[mindvirus]

Edit your resume. Get your friends to help you, professors, post it here and get hacker news to help (brave!), or even hire a professional service to do it. Find a nice template online and use that. I've seen an astonishing number of astonishingly bad resumes. If you are having trouble even getting a phone screen, it says something about your applications (if you're having trouble in phone screens or during on-sites it says something else).

Some common problems I've seen with resumes:

  - Grammar, spelling and formatting problems.

  - Breadth but not depth - people list a million technologies but don't mention a single thing they did with those technologies.

  - Overly long - some people have a six month stint somewhere and yet write two pages of what they did there, filled with technical buzzwords.

  - Too short - people worked somewhere for three years and yet only write a single bullet point.

  - Unexplained gaps, especially early on. Not necessarily fair, but this can be a red flag for people.

The other trap that I've seen people fall into (less fairly) are technological traps:

  - Someone out of school that only knows one big name language like Java. People interpret this as someone who didn't do much outside of class.

  - Windows-centric developers in Silicon Valley. There's a lot of bias in SV against Windows developers, and someone with a list of Microsoft centric technologies risks coming off as someone who wants to be a Windows systems engineer in shops that mostly run off of Linux and Mac OS.

Finally, in the definitely not fair front is names. My Chinese and Indian friends have reported that by putting a Western first name on the resume their response rates more than doubled.