Errors, water in descriptions, work experience: what recruiters actually pay attention to in developer resumes

In the summer of 2013, the famous American tech recruiter Aline Lerner published Check out his blog post with an analysis of the factors that have the greatest impact on hiring a developer. Over a period of about a year, Lerner interviewed about 300 people for the position of a back-end / full-stack developer.

The main goal of the analysis was to identify patterns, including between the design and data in the resume and the final decision to hire a candidate. We decided to go through this work again and compare it with our data to understand what has changed over the seven years.

2013 results

During her analysis, Aline Lerner focused on studying the following factors:

• Degree in Computer Science and university level.

• Highest level of education attained.

• The number of grammatical and punctuation errors in the resume.

• Frequency of using bazwords (names of programming languages, frameworks, OS, software packages, etc.)

• How easy it is to understand from the resume what exactly the person did in the previous place of work.

• The length of the resume.

• Availability of personal projects.

• Work experience in a top company.

• Certificate score (GPA).

The goal was to understand which of these factors have the greatest impact on recruiters and the chances of being hired, and which have almost no effect. Here’s how the results were distributed.

1. The presence of errors in the resume

Statistics have shown that this factor can be one of the most important. It was precisely the numbers that confirmed it – when the recruiter talked with colleagues, then among the 30 people she interviewed there was no one who would declare the exceptional importance of the presence or absence of errors in the programmer’s resume. After all, this is a technical profession, not a humanitarian one, where you need to create texts for external readers.

The thesis sounded logical, but the numbers showed the exact opposite result. According to statistics, 87% of candidates with offers made 2 or fewer mistakes in their resume.

2. Work experience in a top company

There were no surprises here, except that, logically, this item should be the first. The recruiter classified as elite companies: Amazon, Apple, Evernote, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Oracle, startups from the Y Combinator, Yelp and Zynga sets. Recall that the analysis was carried out in 2013; today, obviously, the set of companies would have changed slightly.

3. How easy it is to understand what the candidate did in the previous job

Lerner collected the resume of those candidates who received offers and those who did not, and compiled the so-called word clouds for each cluster. They included words that were most often found in the resume.

This is what the cloud looks like for those who received the offer (the larger and brighter the word, the more often it was used):

And here’s how for those who didn’t receive:

It can be clearly seen that the candidates who were hired used more specific descriptions of their positions and the results achieved, while those who did not receive an offer more poured water and used general wording.

4. The highest level of education

According to the data of this particular study, this indicator turned out to be not only unimportant, but on the contrary, people who did not graduate from university were slightly more likely to receive an offer. Lerner explains this fact by the fact that usually self-taught people are more motivated and can develop faster.

Even having a degree from a top university in Computer Science did not greatly affect the final result – among the hired candidates, half did not have it. Moreover, there was no regularity between success in getting a job and the average grade in the school certificate.

5. Personal projects

Everyone has been talking about their importance for so long that it leads to depreciation. According to Lerner’s observations, many candidates, realizing that they need to include personal projects in their resume, begin to link to their almost empty GitHub accounts or third-party project repositories, where they send maximum commits with fixing the number of spaces.

It is clear that you can make such a side project or slightly change some third-party repository with UI elements, or you can launch a new JavaScript framework. But for a recruiter who performs the initial screening, it is difficult to clearly determine the difference, so if the value is not clearly clear from the description of the project, then the factor of its presence in the resume will give almost nothing.

What has changed in 2020

We decided to see how much the situation has changed and what factors are affecting the careers of engineers today. For this we have analyzed the data bot g-mate and recruiting agency gms. Here’s what we got.

Top reason for rejection: lack of experience

The most common reason a candidate for a technical position is rejected is lack of experience. For this reason, approximately 50% of candidates who have passed through our ecosystem are rejected.

What else confuses employers: unstable work experience, incorrect descriptions

As is clear from the point above, only in half of the cases the candidates do not receive the offer due to lack of experience. In another half of the cases, the chances of success could be improved by working with a resume and cover letter. For example, here are the factors that often confuse employers:

• unstable work experience – if a candidate has pauses in his career or periods when he did not work in the right direction, it is worth pointing out the reasons for this somehow.

• short term of work in the previous company – there may be objective reasons for this (the startup was closed, project work), but if they are not indicated, the impression is alarming.

• clarity of descriptions – If you are applying for a Python developer job, but the name of this programming language is not mentioned or it is difficult to find it somewhere in the middle of the page, the recruiter scanning the resume may decide not to read it in more detail.

Total

In order to pass the first filter in the face of a recruiter studying a resume, it is important to make sure that there are not many mistakes in it. If you have experience working in a large good company, you need to highlight it especially diligently. It is also extremely important to clearly describe your previous experiences, focusing on the results achieved.

It is important to highlight skills and technologies that are relevant to a particular job in a resume. Even more important is to carefully read the job description. If they ask to send a portfolio, write only to people with a certain level of English – it is important to take this into account.

Use the g-mate bot (@g_jobbot) to receive vacancies in your profile with the possibility of relocation or remote work directly in Telegram. Companies can post the first 3 vacancies for free – go link.