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Comment by atraac | Hacker News Reader

Sure let me "tailor my CV" to a role just to get ghosted or offered laughable salary. I'm just gonna make friends of random people from that company that don't know me, presumably by cold approaching them via LinkedIn? Lol

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Tailoring your CV, in my experience, simply means looking at the job description and then rearranging your achievements so that the things they are specifically asking for are mentioned at the top. Also make sure you use the same language as them and specifically mention the exact technology they put in the job description.

I do this, then I make a copy of the CV as MyName_CompanyName.pdf in my Documents directory so I can refer back to it if I get an interview.

I've never struggled to get an interview with this method and I'm pretty sure I'm one of the mediocre people on HN.

I second this. I find that the investment here is well worth it -- in general it takes me 15-30 minutes to read the job description, read up a bit on the company itself, and adjust the resume. I haven't personally tried the spray-and-pray approach.

It's also not something that requires a bunch of mental energy, so you can do it in the late evening when your brain is tired from the full day anyway.

From this comment and your other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33606053 I think what you're missing is that a lower base rate of acceptance also lowers the advantage you get from tailoring your resume.

From your other comment at the low end you suggest a 50% application -> interview conversion and 40% interview -> offer, in other words 20% application -> offer. That's a 90% chance of an offer after 10 applications. Maybe tailoring your resume gives you a 1.5x greater conversion rate, 30% overall, and now you only have to submit 6 applications for the same 90% chance.

All this is with FAANG credentials and presumably some other advantageous stuff correlated to that: good socioeconomic background, good education, no serious health or legal issues. Now suppose you don't have FAANG or you do have some other problem and your base conversion rate is 10 times lower, 2% application -> offer, 110 applications to 90%. With tailoring, 75 applications.

If it takes you 15 minutes to tailor your resume for each application, then in the first case with 6 applications that's 1.5 hours, but in the second case with 75 applications, it's almost 19 hours.

The point is that this is a rich-get-richer scenario where the extra work takes less time and is less necessary for the advantaged candidate than it is for the disadvantaged candidate.

You might argue that someone who is unemployed has all the time in the world, so why not. To that I'd say you should ask yourself how you'd feel about tailoring your 75th resume to increase conversion from 2% to 3% or if you'd rather just treat each application as disposable and keep moving on.

Yes, it's hard to imagine being on a team where my direct coworkers are vouching for random people who contacted them because they're trying to get a referral bonus. If someone contacted me like that, I'd direct them to the careers page and then let someone in the hiring path know. Very strange.

I meant not to make friends from strangers, but to look for friends/connections who you know already at the company. Referal bonus is an extra for them. I recruited and cashed bonus by bringing a couple of my pro friends this way. But you need network for that.

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