Some of this is going to be bragging, but it's because I want to offer up free resume help to anyone who is in a similar situation and needs a job. I feel like I cracked some sort of resume-code or something. PM me if you need help getting phone screens.
In the last few months, I've cold applied and gotten phone screens at Google, Facebook, Apple, Uber, Snap, Zoom, Instacart, CarGurus, Stripe, Squarespace, NBC Universal, Tesla, Dropbox, Peloton, Twitter, Vimeo, and other smaller companies. I have never used a referral. My cold-apply recruiter response rate is about 80%.
Recently accepted an offer for Frontend Software Engineer with TC 240k at one of the above companies. I have 2 years experience.
Disclaimer: These are all companies that I have cold applied and gotten a recruiter response from. 2 companies I didn't get past the recruiter, 2 companies I got offers, and the rest I failed somewhere in the middle or withdrew my application. So my advice here only really applies to getting through to a recruiter.
Here is my resume (with some names changed):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tyy6CtQYzn3mD4ktAvoJj0CK5QRiKZ8r/view?usp=sharing
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Two questions:
1. Why does your Blind account have the Oracle tag if you’ve never worked there?
2. Why do you have a 1 year gap from October 2019 and how do you explain it to recruiters?
1. Applying to a specific position. I'm lucky that I know 'back end of the front end' is what I like to do. And there are a lot of job postings asking for the same skills. But it's very specific. I won't apply to any front-end role. If the job post is emphasizing really strong CSS skills, I will not apply. Strong JS skills yes.
2. Write as if recruiters are a general, non-technical audience. Do not describe your deep technical jargon. Confusing language is not impressive. If you're going to embellish, don't embellish on technical jargon. Which leads me to my next point.
3. Google's advice on bullet points "accomplished X as measured by Y by doing Z" is the best advice for describing experience. "Improved news feed engagement by 2% by improving AI efficiency using Python" or whatever is a hell of a lot more powerful than the technical details of this. Save that stuff for later. Estimate impact numbers if necessary.
4. Ditch your company-specific job titles. Stop with the “full stack cloud platforms & systems engineer” just say software engineer for god’s sake
5. Use bullet points to answer common questions if you have a non-traditional background. I got tired of recruiters asking how I got into SWE from a physics major so I wrote it as a bullet point under my school
But no, I have never had a problem with that. Companies themselves are often inconsistent with job titles. Could be “Frontend Engineer” on workday and “Software Engineer- Frontend Apps” on slack for example
I could guess that background checks more likely become a problem if you represent yourself as a senior engineer when you’re junior. But not sure.
I like your resume format btw. Could I suggest a couple of cosmetic improvements - lesser text (some points could be reduced by a line) and a point summary at the beginning (eg App scaling). These improvements helped me!
The list of companies where I have cold applied and had interviews scheduled:
1. Google
2. Facebook
3. Uber
4. Twitter
5. LinkedIn
6. Microsoft
7. Stripe
8. Amazon
And more. This was before I was at Amazon.
I became better at this by A/B testing my resume. There is no trick, you will have to put in the hard work.
Yeah, I know Apple is not in this list. It's the only big company that has resisted my charms :(
Saves so many wasted DMs.