| I do technical hiring for my company. Here's a bunch of things that I personally like to see -- may not apply to larger, non-startup employers though. * mention in the initial e-mail whether you're applying as local or remote * mention in the initial e-mail your availability (immediate, two weeks on notification, etc) * have a non-generic cover letter/e-mail that shows me you spent at least a couple minutes finding out about my company and tailoring your application to match * don't namedrop languages in resumes: namedrop libraries/APIs you're familiar with * pdf, text, or webpage: no .doc * if asked to provide code in an archive, don't splatter files inside my pwd (I open in /tmp anyway, but it's still annoying) * if asked to provide code, vendor everything you can (ie make your code as self-contained as possible) and provide a README for how to get it up and running I like your page at http://yangman.ca but it would be better if you went into detail about what you did for the various projects. Don't say you "actively contribute" to the radeonhd project -- describe 2 or 3 of your major contributions. Another suggestion: make use of the fact your resume is web-based. Instead of linking directly to linkedin etc, link to a uri on your domain which redirects. That way you can find out your clickthrough rate, and alter your online profile accordingly. For example, if no one ever clicks your LinkedIn profile, you may want to put your employment history on the page itself. If you apply to companies in different locations, you can roughly figure out which ones look at which pages via a geoip lookup. |
I personally think this is being overly picky, but as long as you make it clear that you only accept resumes in these formats there is no problem. I once sent a cold job application to a company that had no resume format requirement on its career page. I sent my resume in .doc. I could have sent it in PDF or something else, but in my experience most companies prefer to receive resumes in .doc unless otherwise stated. This company also sells a product for Windows (and other platforms) so I expected it to use Word internally. A few months later I found a job ad from them on Monster where they very clearly stated that they would only accept resumes in PDF. To this day their career page still does not specify a file format preference for resumes.