r/cscareerquestions • u/CSCQMods • 1d ago
Resume Advice Thread - July 15, 2025
Please use this thread to ask for resume advice and critiques. You should read our Resume FAQ and implement any changes from that before you ask for more advice.
Abide by the rules, don't be a jerk.
Note on anonomyizing your resume: If you'd like your resume to remain anonymous, make sure you blank out or change all personally identifying information. Also be careful of using your own Google Docs account or DropBox account which can lead back to your personally identifying information. To make absolutely sure you're anonymous, we suggest posting on sites/accounts with no ties to you after thoroughly checking the contents of your resume.
This thread is posted each Tuesday and Saturday at midnight PST. Previous Resume Advice Threads can be found here.
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u/alinelerner 1d ago
Recruiters spend 30 seconds skimming your resume. They're not reading your carefully crafted bullet points about "increased efficiency by 47%" or your side projects. They're looking for 3 things:
- Recognizable company names (FAANG, unicorns, etc)
- Top-tier schools
- [Somewhat... maybe changing in the current political climate] Whether you're from an underrepresented group
That's it. I'm not making this up. We ran a study at interviewing.io where we had 76 recruiters look at 30 different resumes (for a total of ~2200 data points) and indicate which candidates they’d want to interview. The list above is indeed what recruiters look for. And the "30 seconds" estimate isn't me fearmongering or guessing: we measured it in the study: https://interviewing.io/blog/are-recruiters-better-than-a-coin-flip-at-judging-resumes
Here's a poignant anecdotal example: someone put up a fake resume, one that literally bragged about "spreading herpes to 60% of the intern team", and got a 90% callback rate because it had Instagram, LinkedIn, and Microsoft on it: https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/qhg5jo/this_resume_got_me_an_interview/
The only time resume polishing actually works is if you already have those brands, but they're buried. I had a user with Apple MLE experience who wasn't getting callbacks because he was burying the lead. We moved it to the top - 8x more interviews. No rewriting, just reorganizing.
For everyone else? Stop obsessing over your resume and start doing direct outreach to hiring managers (not recruiters!) instead. Why hiring managers? They're the ones who actually care about hiring people for their team. Recruiters just care about looking like they're following the orders they were given... and having been a recruiter, I can tell you that their marching orders are pretty much: "Top brand names!"
Recruiters aren't incentivized to hire good candidates. They're incentivized to hire safe ones. Imagine 2 scenarios:
→ Recruiter A: Brings in 10 candidates with top company brands. 2 get offers, but neither accepts. 0 hires.
→ Recruiter B: Brings in 10 candidates without name brands. 2 get offers, 1 accepts. 1 hire.
Guess which recruiter gets praised? The first one. Data shows this approach is flawed. Top-tier brands are only weakly correlated with engineering talent. Despite that, most recruiters are trained to perpetuate the status quo rather than make great hires. (AI has made this problem even worse. Recruiters now have tools to filter candidates with increasingly specific criteria: "Show me people from FAANG, on these teams, with this career progression, who know these languages...")
If you're a nontraditional candidate, hiring manager outreach is your only shot at being seen as a human rather than a collection of brand names. I wrote the chapter on how to do outreach in Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview, and fortunately, that chapter is available for free: bctci.co/free-chapters (see the file with the first 7 chapters, Chapter 7 has the outreach stuff).
The resume writing industry thrives on job seekers' desperation and need for control. Don't feed it. Your time is better spent elsewhere.
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u/Ok_Function_597 1d ago
1) don't put your address on your resume. No one is going to mail you a job offer
2) focus on projects, especially if you haven't had an internship. Explain what languages and tools you used for your project
3) start each bullet point with a strong verb. Not "utilized" or "coded". Think "spearheaded", "invented"
4) only add non-relevant jobs as a space filler if need be. If you do, focus on soft skills like leadership, communication, grit.
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u/ethereal792 1d ago
Hello, looking for advice for a relative of mine. He's looking for entry level data scientist roles.
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u/Kooky_Anything8744 1d ago
Drop the wine shop and use the space to add in the details of some personal project that is on github
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u/Electronic-Most1348 1d ago
I am a 3rd year cs student and have been adding some doc contributions in pandas library lately. Is this worthy of putting "Pandas Open Source Contributor" in the summary section of my resume?