Job and General Employment Thread

[tifosi77]

Do you otherwise go by your full name, including your middle initial? Then by all means go for it. If your resume is the only context in which you ever use your middle initial (absent some specific requirement to do so, like signing a legal agreement), then leave it off.

[tifosi77]

Some woman offered to rewrite mine for $700

I'm inclined to do it

Just be sure you thoroughly vet the person you select. I paid $400 for my re-write around 4 or 5 years ago, and the only thing I retained was the use of emoji style icons for my contact info (i.e. mobile phone icon for my phone number, envelope icon for the hyperlink to my email address, LinkedIn logo for the hyperlink to my profile, etc). It was a really shoddy job that resulted in a document that was overall far more confusing and less compelling than what I started with. I might as well have put the $400 in a bag an lit it on fire.

[meow]

A lot of resumes land on my desk. At this point, I’m more adapt at recognizing a bad resume than I am at writing a good one

[DigitalGypsy66]

Yeah, @meow a bad resume is a lot like porn. Hard to define, but you know it when you see it.

[tifosi77]

Source of the post now, I have no idea how that relates, low or high, to other businesses with a market cap of 2 billion, but considering the company just went through a round of layoffs and a bunch of my friends lost their jobs, it’s pretty disgusting to see

Par for the course for many companies. Look at that **** who held a Zoom and chastised people for calling out the removal of bonuses, while she received a pallet of cash herself. Or the Google exec who received hundreds of millions of dollars in options while they laid off tens of thousands of people.

The chairman of Time Warner was himself paid the same amount that the membership of the WGA is seeking as a group of 10,000. (roughly $250 million) Granted, no one's expecting Warner Bros to foot that bill by themselves, but.......... that's not a good look.

[nocera]

A lot of resumes land on my desk. At this point, I’m more adapt at recognizing a bad resume than I am at writing a good one

Bad resumes eh? Lots of people using their full name?

[NTP66]

Source of the post now, I have no idea how that relates, low or high, to other businesses with a market cap of 2 billion, but considering the company just went through a round of layoffs and a bunch of my friends lost their jobs, it’s pretty disgusting to see

Par for the course for many companies. Look at that **** who held a Zoom and chastised people for calling out the removal of bonuses, while she received a pallet of cash herself. Or the Google exec who received hundreds of millions of dollars in options while they laid off tens of thousands of people.

The chairman of Time Warner was himself paid the same amount that the membership of the WGA is seeking as a group of 10,000. (roughly $250 million) Granted, no one's expecting Warner Bros to foot that bill by themselves, but.......... that's not a good look.

I think I read that the other day - absolutely bonkers. I just can’t wrap my head around one person being worth that much money to a company.

[meow]

A lot of resumes land on my desk. At this point, I’m more adapt at recognizing a bad resume than I am at writing a good one

Bad resumes eh? Lots of people using their full name?

Most of the tips from tif’s post are stupid and meaningless. I’m a substance kind of guy. I don’t care if your resume is in comic sans or your middle name is there or your job from 15 years ago is there. None of that matters. And these “power” words people use suck balls. Collaborated. Managed. Handled. Conducted. All stupid and meaningless. I want results on there. Saved the company $X millions through initiatives. Eliminated 40% of surgical errors through this program.

[MalkinIsMyHomeboy]

honestly, resumes are almost completely useless to me as a hiring manager. Just give me your list of technologies you’ve used, titles and companies you’ve worked for and I’ll ask the questions in the interview to tell if you’re can do a good job in the role or not


honestly at this point you can have ChatGPT write some dumb bullshit resume and no recruiter would ever be able to tell

[meow]

You don’t have to look at enough resumes if that is your philosophy. Resumes are important still

[skullman80]

I'm with @MalkinIsMyHomeboy here at least in the engineering field. Anyone I've interviewed for our team the resume is not important.

I'll skim technologies/languages but beyond that the resume is meaningless honestly. The conversation during the interview will tell me all I need to know if they fit with our team and can do the job.

[King Colby]

Resumes definitely matter but like meow, I normally use them to disqualify people and then i talk to whoever is left

[NTP66]

The resume gets you in the door, though. We have scrapped poor resumes before any contact because of how poor they were.

[shafnutz05]

The resume gets you in the door, though. We have scrapped poor resumes before any contact because of how poor they were.

Yep. Most of those suggestions that Tif posted are complete bullshit, but bad grammar/spelling and attention to detail in a resume is an easy instapass for me

[skullman80]

Fair points. I guess I don't even talk to these people until they've been filtered out by one level above me.

By the time they get to me and others on the team I assume they have a base level competency and am more looking at overall fit and are they an dadhole or not.

[NTP66]

I hate interviewing, but I'm always one of the guys on my team who reviews initial resumes to decide who to actually interview. It doesn't happen often, but I've seen some shitawful resumes come through.

[Shyster]

I have no idea what putting your middle initial in your resume has to do with insecurity

I have two middle initials, and I sign my name with both, as in "John X.Y. Doe."

When I was around 19 my brother and I both I decided to switch back to our mother's maiden name, because my maternal grandfather was far more of a father to us than our own father ever was. But I did keep my father's last name as a second middle name, and I've signed my name with both middle initials ever since as a homage to my paternal grandparents (not my father), who were generally very good people whose only fault was the rotten son they raised.

[robbiestoupe]

A lot of resumes land on my desk. At this point, I’m more adapt at recognizing a bad resume than I am at writing a good one

Bad resumes eh? Lots of people using their full name?

Most of the tips from tif’s post are stupid and meaningless. I’m a substance kind of guy. I don’t care if your resume is in comic sans or your middle name is there or your job from 15 years ago is there. None of that matters. And these “power” words people use suck balls. Collaborated. Managed. Handled. Conducted. All stupid and meaningless. I want results on there. Saved the company $X millions through initiatives. Eliminated 40% of surgical errors through this program.

Some recruiter asked me to add numbers like that to my resume. I just made **** up. How am I supposed to know how much money the company made of my designs? And I'm not the one determining how efficient things are in the real world. There are theories as to how it should work and lab tests, but in reality? Who tf knows?

But I get that big dumb dumbs higher up the food chain like charts with pretty colors where the pie pieces get bigger and bigger, so I feed them what they want.

[mikey]

Yup, this ^

I know I'm good...I don't know how good...so I came up with something plausible and stuck with it haha

[robbiestoupe]

I'm with @MalkinIsMyHomeboy here at least in the engineering field. Anyone I've interviewed for our team the resume is not important.

I'll skim technologies/languages but beyond that the resume is meaningless honestly. The conversation during the interview will tell me all I need to know if they fit with our team and can do the job.

Yes. My resume is there to fit the description of what skills people are working for. Whether or not I would be a fit, that comes out in the interview. And a good interviewer is going to question you on the details you put in the resume, so you can't just make stuff up. Unless it's numbers, you could make that stuff up and lie your way though it and there's no way they could fact check you on it.

[NTP66]

I only have one bullet point on cost savings, and I only included it because I knew the actual number.

[King Colby]

Basically, make sure you're clear and concise so people actually read the parts you want them to, and ensure there are a couple bullet points with numbers. Make them up, exaggerate them, whatever it takes. Nobody knows what they mean or how they can be verified. Just need to ensure you can logically explain them and what you contributed to impact them during an interview.

[Shyster]

I wouldn't use either Calibri or TNR for a résumé. Both of those say to me, "I'm too lazy to use anything other than the default typeface."

I haven't needed to update my résumé in quite a while, but I'd personally use Equity, which is the typeface I use for briefs, or Iowan Old Style, which is another typeface I really like. Neither of them is free, although I think Iowan Old Style may now be a system font on Macs. I've bought licenses for both. It would be hard to go wrong with Adobe Minion or Adobe Garamond. Adobe Garamond was used to set the US editions of the Harry Potter books, for example.

If you put a gun to my head and said I had to use a font that came with Word for Windows, eh, probably Palatino Linotype. Or Gill Sans if you want a sans-serif typeface.

[Morkle]

Wow, the amount of effort you guys go into making your resume stand out is wild, to me.

I've only ever had standard resumes, and I've been hired everywhere I've gone. I might have to worry about that here in the next few months if I get let go - but I've always kept it factual, accurate, and I've only ever looked at a resume as a means to get me in the door, and then sell them personally during the interview.

[tifosi77]

That's the point of all of it, Mork. That's all a resume is and ever should be. It's not about 'standing out', it's about avoiding the circular bin for stupid reasons. It's just with like 95% or more of the work of screening resumes done electronically before a human ever sees the things (at companies with actual HR departments) there are some fairly basic steps you can take to avoid that fate prematurely, and then further to make sure that if/when a human does see it they don't have a reason to wonder why the software didn't reject this one on its own.

I mean, the whole point of me sharing that resume post was to goof on it.

Shyster, I used to be a Garamond guy myself.