Comment by anon1094 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anon1094 | Hacker News Reader

The reality is that PDF resumes are dead. There are too many applicants for you to stand out that way if you don't already have some kind of "in" like knowing someone at the company.

So what can you do? You can create targeted websites like suggested in the article, but that takes a long time and likely isn't worth the effort. I've gotten ignored many times doing this.

Here's what has worked best:

1.Skip the resume even if the company insists on it.

2. Find the hiring manager's email (or anyone involved in hiring)

3. Send a well put together cover letter email selling your skills with concrete links to projects you can show. GitHub, Codepen, Blog links work very well here.

Here's a blog post focusing on remote jobs that I put together that goes into more depth in case you're interested: https://remoteleads.io/blog/proposals-that-win-remote-freela...

Why does this work? You're reaching an real human and have a higher chance of getting looked at for your skills instead of getting your resume scanned by a resume-reading machine. This works well when you don't already have connections with the company.

When writing a cover letter, should I make it about me and my skills, or "us" (the relationship with the company)?

For the last 3.5 years I've been doing automation, control, logging, and data science projects for a memory card manufacturer in Taiwan. Now I want to move to New Zealand (possibly Australia or Canada).

Although my parents are British, I've had more work experience in the relational culture of East Asia (China, Korea, Taiwan). I feel uneasy just bragging about myself on a cover letter/résumé, and instead prefer to write about how "we" could work together. I'm worried that individualist cultures might not understand that, though. Should I change my writing style?

I do not agree with parts of #3. There needs to be a different way. You cannot require developers to maintain github projects in there spare time. This truly will weed out amazing developers who have families, who prefer to have non dev hobbies, who volunteer a lot of their spare time, etc... You know, people who might actually be interesting to work with.

I don't disagree with your point, but it's very rude of you to dismiss developers who find coding fun as 'uninteresting'.

Plenty of people find coding fun but don't have github accounts or do much coding after work. This is especially true if your work is very interesting. You find that you have less itching to scratch so to speak. I love coding. But I don't feel I need to do any outside of work because I love the projects I get to do at work.

But yes, people who code all the time can be interesting. I just don't want the industry to demand we all do it.

> Send a well put together cover letter email selling your skills with concrete links to projects you can show.

Step 3 is reinventing the resume.

Don't get it. You expect the entire market to be coding for free in their spare time just not to be destitute?

A cover letter should usually not be about your skills, but rather reasons why you want to work a specific place and more commonly personal stuff.

Skills, projects etc. are for your resume (CV)

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