching it,
is hyphenated lines and bullets. For instance, this might be OK:
Education
--------* B.S. Computer Science, University of Wherever, 1997
* M.S. Resume Writing, 2003
graduated .357 magnum

But I wouldn't overdo it.

If your name has accent characters in it, your best bet is to change your name. For
instance, if your name is Pirre l'lphant, think about whether you'd prefer to have it

seen as "Pi?rre l'?l?phant" or "Pierre l'Elephant". Sure, your accented

characters mightmake it through, but I'd play it safe.
HTML formatting usually makes it through safely because it's plain text. However, even
if your tags are left alone by the automated mangler, there's no guarantee that your
resume will be viewed from a browser, and nobody wants to read through a bunch of
ugly markup while they're trying to assess your skills. So you shouldn't use HTML
either.
Text! All the best resumes are plain text. Use text.
Tip #3: Check, please!
Attend to your basic hygiene: spell-check, grammar-check, style-check.
For starters, they have these wonderful programs called "spell checkers", and they even
know some computer jargon. For God's sake, don't submit a resume without a spellcheck. This is one bit of traditional advice that's still true for tech resumes. People care
about your spelling, because if you're misspelling things it means you don't care enough
about the quality of your job application to spend 30 seconds running it through a
program that can find your mistakes for you. That's pretty damn lazy.
If you flat-out refuse to use a spell-checker, please at least refrain from misspelling Lisp
as "Lips". You'd be amazed at how often people do this.
Don't misspell "Curriculum Vitae". The proper spelling is r-e-s-u-m-e, unless you have a
Ph.D. or you're applying for a non-US company where "CV" is standardized. In the US,
"curriculum vitae" is likely to be mistaken for a venereal disease.
Please, please, please learn the difference between "lead" and "led". It's one of the most
common grammatical errors on resumes, and it annoys the hell out of many screeners.
"Lead" is either the present-tense verb meaning "not doing any coding", or it's a metallic

element that makes you sterile if you accidentally ingest it. "Led" is the past tense of
"lead". Example:
* 1995-1996: lead a team doing blah blah blah.

we were...

The date is long past, and rest of the paragraph is in the past tense, so this is clearly one
of those people who don't know "lead" from "led". That, or she was trying to sterilize her
team members. Either way, it doesn't look good.
Keeping the tense consistent between sentences in a paragraph is related to the
important grammatical notion of "parallelism", in which you try to use the same
structure for clauses in a sentence. For instance, you should never say: "Job
responsibilities: pretty much doing nothing and pick my nose." Screeners will be much
more impressed if you use the parallel gerund form, picking your nose.
None of this advice applies to blogs, of course. If you find spelling or grammatical errors
in my blog, it's because I put 'em there on purpose. Pshaw.
To finish off our spiffy lead/led example, I should note that you can also use "lead" as a
noun, as in "tech lead", but you risk having it interpreted as "wanker", so read tip
5 before you attempt it.
So! Spell check and grammar check. Gotta have 'em. What about style?
I could of course rant at length about style, but it's pretty open-ended: people constantly
find clever new ways to be unclever. So I will restrict my stylistic remarks to the use of
the word "utilize". "Utilize" has been scientifically demonstrated to be used only by
stupid people, so if you use it you could easily be mistaken for one. A stupid person, that
is, not a scientist. "Utilize" is one of the all-time classic Stupidity Indicators, right up
there with saying "choo-choo-choo" out loud when you're thinking. Ever notice how only
stupid people make train noises when they're thinking? "Oh gosh, lemme think, chsh
chsh chsh... hmmm, choo choo choo..."
Yup. They sound like Winnie the Pooh, who as you may recall "thinks" by pounding his

head and saying "think think think." DYHAQFM!

Tip #4: Avoid Weasel Words
Weasel Words are impressive-sounding verbs that make it sound like you did something
useful, when in fact all you did was snork down chocolates from the big candy bowl in
the conference room while other people did all the actual work.
"Participated" is the all-time champion Weasel Word. As an example of just how
weaselly it is, consider this: I can say truthfully that I participated in the Gulf War. I
even received a medal for it. The actual form of my participation involved watching it on
CNN; I happened to be active duty Navy at the time but wasn't on tour. But I
"participated" so I got a medal, despite the fact that I probably couldn't identify the
Persian Gulf on a map.
Heck, I even "participated" in the election of George W. Bush, specifically by not voting
for him. But it's true! I participated!
Given that you can participate in something without doing much or having any real
impact, the word "participate" becomes a semantic sink: it sucks all meaning out of a
paragraph, nullifying any deductions we can make about your actual contribution. If any
form of "participated" appears in a paragraph describing something you did,
experienced resume screeners will simply draw a big red line through that paragraph
and move on.
"Proposed" is another Weasel Word, unless it's immediately followed by a claim of
bona-fide work, such as "...and implemented". There's a certain type of candidate who
drifts from job to job and produces nothing but proposals. This can mean that the
person doesn't like to do real work, or that nobody ever listens to the person, but either
way it's not good.
One big class of Weasel Words is the "stalker" category, including "analyzed", "studied",
"learned", "observed", "watched" and their ilk. Nobody wants to hire you based on your

extensive experience with observing work occurring. If all you did was analyze stuff,
assuming it wasn't some sort of rigorous statistical analysis worth bragging about, then
just take that whole item out of your tech resume.
Resume screeners keep an eye out for non-weasel words, aka Productivity Words. These
are words that you can't weasel out of when someone asks you about them. The best are
synonyms of "got real stuff done", including "coded", "implemented", "developed",
"delivered", and "launched".
It's perfectly OK to use "designed", as long as you follow it up with a Productivity Word.
If you design something without implementing it, then it's just a synonym for
"Proposed". If you prefer to design things that other people ultimately implement, then
you're quite possibly outstanding material for a company full of kneebiters. But a real
tech company like Amazon or eBay or Microsoft or whoever isn't going to hire you,
because they can find plenty of people who can both design things and implement them.
"Tech lead" is, sadly, another weasel word if you're applying for an individual
contributor position, because it's all too easy for your tech skills to rust into oblivion if
you spend long enough as a tech lead without helping with the coding. It's especially a
red flag for college hires who are talking about their group projects; weaker
programmers often gravitate towards the coordinator position on their project, and
wind up not having any real knowledge to show for their effort. Hence, if you're applying
for a programming position and you were a project leader of any kind, make sure to call
out whether you did any coding on the project, or screeners will assume that you did
none.
Tip #5: Avoid Wank Words
Wank Words are words that inflate your perceived importance (e.g. using "architected"
rather than "designed"), or words that have simply become synonyms, such as "Rational
UML Process", for the so-called work done by people who sit on their asses and don't
know how to code anymore.

Wank Words are worse than just devoid of content; they're active indicators of total
inactivity. Resume screeners either delete Wank Words or replace them with the word
"wank" (e.g., "Certified Wank Master"), which makes the resume a lot easier to scan.
"Advocate" is a common wank word, when it refers to a title or position. If it's a verb
then it's just a weasel word, but if you think it's your title, then you've inflated yourself
into Wanker territory. Either way, if you're walking around advocating stuff, it means
you're not working. Also, it means nobody listens to you, because if you possessed actual
leadership, people would just do what you recommended and then you wouldn't need
advocate it anymore. So "advocate" just means "wanker".
"Consultant" is often another absolutely outstanding synonym for "wanker". Now let me
just add, before I get stabbed to death by eager members of the heavily armed
Consultant Industry, that some consultants are great. The problem is that the odds are
completely stacked against you in tech resume screening. It's like fast-food experience
when applying to be a waiter at a fancy restaurant. It might have helped you hone your
waiter skills, but the odds are against it, and a lot of the art of resume screening is about
weighing odds.
The problem with "consultant" is that it has two meanings. It can either mean "person
who was hired on a contract basis to fill a coding need in the organization", or it can
mean "person hired to 'consult', aka 'wank', because the hiring organization is too
clueless to solve their own problems and too incompetent to retain even one full-time
staff member capable of helping them, so they turn to paid self-help." When you see the
word on a resume, it can be hard to distinguish which kind it is.
The all-time worst Wank Word is probably "Methodologist". It will definitely get your
resume circulated around at tech companies, but not for the reasons you were hoping.
Any sort of amusing synonym for "Methodologist", such as Scrum Master, generally has
the same effect.
Wank Words are a bit like the adjectives on restaurant menus meaningless fluff words
added in an attempt to make the dish sound tasty. You can get a much clearer idea of

what the hell it is that you're contemplating eating if you take all the adjectives out,
including nouns and noun-strings that serve as adjectives. For instance, House Cured
Spice Rubbed Apple Smoked Line Caught Columbia River Coho Salmon, when all the
Wank Words are removed, becomes "Salmon", which is of course the only part of the
description that you're actually eating. Depending on how you feel about what that
winds up being, you can replace all the adjectives with either "icky" or "yummy", e.g.
"Yummy yummy yummy yummy yummy yummy yummy yummy Salmon", or "Icky icky
icky icky icky icky icky icky Eggplant."
Hence, many wank-filled resumes wind up looking, after the screeners have marked
them up a bit, like this: "Senior wanker wanking for the Wank-Wank Institute of
Wankology on the wank wank wank project during which I wanked successfully with
seven other wanky wankers."
Well, "senior" is also kind of a wank word, but you get the idea.
Tip #6: Don't be a Certified Loser
Don't ever, ever use the word "certified" your resume. It's far and away one of the most
prominent red flags in resume screening, bordering on a dead-giveaway round-file 86that-bad-boy no-review-required situation, if you know what I mean. (If you don't know
what I mean, well, you know the old saying about not knowing who the sucker is at the
poker table.)
Certification is for the weak. It's something that flags you as a technician when you
really want to be an engineer. If you want to be a television repairman, you can become
certified in TV repair. If you want to work for Sony and design their next big-screen TV,
then you clearly don't need a busy-working-adults course on how to repair the fugging
things.
Same goes for tech certification. It means you had to take a course to learn something
you could have read in a book. If you know something, just say you know it, and then be
prepared to answer questions about it during your phone screens and/or interviews. If

you feel compelled to add that you're certified in said skill, it's just broadcasting that you
lack confidence in your own self-assessments, which doesn't help you in the slightest.
Seriously. Take all mentions of certifications off your tech resume. It's actively hurting
your chances of getting an interview.
Tip #7: Don't say "expert" unless you really mean it
The term "expert" makes experts' eyes glow red. It doesn't bother me personally, but I
know enough interviewers who care vastly about it that I'm advising you to steer clear. If
you say you're an expert in something, many interviewers take it to mean you claim to
have a bigger penis than they do, metaphorically speaking of course, and they're going to
pull out their still highly metaphorical measuring stick during the interview and size you
up. I employ this metaphor in its most gender-neutral possible interpretation, needless
to say.
A friend of mine at Amazon once told me that he takes resumes that list "expertise" and
he tells the candidate something along these lines: "Wow! You don't often find true
experts in fields like this. I feel like I've found a kindred spirit here. I don't often do this,
but I'm going to pick one of these technologies you're an expert at, and we're doing to do
an incredibly deep technical dive on the subject. But before I start, is there anything you
want to take off the resume?"
He says it's like truth serum. (Hi, H.B.!)
Tip #8: Don't tip your hand
Resume writing is just like dating, or applying for a bank loan, in that nobody wants you
if you're desperate. And there are dozens of sure-fire little ways to let it slip out
accidentally that you are, in fact, desperate, such as (just as one example) using the word
"desperate" on the actual resume. Don't do that.
Ideally you want to appear confident and competent. Regardless of your overall skill

level, from "Magna Cum Laude" to "Platyhelminthes", you'll want to appear confident
that you can function effectively at that level.
One way of sounding really desperate is to apply for 18 jobs in one sentence. "Objective:
Highly personable, results-oriented programmer seeking opportunity to lead or
contribute individually on projects or programs involving e-commerce, 3D multiplayer
gaming, b2b, web programming or client/server networking with database or other
persistence strategies while utilizing my broad background in problem-solving to do
pretty much any menial job you'll give me oh please please please hire me, I'm d-d-desdesp-waaaaaaah!" Works like a charm!
You can apply for 18 jobs, but you should send 18 different resumes, each targeted at
that job, and you shouldn't send them all at once.
Another really obvious sign of desperation is saying you're eager to learn. Never, ever
say "eager to learn" on a resume. In the ancient and occult secret rosetta-stone decoder
language of technical resume screeners everywhere, "eager to learn" means "unskilled
labor". Let's face it: if you were really eager to learn, you'd have done it by now.
"Fast learner" definitely another bad one. Doubly so, because it combines desperation
with ignorance; you wouldn't need to call it out if you could demonstrate something
concrete that you've already learned. If you have some true demonstration that you're a
fast learner, such as entering college at age 14, then sure, call it out. But the phrase "fast
learner" is a fast track to the Big Resume Bin in the Sky.
"Motivated" is another resume-screening synonym for "desperate". Don't say you're
motivated. It's like wearing a suit to the interview. It'll turn people off, guaranteed.
The best way to sound non-desperate is to be non-desperate. You can do that by
lowering your expectations, tightening your belt, and not applying for that job you know
you're not qualified for. Failing that, just make a nice clean resume that sticks the bare
facts about your skills and accomplishments.

Tip #9: Don't bore us to death

Consider this resume statement:
* designed and developed runtime library code to emulate
MS-DOS and BIOS calls on a variety of Unix platforms.

This

enables binary-ported DOS application programs such as Quicken

and Microsoft Word to run under a commercial emulator on Unix
platforms.

This enables users who do not currently have access

to a DOS machine, but who have blah blah BLAH lather rinse repeat.

All it needs is the first sentence; we can deduce the rest.

Incidentally, if you're cleverly thinking of commenting that I need to follow Tip #9 in my
blogs, well, just remember this: if you ever write well enough to attract commenters,
they'll hate you too. So there!
Seriously, take a close look at your resume and delete anything that seems obvious. If
you worked at a company that everyone in the world has heard of, such as Microsoft or
Amazon, then don't spend time explaining to us what they do.
Be as specific as possible. Don't say "managed several small projects and one mediumsized one." That's useless. If the projects were too small to detail, then don't mention
them at all.
Don't repeat information from section to section. That happens a lot. Candidates seem
to think that screeners might miss something important on the resume, so they wind up
saying the same thing over and over. This copy-and-paste strategy has two major
downsides. The first is that the screener will be irked that you're repeating yourself,
causing them to start grading more harshly. The second is that if you're repeating
something the screener finds comical, such as "Senior Agile Methodologist" or "Certified
J2EE Consultant", you're not exactly helping by repeatedly honking it out like a
wounded seagull.

Resumes aren't a time for storytelling. Your goal, as a resume writer, should be to cover
your entire academic and professional career in a way that makes it as easy as possible
for screeners to match up your skills and accomplishments with things they recognize.
It's basically a checklist.
Don't go overboard on me and make a resume with so little information that nobody can
figure out what the heck you did on any of your projects I've seen that too. When in
doubt, provide more information, not less. There's nothing wrong with a long-ish
resume, despite what you might have heard from other industries. Just try to leave out
stuff that can be found through a search engine.
Tip #10: Don't be a lying scumbag
See, it's like this: you'll get caught. I'm still amazed at how many candidates think that
the resume game is some variant of bingo, wherein all the words on your resume have
optional invisible stars indicating whether you actually know something about that
word, and you just cross your fingers hope the interviewer shouts out Bingo! after
randomly selecting five starred words.
The weird thing is that so many people do it. Maybe they had to write a 10-line program
in Forth back in approximately fourth grade, so they shrug and list "Forth" in their
programming languages section, squeezed in at the end right between "HTML" and
"English", in the hope that it looks good but won't be selected for Interview Bingo. That,
folks, is tantamount to lying.
I do realize that "lying" is a rather harsh criticism, so I'm willing chalk it up to a
gentlemanly misunderstanding over the definition of the number "five". Many people
who rate themselves in some skill as being "average", or "intermediate", or "passably fair
to middling", or 4 through 6 on a 1-10, have redefined those terms to mean "have been
briefly exposed to the concept, but don't remember a single thing about it now except
the name." Really. I'm not making this up.
Seeing as candidates are redefining the number five to mean "one", I figure I can

redefine "grossly exaggerating" to mean "lying". Fair enough?

If you lie on a tech resume, you'll get caught. Of course one of the interviewers is going
to be a passionate closet Forth user (as if there's any other kind), and they'll get all
excited and ask about it, which sends the candidate into a pants-crapping frenzy of lostat-Bingo smoke-screen tactics, which include hemming and hawing and saying "oh gosh
it's been a long time" and all those other things that so endear them with interviewers.
What were they thinking?
Incidentally, I know this is supposed to be about resume writing and not interviewing,
but let me just state for the record that I remember my college courses from nearly 20
years ago as if they were last week. If I'm interviewing you and I ask about your OS
course and you say "oh gosh, it's been a long time, lemme think, choo choo choo, I can't
remember" and then I look at your transcript and you took it 2 years ago, well,
DYHAQFM?
Here's your absolute bestest-best winning strategy: don't lie and don't exaggerate.
Everyone's had brief exposure to programming languages they didn't like and didn't
understand, and there's nothing to be gained by listing them on a resume. Do your best
to give a qualitative estimate of proficiency for every skill on your resume (the
acceptable levels being "novice", "amateur", "tyro", "newbie", and "invented it" if you
want extra insurance towards Tip #7).
Summary
Resume writing is a fine art, and everyone has their own cherished opinions about it,
and no doubt I've angered even more than the usual number of certified agile
consultants. But I estimate that I've screened well over five thousand tech resumes, and
I've interviewed or phone-screened over 1200 candidates in my 18-year career, and I've
worked with people who've got those numbers beat by a wide margin. Despite broad
philosophical differences in opinion about how to conduct technical interviews, all the
engineers I've talked to over the years pretty much look for the same things in resumes.

At the risk of boring you to death, I'll reiterate that I'm not speaking for Google here. It's
not actually possible to speak for a whole company on a subject as diverse and
opinionated as resume writing (or screening), but even if it were possible, I wouldn't be
doing it.
This concludes today's little set of free, personal tips on writing programmer resumes.
Thanks for reading!
DYHAQFM?
P O S T E D B Y S T E V E Y E G G E AT 9 : 1 7 P M

<< Home
https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-get-my-resume-shortlisted-by-Google-for-theposition-of-software-engineer

How can I get my resume shortlisted by Google for the

position of software engineer?
Can some one tell about technical achievements or any other details which Google looks for
on a resume?

4 Answers

Gayle Laakmann McDowell, Ex-Googler Software Engineer, Author of The Google

Resume
Updated Oct 20, 2015 Featured in Forbes and Fortune Upvoted by Raj Irukulla, Former Googler. 20042008 and Ilker Deligoz, Video architect @ Google

There's nothing special about Google that wouldn't apply to Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook,
or another major tech company. So that's the good news.
There are really three parts to this answer: getting the right experience, creating a good
resume, and submitting it the right way.
Getting the Right Experience
If you come from a good school / work for a well respected company, that'll help you a ton.
But anyone can boost their resume with some projects.

Build some iPhone apps, web apps, whatever! Honestly it doesn't matter that
much what you're building as long as you're building something. Good
languages include Java, Python, Ruby on Rails, C++, etc. I would encourage you
to stay away from .NET. Not because .NET isn't a perfectly good tool, but there's
a stigma.
Doing these projects is especially important if you're, say, a programmer for
CitiBank. You don't have the right "pedigree." But projects will help you a ton.
You can build a fairly meaty project in one weekend. This means that with about
3 - 4 weekends of work, you can make your resume go from so-so to fantastic.
Seriously -- I've seen lots of people do this.
Participate in hackathons.
Build a website / portfolio. Show your experience.

Building a Great Resume

One page only. When you go onto two pages, you add weaker content to your
resume, by definition. And when your resume is only read for about 15 seconds,
it's the average content that matters, not the "total amount of content."
Use a real resume format. Don't create your own -- it tends to waste space and
look sloppy. I have a template that I like up at www.careercup.com/resume.
List your projects, hackathons, etc. Don't worry about whether or not something
is "resume appropriate." Does it make you look more impressive? Then include
it.
Keep your bullets short - 1 to 2 lines each. Bullets that are 3 or more lines look
like paragraphs and won't be read.
Focus on accomplishments, not responsibilities. The first line of each bullet
should be a word like built, created, implemented, designed, architected,
optimized, etc.
Quantify your accomplishments. Did you optimize something? Okay, then tell
me by how much.
No summaries. They don't tell me anything other than what position you're
applying for and I already know that.
Submitting Your Resume
Too many people stop with just one avenue. They apply once, and then figure that's enough.
Try all available avenues.
If you're active on Github, Stack Overflow, etc, there's a chance a recruiter will
come to you. But there's no reason to wait for that.
Apply online. It's tough, but people do get their resume selected that way.
Ask around to your friends. Does anyone work at Google? Or know someone
who does? It's a huge help if someone will refer you.
Try reaching out to Google engineers on Twitter, Quora, or other social media.
Remember that your first contact with them is, effectively, a cover letter. Don't
just say "Hi, I'm interested in Google, will you refer me?" Reach out to them and
tell them about some of the things you've done, and then link them to your
resume.
Again, this advice applies to all companies, and much of it to many positions as well.

102.5k Views View Upvotes Answer requested by Mohamed Amine Aboura

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Cosmin Negruseri, ex Google engineer, worked on Ads, Search and Google Code Jam
Written May 19, 2012

Get someone working at Google to refer you.

Here are some tips for resumes from two respected Google engineers:
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/...
http://yonatanzunger.com/2006/11...
16.9k Views View Upvotes

Priyanshu Singh, Summer intern at Amazon.com, 2014 & at Codenation.co.in, 2015

Written Sep 13, 2015

The easiest way as of now, is to perform well in Google APAC university hiring program.
Or you can also get your resume shortlisted, by getting reffered by one of the current google
employee.
If you have some technical experience under your belt, and you get lucky, your resume
might also get shortlisted from their public job portal. Keep checking their job portal from
time-to-time.
10.4k Views View Upvotes

Jagir Jhaveri, Travel Hacker

Written Feb 27, 2014

This applies to all positions and all companies. It is not just specific to your requirement.
Hope it helps.

Its a presentation by Don Asher.

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