Comment by keyist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keyist | Hacker News Reader

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I do technical hiring for my company. Here's a bunch of things that I personally like to see -- may not apply to larger, non-startup employers though.

* mention in the initial e-mail whether you're applying as local or remote

* mention in the initial e-mail your availability (immediate, two weeks on notification, etc)

* have a non-generic cover letter/e-mail that shows me you spent at least a couple minutes finding out about my company and tailoring your application to match

* don't namedrop languages in resumes: namedrop libraries/APIs you're familiar with

* pdf, text, or webpage: no .doc

* if asked to provide code in an archive, don't splatter files inside my pwd (I open in /tmp anyway, but it's still annoying)

* if asked to provide code, vendor everything you can (ie make your code as self-contained as possible) and provide a README for how to get it up and running

I like your page at http://yangman.ca but it would be better if you went into detail about what you did for the various projects. Don't say you "actively contribute" to the radeonhd project -- describe 2 or 3 of your major contributions.

Another suggestion: make use of the fact your resume is web-based. Instead of linking directly to linkedin etc, link to a uri on your domain which redirects. That way you can find out your clickthrough rate, and alter your online profile accordingly. For example, if no one ever clicks your LinkedIn profile, you may want to put your employment history on the page itself. If you apply to companies in different locations, you can roughly figure out which ones look at which pages via a geoip lookup.

"* pdf, text, or webpage: no .doc"

I personally think this is being overly picky, but as long as you make it clear that you only accept resumes in these formats there is no problem. I once sent a cold job application to a company that had no resume format requirement on its career page. I sent my resume in .doc. I could have sent it in PDF or something else, but in my experience most companies prefer to receive resumes in .doc unless otherwise stated. This company also sells a product for Windows (and other platforms) so I expected it to use Word internally. A few months later I found a job ad from them on Monster where they very clearly stated that they would only accept resumes in PDF. To this day their career page still does not specify a file format preference for resumes.

Yeah, it's somewhat frustrating how some people will screen you for sending a .DOC, and some people will screen you for NOT sending a .DOC. For extra fun, let's ask whether we should wear a suit to the interview: must wear for consideration, or immediate disqualification/no-hire? There's disagreement there as well.

The only safe advice is to ask ahead of time; unfortunately for you, there was no one to ask. Dysfunction is unfortunately common.

"and some people will screen you for NOT sending a .DOC"

Yeah I do think that is equally stupid as well. To me doc, pdf, text or even odf is fair game.

> if asked to provide code in an archive, don't splatter files inside my pwd

I think that displays the typical pickiness of people that do hiring. I mean, you could just type 'unzip -l' to check the contents of an archive. Similarly, the resume format. Practically every hirer requires a different format nowadays - pdf/txt/doc/odt/html - that simply maintaining a CV becomes a massive time sink.

Actually I specify tar.gz. This is actually a subtle test -- the job requires *NIX fluency and those who had ever compiled a few packages would have noticed the convention. That's my train of thought anyway.

As for resume format, it is an open source job and my main machines are all MS-free, so it is extra trouble (especially if it is docx). Just a preference, that's all. I didn't advertise otherwise.

Tip for maintaining multiple formats: asciidoc/markdown = text you can generate html with. And once you have html you can print to pdf from a browser. 3 formats for the price of one.

Bear in mind I wasn't trying to write a list that's canon -- just what I like to see. I'm not going to chuck applications simply because they missed a point in that list of recommendations.

Off topic, but might be useful if you're worried about tarbombs: '-C /dir' will extract to a particular folder without having to change there first.

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