Context: Searching for a new senior level software development job over a 9 week period in summer 2025.

  • Focused mostly on data engineering and backend roles that are in-person or hybrid in the SF Bay Area.
  • Leads from recruiters on LinkedIn were much more likely to lead to interviews+offers.
  • The winning offer came through my personal network.
  • I mostly used Hiring.cafe for prospecting. They’re a scraper with an interface I didn’t hate.
  • 𝕱𝖎𝖗𝖊𝖜𝖎𝖙𝖈𝖍@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    2 days ago

    My partner with two masters and tons of experience in management has sent over 400 applications in the past year. She even learned appscript and made a smart spreadsheet to track them all. She’s still unemployed.

    She just got rejected from a dentist receptionist job because they were worried they were gonna have to pay her too much

    • bagsy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      2 days ago

      Formatting, fonts, and file format are very important. Certai. formats like PDF are harder to scrape. 2 or more colums cause the A.I. to get confused. Sometimes the scanners have trouble with fo ta with heavy kerning.

      i would suggest ms word, with the default font, and a single colum. Dont get fancy with the formatting.

      Also, there are a couple of online services that will use a.i. to score your resume. Find a service that uses the same ranking algo as the popular recruiting tools such as greenhouse and workday.

      It sucks, but your resume has to get past the a.i. screener before it ever reaches a human.

      • Leax@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        1 day ago

        Ms word recommended really? I went through markdown resume route for simple formatting, but still went with PDF as the norm

        • bagsy@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 day ago

          PDF is a typesetting format. Behind the scenes, every letter is placed on the page at a specific x,y coordinate. parsing text out of a pdf is essentially a series of guesses. sometimes the algorithm guesses wrong. PDF was invented for perfect layouts for printing.

          Word docs are a text-based format. It’s very easy to correctly pull text from a Word doc.

          Why risk an ai parsing a pdf incorrectly? There is no upside.

          • alternategait@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            21 hours ago

            A word document converted to a PDF maintains the text content. A tagged PDF has the same (plus accessibility to screen readers).