[PaulHoule]

(1) Unfortunately when the job market is the way it is right now hiring managers don't feel they can talk to everybody and will look for quick heuristics to eliminate people. Myself I have left experience off my resume which I thought would make me look overqualified and it's worked.

(2) Of course FAANG is not all the same. There's the story that AMZN is an awful place to work but I know some people who are happy and productive there who I'd love to snap up if I could. I've debriefed numerous ex-Googlers and they all seemed broken to me, a common story was "I thought I could have impact there, I thought I could learn something" but they couldn't. [1] I actually have a few cases of before and after interviews where I'm inclined to say "I told you so" I can't say I've really sampled Facebook, Apple or Netflix though.

[1] Google is less a company that does things better than other companies than it is a monopoly that doesn't have to do better on any metric, the one metric that matters is earnings, and they can always tighten the screws on their ecosystem to take a little more.

[tombert]

I've thought about taking experience that makes me overqualified off my resume as well, but I don't know the way to explain the gaps in my resume for that. What do you do?

[PaulHoule]

While the part that I left off happened a long time ago so I didn't have that problem.

In general gap problems are tough and need some combination of hard work and luck to overcome. I had two times when I had gap problems.

For the first I was still processing my separation from physics, had spent two years as a nearly full-time activist (a bit unplanned) and had trouble with depression and chronic pain. I networked very hard and managed to get a new position created for me after about eight months of busting my ass.

For the second I'd spent a few years trying to start up my own business together with a salesman who couldn't sell anything. I gave up in December 2016 and rolled my car on the 31st, I created a workflow system that processed job listings and applications with plans to AI enable it. I saw a listing for a company that was doing something similar and was pretty sure I'd get the job and sure enough I did. They liked the story of my workflow system, and funny enough that code has been through various revisions and become an RSS reader and image sorter.

[tombert]

I'm not sure what looks worse: short stints at companies or gaps. I've tried the A/B test with my resume but the result are inconclusive.

I really hate the software industry. I like writing code, I like building stuff, I like math, I like a lot of my fellow engineers, but the entire industry is pretty insufferable at this point.

[creer]

Do gaps matter these days? If anything, everyone knows there have been layoffs; there has been job hopping; there have been startups named "Yo"; weird platforms and languages; political jobs; volunteer gigs...

Is a resume that just lists enough experience relevant to a position that bad of an idea? (and skips the noise?)

Did you try A/B testing that by any chance?

[tombert]

I have not. Worth a shot.

[creer]

Hmmm. In the case of submitting resumes in response to job postings, there is the issue of the software that ingests these resumes. I have always wondered if some keywords were toxic with some of these. Or whether they latch on (parse) some resume features which then eliminates you if you mess with them. For example, does deviating from "standard" resume formats disqualify you? Does listing some specific tools, platforms or hobbies run you head on into a keyword-specific scoring bug?

Of course any such problem would be poor design, but we know how little that means.

I keep my eyes open for people testing HR resume ingestion software, publishing findings or even side by side comparisons. And I have never seen useful reports. Anyone knows any, please let us know!

[tombert]

I have noticed a lot more jobs are requiring you to post your LinkedIn now. A small part of me thinks it's an AI automatically filtering for these things now.

I thought about buying a domain name that looks similar enough to a LinkedIn URL shortener and writing a thing to track the data around it (like Grabify) just so I might be able to see where it's actually being ingested from.