Ask HN: I’ve been applying to a million jobs
A lot of the other comments are focusing on the content and style of your website. Here&#x27;s the thing: Most employers are never going to look at that. Unless you are showcasing something truly incredible, even the ones who are actually interested may take a quick glance and then move on.<p>What actually matters is your resume. That&#x27;s the document that every single person is going to look at. Not everyone is going to read it over carefully, but everyone who is even remotely interested in you is going to look at it and for most of them, that&#x27;s the document that matters most. I haven&#x27;t seen your formatted resume, so I can&#x27;t give you specific feedback, but maybe these tips will help others reading these comments:<p>* If you have fewer than 10 years of experience, keep it to one page (exceptions are academia and possibly roles in Europe). I know people with 40 years of experience who use one page. If they can squeeze it in, so can you.<p>* Keep the page clean and minimal. Black type on a white background with <i>plenty</i> of white space. It should look clean.<p>* No pictures or graphics. A lot of people will be turned off by this. Virtually no one will be turned off by black and white, text only.<p>* While we&#x27;re at it, no funky fonts. Serif, sans-serif, it&#x27;s not gonna matter much. But don&#x27;t try to get cute.<p>* No typos or grammatical errors. 80% of people seem to have them. But this is a one page document and if you can&#x27;t show that you can write one page without typos or other errors, what does that say about your attention to detail?<p>* Have someone proofread it anytime you make more than minor edits.<p>* I personally think that a statement of purpose line at the top can only hurt you by putting you in a box and rarely helps you. I&#x27;ve never looked at a well formatted resume and said &quot;why doesn&#x27;t this have a statement of purpose?&quot;. Just highlight your experience, contact info, etc and that&#x27;s it.<p>* If you want, you can have <i>one line</i> at the bottom that talks about your hobbies that aren&#x27;t directly relevant to your job. Sometimes your love of golf will be a good talking point for interviewers. But limit it to one line (or better yet, don&#x27;t put hobbies in at all).<p>* PDF format! This means that it&#x27;ll look the same on everyone&#x27;s computer. I made this mistake in college when I sent out my resume as a word document. It looked great on my mac but I realized later than on Windows, the text went one line over the first page which looked terrible. That&#x27;s when I started using PDFs and PDFs only for my resume (I format it using LaTeX but using Word or similar is fine as long as you save to PDF).<p>I&#x27;ve seen a lot of resumes for developers and you know what sticks out? A clean, well written resume with no typos. Because it&#x27;s much rarer than you&#x27;d think. Most have typos. Some are too cluttered. Many list experience that I don&#x27;t give a damn about. If you went to a college, then I don&#x27;t really care about your high school experience. I also don&#x27;t care about your babysitting experience if you are applying to be a developer. If you need to show work history then keep the irrelevant parts as short as possible.<p>But the main point is this: Well written resumes stand out because they are rarer than you would think. I used to think the opposite; that most people write good resumes and maybe you need to try something bold to stick out. But when I got to the other side of the table where I was looking over others&#x27; resumes, this turned out not to be the case. The resumes that tried to hard to stick out looked tacky to me. And finding a well written resume with consistent formatting, a nice layout and no errors seems to be rare, at least among junior hires.<p>OK, so now you&#x27;ve got a great resume. You send it to a thousand websites. Well, here&#x27;s the bad news. No one is going to read it. I&#x27;m sorry, and it sucks, but it&#x27;s the truth. But the good news is that today, there are many ways to contact hiring managers directly. You can message them via LinkedIn. You can go onto company websites and find email addresses. At small companies, those messages will often find their way to the CEO. You wanna really make sure it gets to the right person? Print it out and mail it in with a short cover letter. No one gets snail mail anymore so it&#x27;s almost guaranteed they will have a look. Submitting a resume online for a large company is kind of like throwing your resume in the garbage and hoping someone will pick it up, unfortunately.<p>Finally, talk to recruiters. Email them out of the blue. These are the only people who are incentivized to scrutinize your resume more carefully. They will give you frank and honest feedback on your resume because that&#x27;s what they do. As an employed developer you will get reached out to by recruiters all the time and will become annoyed by some of them (and possibly angry at some of the less ethical ones). But at your stage, you may need to reach out to them. And the good ones will actually help you. Their livings depend on getting your resume into the hands of people who hire.<p>Anyway, I&#x27;m sure there are those who disagree with some of my points above, but I think this is applicable to the majority of people, especially those early in their career.