[nika]

Back when I still deigned to work for other people, I had an extensive and successful resume. I started out with a one page resume, and kept it that way for the first 5 years of my career. Then at some point, I kept getting asked silly questions by recruiters (not in house but the independent agencies) and they'd often say "you should put this on your resume. You should list every language you've worked with, all your skills. And tells us more about each company you worked for.

I was able to hold the line at a 2 page resume, but I optimized the hell out of it.

Finally, I got really irritated and re-worked it again to be a single page.

The resume looked something like this- . . .

[e-mail] -- huge letters across the top. the only contact info on the resume

Summary 18+ years of software development experience.... going on for about a paragraph, that really gives my "value offered" rather than "this is what I'm looking for". This was succinct and compelling and I think many people never read further.

Then a cronological list of jobs in this format:

JOB TITLE @companydomian.name date-now Patent #444,444,444 "Title of Patent", sole inventor One-two sentences highlighting significant accomplishments there. Ruby on Rails, Javascript, Perl exit: need more challenge

and at the bottom: copyright - do not forward or alter this resume, no agency may represent me. . . .

This worked really well. Let people see the tech I used, why I left each position, what I did there, and what my title was.

That last line was because I was constantly finding my resume retyped (very poorly) by agencies that wished to send it out, often who got it under fraudulent terms (they made a job posting pretending to be the company rather than an agency). They'd do this just to remove my contact info at the top lest the company contact me directly.

Eventually I stopped dealing with agencies.

In fact, don't give your resume or even talk to anyone who isn't a hiring manager, or a friend of yours at the company. HR people are just going to prevent you from getting a job. Agencies are just going to say things like "You built a search engine? that's nice. Were you using Oracle 15?" "No, I was working in Java, and some SQL, I think the backend was Oracle 14" "Oh, sorry, they really want Oracle 15 experience".

And of course, when a bimbo airhead (often male with some sort of ego involvement) has decided that you're not qualified because your buzzword compliance is 6 months out of date, there is no convincing them.

So, I decided they just got in the way, and started networking.

This was so much better-- stopped getting jobs and job offers, but opportunities. Started interviewing for CTO positions rather than "Sr. Developer".

YMMV.