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by epynonymous 5595 days ago
i disagree--two pages of content is quite sane for someone who's worked let's say over 4-5 years. if you read a resume that says:

Google, Principal Software Engineer, 2006 - Current Python, git, gerrit, responsible for Gmail

is that really enough for you to make a decision to spend time on a phone screen?

i've scanned over tens of thousands of resumes and agree with you that making things concise is important. however just because a resume has additional information should not mean that that person's not qualified, it simply implies that it's harder for you to scan.

so simple rule for those updating your resumes, keep it concise, but don't be afraid to elaborate. a) it tells me a little bit about your communication ability and b) it gives me more information that i can optionally read if i want to know something. that also means my phone screenings are a lot more efficient because i know which questions to ask.

another piece of advice is to have a quick summary somewhere in your resume, i keep mine at the top. this is for the impatient (or over burdened). i've never dropped a set of resumes because they were too long, but to the contrary i've dropped resumes because they were too short too many times.

1 comments

if you read a resume that says: Google, Principal Software Engineer, 2006 - Current Python, git, gerrit, responsible for Gmail is that really enough for you to make a decision to spend time on a phone screen?

Yeah.

not if you're looking for a C++ developer, or not necessarily if you're looking for a performance tuning engineer...

the point is that it doesn't really tell you anything, i could be wasting my time on a phone call if i find out he was only writing python tools to help with packaging and deployment when what i want is a rockstar python developer to help create highly scalable wsgi compliant rest servers.

It tells me he already got through Google's notoriously thorough hiring process.
granted--google is quite thorough--but it doesn't directly translate into this candidate being a match for your company based on motivation nor skill set.