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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

I was told by someone many years ago to always take a copy of my resume with me to an interview. That advice has paid off a couple of times. These days I also keep an email draft ready to send.

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While that's good advice, I don't follow it.

If a company doesn't have their shit together enough to coordinate an interview schedule and get the right people into the right room at the right time with my resume in their hands, ideally in their hands ahead of time, I don't want to work there. It's a basic competence test.

"It's a basic competence test."

They feel the same way about you having your own resume in an interview.

I feel its more of a talisman. Who reads those things? Not at an interview; the time for resumes is over, you passed that sieve already.

Lol. I do bring my own resume with me at interviews, but I've never been in the need for that. If they don't have one, they usually have me that can narrate it. Otherwise they should have done their homework.

One reason bringing your resume is a good idea is because scumbag recruiters sometimes modify your resume, inserting the right keywords to get you the interview in the first place.

I try to avoid headhunters who think keywords matter (which, sadly, is most of them).

Exactly, I find it's just ticking off every item that's mentioned in the job description. Using the exact same words works best.

I find if you use PDFs it happens significantly less

Or they just get all the more butchered. Last time a recruiter was done with my resume, it looked so bad that I would've never interviewed me.

Unfortunately and apparently some recruiters have interns to convert those PDF's into their shitty doc-template. It happened to me a few times. Every time I had my CV ready and this seemed to help. Knowing LaTeX reflects very positively on you in some circles.

Most people don't have to luxury of going to interviews simply to test a companies competence. They're going because they really want/need that job, and want to make it as easy as possible for the company to hire them.

Google didn't make $300B on the back of its world class HR department.

Bring it anyways. If they need it, you can still count it against them, while not hurting your own chances if the job ends up being worthwhile despite failing this test.

Don't you have a PDF copy of it already on your smartphone?

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