fecak

Resume writer here. Don't overdo the resume customization thing - I've had clients who wanted to spend lots of time tailoring each line of a resume to the job, and the time invested really isn't worth it. Especially if it becomes far too clear to the reader that you were essentially pandering.

For most people, different resumes for different roles (web dev, mobile dev, etc.) make sense, but if you have 20 resumes for different roles you're probably applying for jobs that you are highly unqualified for - nobody has expertise in so many areas where they need 20 resumes. 2-3 for most is probably plenty.

The key difference in most resume customizations is how you define yourself to the reader. I use summaries to tell the reader who I WANT them to think you are. If the job is "web developer", I want to tell the reader right away that you are a web developer right in the summary. You've defined yourself as what they are looking for, checked their first (and most important box), and they will now keep reading.

If that summary said "embedded developer", they may stop reading. If there was no summary and your first job title is "data analyst", they may stop reading.

I've written for clients in probably 50+ countries, and many do commonly include photos and birthday. I would hope people are 'against' discrimination.

Something like a functional resume can do a good job in masking age a bit, but typically we still need to list employers, titles, and years.

I feel job hopping in tech has gone from a negative to a positive in the eyes of many who are hiring, as long as the hops are for good reasons (better opportunity, company shut down, finished what you were hired to do, etc.).

Jumping around because you can't keep a job or nobody likes working with you is another story.

Who said anything about failure? If you're happy doing the same stuff day in and day out, that's great and I hope it works out for you. In my experience, people doing the same thing for a long time tend to struggle to find jobs when it becomes necessary.

If you keep building 'cool new features', you don't appear to be doing the same thing over and over again.

If you didn't graduate, omitting dates is not at all suspicious. I rarely see someone writing "Earned 80 credits at UCLA (2011-2013)".

Maybe what you do IS cool, but you expect others don't think it is, or you don't make it sound cool when you talk about it. I've made some pretty mundane work sound cool, but it's not always easy.

Not necessarily. If you list say 15 years of experience and a degree with no date, the reader will assume you are "at least 37". We're just trying to get an interview here - when you show up they'll have a better understanding of your actual age (in most cases), but at that point they're committed to the interview and hopefully the candidate performs well enough where age won't be a factor in any decisions.

I'm a former tech recruiter for startups and now a resume writer and career consultant, and I've written for software engineers from 18 through their late 60's.

- Older software engineers (40+) won't be discriminated against if they are doing cool stuff and are doing different stuff than they were doing a few years back. I've written this a thousand times before, but we often confuse ageism for stagnation. If you've had the same job for 15 years working on the same system and using the same languages, you aren't a victim of ageism as much as you are being discriminated against because they don't think you'll be able to learn new tricks.

- On resumes, don't advertise your age if you're a bit older. We don't need to list that internship, first job out of school, or graduation dates from college. List 15-20 years of your career and leave the rest off. It isn't a biography.

Or they were impressed by you, but feel your market value is below the maximum they are willing to pay. When companies hire, they have a model of an ideal candidate and an acceptable candidate. We want x, y, and z, but we'd be willing to take 2 of the 3. XYZ is worth more than XY.

If the company only had one ideal candidate profile that was acceptable, that would change things a bit.

That's certainly a possibility, and in those situations an offer usually isn't given at all. If we (a) know a candidate will only accept the top end of the range and (b) the candidate doesn't qualify or interview at that level, there's no reason to make an offer at all.

When a range is given, in my experience a candidate will usually say "I'd only be interested at the top of that range" from the beginning if that's indeed the case. The point I made in my initial comment is more aligned to situations when a candidate says they are OK with the range but don't 'commit' (prior to interviews) on where they feel they qualify on that range.

In theory it's a large range, but in practice it really isn't. Candidates regularly negotiate starting salary to 10-20% above an initial offer, so a range like this is pretty common. You also need to keep in mind that job ads can cost $, so a small company on a budget doesn't want to be placing a bunch of ads for each potential level of hire when all they want is someone who can do the job.

"Junior" and "Senior" probably oversimplifies it. You could have a senior with 10 years and one with 20 years. The salary difference often won't be as pronounced (because salaries tend to plateau at a certain point), but there will usually (and should) be a difference.

I was a recruiter for 20 years. In my experience, when a range was listed, every applicant expected to get offered at the top of the range.

So if the range was 80-100K and you had a candidate at the lower end of the experience/skills range for the job, that candidate becomes attached to that 100K number. He tells his friends "I found a job that pays 100K". Candidates don't pay much attention to the low number in the real world.

So the interviews happen, the candidate performs as expected (not superb) and gets an offer for 80K. He thinks he's leaving 20K on the table if he accepts, or that he's getting lowballed. If the job had been posted 60-80K, he wouldn't have felt shorted at all.

This is a simplification of course, but posting salary led to lots of refused offers when the offer < the top figure.

It depends on the user's settings.

That's interesting. I know I'm well over 20 a month on searches like that. I'd wonder if they base it on other things (like connections). I did have a paid account in the past, but it's been a few years since I opted for the free one.

I believe you, but I have a standard account and run lots of searches (maybe a couple hundred a month?) without running into this issue. I expect by 'several' you must be doing several hundred searches a month to get that issue, or scrolling through lots of profiles (looking at 10 pages of results for each search).

I often do searches as an exercise with clients live, and I use the filters (location, title, etc.) to try and target results so I'm not scrolling through pages of profiles.

I write resumes for a living and coach many of my clients on job search strategy, which often relates to strategies to get people to actually read the resume that I've written for them.

I've never heard of someone doing this, and it's not a bad hack since it's apparently free. My main question would be the effectiveness of an ad like this vs a simple message to the people directly.

As a recruiter (which I was in a different life), would I even notice an ad like this? I'm not sure, but I'd definitely notice a message in my inbox saying "Hey Dave, I found your profile doing some research on $COMPANY ..."

Since he's only targeting 15 companies doing a quick search on LinkedIn for HR/recruiting types at those firms and sending a message like that could probably be done in under an hour, and I'd think it might be a bit more effective than the ad.

It's a clever idea, but I'd question how effective it might be vs a direct message.

Poor resumes don't list any tangible accomplishments or lack the proper context to let the reader even figure out if the accomplishment was useful. If you read a job advertisement, that's a list of responsibilities - a resume should outline responsibilities (especially if the responsibility is critical), but also describe unique accomplishments.

That's the main thing, but there are lots of other factors.

For your example, leading an SRE team for a busy site is a responsibility, and it's useful to know - it seems kinda important. If you actually built the team, established their processes, led changes to some of the processes, implemented new tools, etc. that resulted in increased site reliability, that would be an accomplishment.

I'm a resume writer and former recruiter. As a recruiter I was required to 'judge' candidates based on their resume, and didn't spend much time with candidates who had resumes that didn't show what I was looking for.

As a resume writer, my job isn't to judge the candidate, but to make the candidate look as strong as possible on paper.

My work as a resume writer has led me to believe that much of the talk of worker shortages in skilled employment markets is directly related to poor resumes (and not a lack of qualified candidates).

I get a lot more personal satisfaction out of helping people write resumes and coaching them on job search strategy than I did as a recruiter. But my work has also convinced me that there are lots of people out there who are qualified for the jobs they seek, but simply aren't capable of expressing that qualification in writing.

I'm a resume writer that also provides career consultation and job search strategy sessions, LinkedIn and cover letter writing, executive bios, etc. I work from home, am able to set my own schedule and spend time with my kids, and do quite well financially with very little overhead.

I've worked with a number of HN readers over the years.

A "visualized resume" and "my resume is on a PDF" are very different concepts. Most of my clients use my resumes in PDF formats, and I do adjust margins, fonts, headers, etc. to make sure I'm making the best use of the space based on the client's content. I'd hardly call that 'visualized' though.

There are probably several resume writers that offer review services, and I am one of them. My profile has details on how to find me.

As others have said, it depends on the country. For my US clients I never add a photo, but I will offer to add a LinkedIn URL at the top. The ability for the reader to view your profile (and photo) can help them to understand that this is a real person, and my guess is it's harder for most people to say 'no' to someone they have seen (of course this is assuming several things about each party).

As a professional resume writer I'm seeing a lot of clients now asking for more design on their resumes (including many senior clients with solid accomplishments) and it's a disturbing trend. I think part of the blame can go to the handful of companies that have gone viral with highly visualized 'mock' resumes for tech celebrities (Elon Musk and Marissa Mayer - example https://enhancv.com/resume-examples/famous/marissa-mayer/).

These resumes certainly "look good", but they aren't useful. Obviously, it doesn't matter what your resume looks like if you're Elon Musk - you're getting the interview anyway.

With visualized resumes, the user is sacrificing the ability to provide a more robust list of accomplishments, or perhaps to provide additional details and context for the accomplishments they have listed.

If you are junior level and don't have many accomplishments to mention, a visualized resume might get their attention. For senior level candidates or even mid-career folks who have already done a thing or two, these resumes look like an ill-fitting suit.

Don't distract your reader with fancy formatting. Using a simple format allows the reader to focus entirely on what is important (your body of work) without being distracted.

Those labeled as "severe" aren't remotely likely to have their autism "resolve itself". Those labeled severe have the types of behaviors that tend to remain through the years. Children who are prone to self-injurious behavior, in my experience (two kids with autism, lots of exposure to other severe cases in the community), don't tend to outgrow it.

Those that you see able to 'mask' their symptoms are generally on the opposite end of the spectrum, sometimes referred to as 'high-functioning'. That requires a level of self-awareness that many of the lower functioning spectrum seem to lack.

One of the major problems with autism diagnoses is that there are lots of people who see the higher-functioning members of the autism community as the norm, whereas there are a fair percentage that are essentially permanently disabled that will likely be unable to contribute to society in a measurable way.

A few years ago I briefly had some business interactions with iRoko in New York, and when I saw the title of this article I immediately thought what you did. I think the biggest challenge they discussed with me at the time was a mobile first market, but it was a few years ago.

"Freelancing" is a bit of a catch-all term so it's tough to give you a simple answer, and your success working independently will probably rely on several factors.

1 - Is your skillset relatively rare or in demand in a freelance market?

2 - How easy or difficult will it be for employers to find you? This is related to how well you market yourself, how well networked you are within the market, whether an exchange (eg Upwork, Fiverr) of some kind exists for you to join, and whether or not you can use any "agents" or third-parties to broker deals and connect you with work.

3 - What is your 'end game' or primary criteria for the work that you want to do? Are you interested in work/life balance, money, control over what kind of work you do (and don't do), career progression, ability to take long breaks between work, remote work or digital nomad roles, etc.?

There are even more factors than this, but this is a start. I know countless people who have freelanced successfully for many years, and others who didn't like it at all. Every story is different.

If I learned anything as a recruiter for 20 years it's that there are bad actors on all sides. Employers do sometimes rescind offers that could hurt job seekers. Candidates do accept offers and then not show up (counteroffer, better offer came late). Employees sometimes leave without giving notice. All of these things do happen.

But none of these things happen often enough to make it "a thing". This article is basically some anecdotes about things that have happened, but not any type of regular occurrence in most professional industries. A high school or college kid is thousands of times more likely to quit without giving notice than anyone in a professional environment.

If there is any takeaway in this article:

* Your loyalty must be to yourself and your career. The days of employers seeming to take care of employees are over other than some rare occasions. You must make career decisions strictly based on what is best for your career and earning potential (short and long term).

* Do your research - These companies that pull job offers on people probably have some history of doing it, and there are plenty of websites that offer horror stories. Ask around and do some research if the company you're speaking to doesn't have much reputation or credibility online or in the public domain.

* Be professional - Especially in tech, career fluidity is much more common now than it was even 15 years ago. 2-4 year stints at companies are the norm. What does this mean? It means that your potential network is exponentially bigger than it would be if tenures were 10-15 years and turnover was low - you are working with a larger number of peers over your career, and those peers are going on to work for many other companies. You work for a 50-person startup that collapses, and those employees maybe join 30 other firms. Now your reputation (good or bad) has reached 30 firms. Bad news spreads. Give proper notice and treat employers as you'd like to be treated - hopefully they will reciprocate.

I appreciate the thoughts, and luck does play a part but there are definitely methods to maximize your chances. I tend to find many older workers aren’t aware of how to find a job in the modern market or how to best approach companies. Job search has changed significantly in just the past few years, let alone the past decade.

Professional resume writer and career consultant here, approaching 50, and I’ve helped rehabilitate careers of many clients in similar situations. The line that caught my eye was his quote “I have been unemployed for a long time." I believe the stigma of extended unemployment is worse than ageism.

What I do is a mix of marketing (maximize assets, minimize liabilities, optimize everything), strategy for job search (beyond “spray and pray” resume broadcasting), and building confidence for interviews and the general approach. You have to believe you’ve earned a seat at the table.

There is always more to stories like this. Qualified candidates can overcome ageism with proper understanding of the market conditions.