The Myth of Resume Magic

Probably many of you know the Tech Immigrants group and are members of it. It's a group for those who want to immigrate through work. Within this group, there is a topic titled "Resume", and every time it comes up and I check its messages, I see hordes of people who have sent their resumes for someone to give them feedback and tell them how to fix this CV, and these hordes of people are from all kinds of backgrounds. From resumes that a truck couldn't pull to that beginner who has listed their hobbies to fill up their resume. But what I see a lot is a belief that bothers me, and that is that the CV is supposed to do the things you haven't done, gain experience instead of you, and get you an interview with its magical characters.

I can't deny that the rejection rate has gone up, and this makes these people think that the problem lies with themselves. Or at least the problem is somewhere that can be fixed right now with four bullet points. But the truth is that's not the catch. Just as the biggest factor in the increase in divorce is marriage, the biggest reason for the rise in rejections is the increase in applicants and applying :) For better or worse, the number of programmers, or rather, applicants for jobs related to the IT industry is increasing day by day. There are too many people, and there will be more, and the situation is going to get worse than it is. Or on the other side, the admin of some application channel happily talks about a repo that you can use to automatically apply for LinkedIn's easy apply. This person doesn't realize that this spamming of companies makes the situation worse than it already is, and following them are people who eagerly dive into the heart of the filth. With this situation we are caught in, at least don't think that if you polish and bedazzle your resume, the HR's legs will go weak and they'll suddenly come proposing to you. In my experience and that of my friends, it's not about these things! :)

So how much attention should we pay to the resume? Short and simple: to a normal extent. Let me give an example. You can solve many structural flaws and how the resume elements are arranged by using one of the billions of resume builders, many of which are also ATS friendly. Although this ATS is not as simple or solvable as the friends who have grabbed an ATS make it out to be. The problem lies here that no standard has been set for ATS Parsers. Each of the companies (assuming they use these tools in their pipeline and the process in the early stages is machine-driven) uses software for automatically processing resumes, and each one reads your CV differently. The only thing you can do is try to use a suitable template and pray to God that the companies use a parser that can parse your resume correctly. That's it! For this too, you can turn to resume builders or use famous templates that are on Google Docs or LaTeX.

One of the issues that is frequently raised is the arrangement of elements and the visual appearance, where often the opinions given have no rhyme or reason and people act based on personal taste. There is no other way, because there is no metric or criterion. One says you should put a number from 1 to five for your skills (one of the leads at Bending Spoons personally told me this), another says what are these frivolous acts, and you are left in the middle not knowing whose tune to dance to! The truth of the matter is that again, it's not that important. If you can keep everything simple, keep it simple. There is one principle for writing a resume and I believe in it, and that is: comprehensive and concise. Try to cover everything and avoid verbosity. The rest is just a story and torment for the soul and psyche.

How can one determine the reasonable limit of resume writing? It's very simple. Much simpler than constantly running after this person and that person to comment on your CV. Take an example from someone who has managed to get a position with their resume or a respectable person you accept. Of course, if you know them and that person is willing to do this, there are probably plenty of people who do this even without you asking them; because they have put their resumes on their website or LinkedIn. Put their resume in front of you and copy it! In high school, our math teacher, after writing the answer to the problem on the board, would sit on his chair and say, "Since you don't understand, draw a picture!" :)))) Let's also draw a picture from others' CVs, sir, what's wrong with that? :)

The situation has become such that a business has been set up to make an opportunity out of this people's superstition to shove really expensive subscriptions down people's throats and pocket fat cash. The desperate job seeker also comes and wastes their money on these people for what? So that their CV score goes from 40 to 100, because they think if it becomes 100 now, then a flood of interviews will follow.

I think it's clear what I mean by all these words, but I'll say it separately here. I'm not saying you should submit a bad resume and that it's no different from someone who submitted a proper resume and spent time on it. No! My point is that you should build a conventional resume and not expect anything more from it than a piece of paper that says what you did where. To increase our chances, we need to make our backpacks heavier and become more knowledgeable. Increase our connections and be friends with more people, show ourselves with our performance, and hope that the day HR is checking the CVs will be our lucky day. The bitter truth is that we need a lot of luck for many things.

I've talked too much, but well, I thought it was necessary that amidst thousands of videos and documents on "how to build a good resume" and "I found a template that increased my interview rate a thousand times," it should be talked about at least once that the reality is something else, and let's not buy dreams, and maybe we can see reality with a different pair of glasses.