Ask HN: Resume tips to get more responses from job applications? In a pre-COVID world, I used to have recruiters in my LinkedIn 24/7. Now I cant even get an initial interview when proactively applying to hundreds of jobs. Its a different job market we're in that requires more cleverness to be noticed. What tricks do you use to stand out and quantifiable increase callbacks / recruiter reachouts on your resume or LinkedIn? |
This may be due to reasons specific to your proposition or it may apply to propositions generally or categorically.
You ought to find out which effect is the case for you first.
Be precise on the role you’re interested in and make sure your linkedin profile matches.
As to tips, it's unclear how to proceed. The only similar time I can think of when I was applying for work, was after the 2008 crash. Then, you'd have postings asking for an entire IT department in a single position; This is probably where the term "full stack" came from, or was derived from. And so, if employers are doing something similar: Looking for as many skills and experience, for as little cost as they can, then it may pay to look at people that have work and see if there are any insights there.
AI of course is popular. VC money is getting thrown at it left and right; Even if it doesn't make sense to. So that's a possible up-skill option. Maybe a project with AI to show off?
Otherwise, I've had good luck at looking at the literature surrounding hiring and employment. The academics have some pretty good insights; For example, you're MUCH more likely to be hired if you're already employed. The thinking there goes that employed people are already vetted and have been trained for a type of position, and so poaching them saves on training/vetting costs. Another insight was that LinkedIn is almost useless as a means of applying for work. It has no market segmentation, and so a single posting can get world-wide exposure. This means that companies can get thousands of applications for a single posting. This has the effect of companies taking a LONG time going through applications, as their HR apparatuses were/are not built to handle world-wide scales of applicants *. Also, I don't know but suspect that companies now focus on recruiting over hiring through postings; That is, they would have recruiters find the best candidates and send out invites, rather than making a posting. Or, if they're obligated to make a posting, it makes sense that they might do that, but then ignore the applicants as it's: 1) a lot of work going through all of those applications, and 2) the best candidates are the ones they would want to invite anyways. Given all the downsides of making a job posting, I wonder if some companies have just stopped going through the trouble of using traditional means of hiring altogether.
Then also there's the silly impression that AI will replace labour, and so some very unserious people have made some very large bets on AI replacing their labour; With some notable failures, which don't seem to have dampened that enthusiasm. So, in other words, many people may not be hiring because of their mistaken beliefs about what AI is and does. And while time will show them to be incorrect, right now it's causing this weird pseudo-recession where work is hard to come by, unless you meet some very specific and selective criteria; Which does not appear to be most people.
---
* Another point here is that LinkedIn makes it trivial to apply for work, and so many people do, and so companies have to spend time and money to weed out applicants that aren't really qualified for a role. Also, this means that many people that aren't legally allowed to work in the position (i.e., Work Visas) have to be weeded out too.