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Comment by philipwhiuk | Hacker News Reader

Beware the comments here from the US that don't apply to UK CVs - which are a different style. Personal intros are not important.

I can't see any job titles - which is frankly more important than the company and makes it easier to skim sections of experience

Definitely go into more detail than just "Worked on" and "Used" - anything on stuff the company uses in the CV is not confidential and you can put on your CV.

Finally put months on your CV - it's not clear if your most recent role was 12 months or 1.

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> Finally put months on your CV - it's not clear if your most recent role was 12 months or 1.

I've stopped doing that because it gets tiring why I changed so frequently in recent years. It's not my fault places go bankrupt, startups do layoffs, or teams just up and dissolve after you join, and it gets tiring explaining that rather than discussing my experience, skills, and interests and the role at hand. It was a total mistake to enter into the startup world.

At least you got the CHANCE to explain before. Now you can't even do that because your resume is not passing the screen.

You're handicapping yourself with the lack of transparency. It just comes across as shady. Why are you worth the risk compared to the overflow of excellent candidates in this market?

You need to suck it up and share this information. Briefly explain each situation on the resume (i.e. "fixed contract ended" or "startup shut down due to loss of largest customer").

Edit: spelling.

It's not shady at all. And there's a lot of things that describe me, but untransparent is not one of them. In fact, my transparency often gets me into trouble, in a sense, because people are not used to it and it seemingly weirds them out.

> Briefly explain each situation on the resume (i.e. "fixed contract ended" or "startup shut down due to loss of largest customer").

There's not room, and it's ultimately irrelevant to my experience and skills.

It's relevant to the decision-makers: the people reviewing your resume.

> Why are you worth the risk compared to the overflow of excellent candidates in this market?

Because your resume is better?

You really saving time by filtering those to whom it's important. Those who contact you would mind less about those missing months.

Yes, when you need every possible contact, you might be interested to approach things differently, but the question isn't how to match best the screening algorithms. And it's very sad thing to have to explain those months.

I can't speak to his skills - but in the eyes of a Hiring Manager reviewing his resume, it's worse than the majority. There is too much great laid-off talent out there.

It's not fair, but it's true.

I've had way too many ATS's that require day of month. Like WTF.

My automatic response there when filling out is "start date is always first of month, end date is always last of month".

(UK CTO) I'd disagree with the "Personal intros are not important" bit, I use that a lot when filtering but the rest of this is good advice. It's also missing a list of skills you consider yourself to have, what you like doing with those skills, things you maybe do in your off-time - personality basically.

The other thing I'd suggest is tailoring your CV to the roles you're going for - the last time I had to write my own I had a two page appendix of the awards won by my projects as that's the sort of thing the hirers I was targeting would be looking for. And as someone hiring now I'm far more likely to interview someone who's CV shows some interest in the kind of work we do and who we do it for.

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