As someone currently wading through resumes and kinda worried about missing some one like this, here's a tip to anyone else like you: The purpose of a resume is to get you hired. If you have something like an incredible technical sound driver support email chain like that... put a link to it in your resume. Yeah, your resume has standard fields, and those are indeed sorted on by HR, so don't leave out the skills & experience... but otherwise, the resume is free form. Generally not prose exactly, but free form. Link to ANYTHING you think will help you get the job.
And don't just say "I participate in some LUG"... that can mean you show up to the meetings once every couple of months to eat the free food. Show your helpfulness in an email chain. Show a project that you did with them with a link that explicitly says you did a big portion of it. If no such link exists, get one created!
By no means do I promise wonders if you do this. HR filters may still eat your resume. But if you do get through to a real human, they may look at those things, and the ones who will understand what this means are the ones you want to work for anyhow.
If you've got the skills to pay the bills but your resume looks like any other high school dropout's, I can tell you, from the other side of the desk, you've given me no way to tell any different. It may stink that all we have are resumes in the initial process... but at least that resume is under your control. (Mostly. Sometimes it gets chewed on. But speaking for myself, I'm looking at raw resumes straight from the candidate and that's not uncommon.) Don't be afraid to use it, and don't be afraid to toot your own horn, that's the whole point of this particular document.
(Similarly, to the extent possible without lying, don't say "I participated in some project" as your work experience. Write something you did in the project. Don't say "I participated in a billing system upgrade", say how you rewrote the UI in React to conform to accessibility standards and made it run 10 times faster than before and customers uniformly loved it and paid lots more money or whatever. "Participation" could be "I had my hand held for every bug as I struggled to keep up" and it could be "I stepped up and took more responsibility than anyone expected and almost single-handedly completed the project, freeing up the other developers" or anything in between. Unfortunately, based on experience, I kinda have to assume the worst because it's usually right. If "the worst" interpretation of that phrase isn't right, don't leave it open to me!)
Believe me, if you're doing Linux support on a mailing list, or anything even remotely like that, you stand out, at least to the right people. Do whatever it takes to work that on to the resume somehow. The "standard resume form" is a skeleton to be fleshed out, not a straightjacket of form.
This. This is why I always encourage people who I mentor to have a skills section.
My first job I got the interview because at the time I was attempting to turn a snowmobile into a hovercraft. I had plans and everything.
I put this on the resume.
The first question in the interview? "Look, if nothing else we had to bring you in to ask. How the hell are you planning on turning a snowmobile into a hovercraft?!?"
The project never went anywhere, but it got me the job.
When you are involved in hiring, it's surprising just how bad most resumes are. Have a single page of highlights that are going to make me want to talk to you. The interview is the time to go deep on details, if that's how the conversation goes.
It's really hard for somebody to know what's going to appeal. Maybe "planning on building a hovercraft" looks great to you; maybe it looks like somebody padding their resume. Maybe "had a really cool email thread" catches your eye; maybe it looks like an irrelevant detail.
A resume page isn't very long, especially presented as bullet points as expected. And especially when you have absolutely no idea who it is will be reading it. I can tell you great stories about every project I've ever done, but not in a bullet point.
I have no doubt that most resumes are incredibly bad. But I'd venture to say that a substantial fraction of the resumes you think are very good will be considered very bad by the next hiring manager over.
Yup. That's life. But if you make a resume like everyone else's, you're going to get everyone else's results. That's life too. I don't have a magic solution that will guarantee you a resume so awesome that literally every hiring manager in the world will break down in tears and hire you on nothing more than your resume.
You can turn this to your advantage, which I alluded to in my original. If you want to work with people who thing making hovercraft out of snowmobiles is awesome, put it on there. If you want to work with people who think that is a strange distracting thing to put on a resume, by all means leave it off. I'm sure HN is largely biased towards the first, so let me say I'm not being snarky at all about the second and I'm totally serious; if you are interested in a banking or government job you may well have those sorts of external interests yet find it a bad idea to put it directly on your resume.
Really my main message here is, take advantage of the fact that the resume is free form and don't just thoughtlessly put your name, work and educational experience, and three one-word bullet points about your hobbies or something on your resume, and then stop, because "that's what a resume is". Put whatever will get you hired. If there isn't a standard category/heading for whatever that is, make one.
> I can tell you great stories about every project I've ever done, but not in a bullet point.
If you can figure out some way to distill an important project down to a point or two, it's definitely going to work in your favor. A resume is not the place for great stories but it should make me want to ask.
I agree with your last sentence, although I don't think you will find anybody wanting a long resume from you. You could always provide a link to your online CV that is complete while the one you submit is an edited down version tailored to the company and position you hope to interview for.
As an outsider how sends resumes, it is difficult to know what a good resume is because one has not had the on hands experience of actually knowing what others are doing. Some searching on the internet may be helpful in the end but the jobs I got so far felt like blackboxes in the hiring process.
It wasn't awful. I was a new grad though, so I had a grocery store job, some volunteer experience and then fluffed up with whatever skills were on the job posting.
Second this. And especially the "I participated in" bit - that almost immediately makes me heavily discount the value of that experience because it tells me nothing and it's exactly what someone who has had only peripheral involvements but wants to play up their importance would say.
If they get through to an interview, fine, they'll get a chance to be specific, but failing to be specific might well get them filtered out before that.
HR might not even understand what the link is about, but if they see something technical they don't understand but is related to the job, they will ask some technical person.
I got a call when I was younger because I was the maintainer of a package with several million downloads on RubyGems. It wasn't even a Ruby job, but the HR person's rationale was that "at least he's making stuff people are using".
And don't just say "I participate in some LUG"... that can mean you show up to the meetings once every couple of months to eat the free food. Show your helpfulness in an email chain. Show a project that you did with them with a link that explicitly says you did a big portion of it. If no such link exists, get one created!
By no means do I promise wonders if you do this. HR filters may still eat your resume. But if you do get through to a real human, they may look at those things, and the ones who will understand what this means are the ones you want to work for anyhow.
If you've got the skills to pay the bills but your resume looks like any other high school dropout's, I can tell you, from the other side of the desk, you've given me no way to tell any different. It may stink that all we have are resumes in the initial process... but at least that resume is under your control. (Mostly. Sometimes it gets chewed on. But speaking for myself, I'm looking at raw resumes straight from the candidate and that's not uncommon.) Don't be afraid to use it, and don't be afraid to toot your own horn, that's the whole point of this particular document.
(Similarly, to the extent possible without lying, don't say "I participated in some project" as your work experience. Write something you did in the project. Don't say "I participated in a billing system upgrade", say how you rewrote the UI in React to conform to accessibility standards and made it run 10 times faster than before and customers uniformly loved it and paid lots more money or whatever. "Participation" could be "I had my hand held for every bug as I struggled to keep up" and it could be "I stepped up and took more responsibility than anyone expected and almost single-handedly completed the project, freeing up the other developers" or anything in between. Unfortunately, based on experience, I kinda have to assume the worst because it's usually right. If "the worst" interpretation of that phrase isn't right, don't leave it open to me!)
Believe me, if you're doing Linux support on a mailing list, or anything even remotely like that, you stand out, at least to the right people. Do whatever it takes to work that on to the resume somehow. The "standard resume form" is a skeleton to be fleshed out, not a straightjacket of form.