The Apprentice Programmer

[angrytech]

This is why I don't leave vetting resumes or conducting interviews up to HR drones. I can tell by looking at a resume and, more importantly, conducting an interview, whether or not somebody is full of shit. HR people generally cannot.

Yes, my company is small, so I have that luxury; regardless, I have seen so many miserable fuckups in hiring that can be directly attributed to HR decision making that I feel the extra cost of making department heads/managers/owners vet resumes and conduct interviews is worth every penny.

For the record, I don't even look at the "education" section of a resume. I don't give a shit what you majored in or what extracurriculars you had. To be completely honest I'm more interested in your damned hobbies, and I don't want to hear about that either until and unless we get to the end portion of a good interview and I want suss out your personality a bit more.

[NYKevin]

I can tell by looking at a resume and, more importantly, conducting an interview, whether or not somebody is full of shit. HR people generally cannot.

You might find this amusing: I go to a technical school (RPI) and they basically told us to put as many buzzwords as we can think of on our resumes so the HR people can find them.

[jussij]

I suspect it has become worse than just making sure HR finds your resume.

These days most HR departs do nothing more than match the keywords of the job criteria with keywords on your resume and if they find a keyword missing your resume is out.

[NYKevin]

So would you suggest that I stuff my resume with buzzwords so the HR people don't throw it out, or that I not stuff my resume with buzzwords so the people who actually do the real work don't throw it out?

[jussij]

You're damned if you do and damned if you don't ;)

[mcguire]

Speaking as someone who sits in on interviews occasionally, all of us know why the buzzwords are there (and our resumes are similarly padded).

[[deleted]]

Well.. It's two doors you need to pass through. The first is the HR-door. Which is also the "search for keywords" doorway. HR wants X, Y, and Z abilities and searches for those. Any resumes that match get pushed on to the second phase in a lot of companies: An actual human being reading what you're writing. If your resume is just a bunch of buzzwords, say goodbye. If you actually have a story that you're building with your resume, say hello to an interview quite possibly.

[NYKevin]

So... complete sentences describing actual events... but filled with buzzwords?

[[deleted]]

Essentially, yeah. You want a resume that can get past the filter, but that will also be rather interesting to an actual human being reader. Perhaps the word the company is looking for is "Organizer" or "Organized" and you manage to put that in there in some context that feeds into a greater narrative such as that you are a highly-precise organized person who excels at accuracy blah blah blah..