Book Review: The Tech Resume Inside-Out
As I started reading Tech Resume Inside-Out by Gergely Orosz, I quickly realized how much I took for granted an organized, structured interview process driven by a dedicated recruitment team!
I was lucky enough to work in companies where this is the norm and had forgotten that it isn’t so everywhere!
If you’re a hiring manager and are not sure if you have a solid recruitment process in place — you should read this book!
Whenever I switched jobs and refreshed my resume throughout my career, I inadvertently read advice about keeping your resume simple, not using custom templates and formats, sending it as a Word Document, and so on.
This advice is supposed to increase your chances of not being automatically screened out by an ATS (Applicant Tracking System). Yet, I’ve seen a few such systems in-use, and most importantly, I’ve seen what they do automatically (which is very little).
Somehow, I never put two and two together, and I kept my resumes pretty spartan, in fear of the big bad ATS who will send my application straight to the trash bin. Reading Gergely’s advice was an a-ha moment for me.
No ATS will automatically reject your resume!
At best, they use basic tactics like matching keywords between the job spec and your resume. The bottom line? You don’t have to submit a Word document, but that said if you’re a software engineer (or in a related field), not every template works in your favor. There is a full chapter in the book dedicated to comparing various templates. As a hiring manager, I prefer PDFs that look somewhat nice — they make the resume review experience more pleasant. A poorly formatted docx does not!
The author does a great job at outlining different resume formats for different stages of your career. Treat it like a project — write multiple versions, refactor it, get reviews from people you know, take the feedback, and incorporate it. Read the book for a detailed explanation of why this matters!
In the past, I found it hard to make my resumes look good — I’m no designer, but I appreciate good design. I wanted to use a template but was afraid of the ATS-myth. Plus, most resume templates out there are not designed for a software engineer. Too many graphics or unnecessary sections can be a detractor.
One of the most significant finds for me in the book was Standard Resume — a resume builder with engineers in mind.
The last chapter of the book addresses hiring managers. I find there’s nothing quite useful as receiving feedback; in some cases, it is directed. In other cases, feedback comes to you indirectly via a conversation you listen to or a book you read!
Your success at hiring high-quality candidates starts with your recruitment pipeline and the people in charge of it — the recruiters. Success depends on the relationships you build with that group! It is tempting to assume that the hiring pipeline will run itself and that candidates will either pass or fail a series of interviews, but the situation is much more complicated.
For once, the tech industry at large seems to err on the side of caution and is biased towards filtering out early, optimizing for interviewers’ time. The book gave me an idea of tackling that problem by filtering fewer candidates and offering applicants who are not so adept at preparing a good resume a chance!
Overall, I’m grateful for finding and reading this book as it gave me fresh perspectives on hiring practices and how to get better results out of the industry-standard interview process!
Drop me a line if you read it too, and let me know what you think!
— Mihai
