Ask HN: Why is no one hiring me?

2 points by sidyapa 5 years ago | 4 comments

Hey HN,

I am a 24yo from India and have been self employed building websites and apps small businesses since I was 17. I have also built a ton of side projects but none of them have been "successful" yet. Covid hit my freelancing a lot so I decided to apply to startups to work as a APM / PM because I can code, design, do product analysis and so much more. But I have applied to more that 200 startups till now and no one seems to be interested in hiring me at all, all of them have rejected me with the same "you are not a good fit for now" email. What am I doing wrong? Are my skills and experience not relevant? Could you help me see from startups' perspective?

My resume - sid.lol/sid.pdf

codingdave 5 years ago |

Unfortunately, I can see why you are not getting calls. But I may be able to at least give some advice:

Your resume is all over the place. Sure, you've done some things, but you haven't listed a single technical skill. Tell us more about what your software skills are, not just list a description of projects. Your resume should be a focused story of how you have delivered successful projects, and how you can help a team improve the delivery of future projects. Unfortunately, your resume has way too many instances of "Didn't work, I shut it down." Failures happen, but you need to spin them to show that you learned something from the experience.

If I were you, I'd do a few things to fix this --

Don't describe every thing you have ever done. Filter it down to only projects that are relevant to software development. List out what technical stacks you used, and what skills you learned from the projects. Don't say, "I gave up and shut it down." Find something else to say about the project - describe lessons learned and how your skills improved. If you can't come up with a positive description of the result of a project, don't list it.

If you re-write your experience in that way, you'll have a better chance of someone calling you back.

sidyapa 5 years ago | |

That's really good advice, thanks a lot, will make changes accordingly.

viraptor 5 years ago |

You may be aiming for the wrong position (or at least advertising yourself with wrong skills). PMs need to do a lot of people management and problem solving between layers in the company, but from skimming the cv, everything looks like a solo project where your didn't have to do that.

edoceo 5 years ago | |

Agree. Seems a better fit for on-team contributor for a while. Also, look outside of startups. Some boring small business could use a coder too and some of those can become a one-person team (you) that you grow into 10.