Looks like I'm going to be kept busy. I will do my absolute best to respond to each and every one of you but you will need to be patient.

Anyone else looking to send me a CV, please fire away but it would help if you could include info on what you would like me to focus on, eg. are you concerned about specific content, is it the layout or format that you feel is letting you down, etc.

UPDATE:

That figure has now doubled and I'm looking at over 40 CV's in my inbox. I'll get started on them tonight and see how many I get through.

I've given very brief responses to some of you but I am determined to get through all of them in detail.

Remember, all I am offering is my informed opinion and if you disagree with my advice, don't take it personally!

I took a class where we had "critique sessions." One of the huge differences between the veteran writers in the class and the inexperienced was their ability to take criticism.

One girl became particularly defensive about something she had written, so one of the more practiced writers stood up and said to her, "Look, this is just my opinion. If you don't like it, well, maybe I'm full of shit."

I always find that's a helpful way to think about it.

http://miazmatic.com/wiki/images/0/04/Tech-resume.pdf

Not overly convinced with listing the skills down the right hand side. It makes it a little hard to read. I generally recommend that people stick to "normal" layouts and list skills at the end.

Also; be more specific with the skills if you can. "Database design" can mean many things (this is particularly important if you go for, say, a DB design job :)).

Also; it is ok to write a short prose section under "interests" or something, which is where you can be a bit more creative and sell yourself.

Otherwise, pretty good :)

As for specifics, list your day to day duties and responsibilities in a format that will stand out and be easy to read such as a list of bullet points under each brief.

I'm not sure whom this is meant to appeal to.

I'm head of development for a search related company and as part of my role review all incoming CV's(with advice from one of my senior devs) as well as handle the most of the interviews.

If you'd like two perspectives(Recruiter who will work to get you an interview and HoD who will ultimately hire you) feel free to send them over to me as well. My email is in my profile though I can only honestly help if you're targeting development roles.

Same disclaimer about time though, I will try to do any I get through over the next couple of nights though.

Edit: If you could include what type of role you are targetting(tech startup, agency, finance, etc) it would really help with my advice.

As a caveat for those who might think I'm looking for teaching examples for free, I promise I'm not. Just really want to help out. Same disclaimer about time. I've already done some mark up on rdamico's CV on crocodoc if you want to take a look at some of my quick remarks on his.

It would be interesting to see how your feedback would differ to mine on certain CV's. I definitely think that you will get flooded with CV's though!

Communities such as HN, where intelligent discussion is rampant and trolls are minimal, are a rare breed these days and to see the community step up and start assisting each other in the real world is admirable to say the least.

Whilst I may not be a genius developer or a powerful CEO, I still have skills that could be of use to the element of the community that are looking for a new challenge or those who are struggling to find work.

I think a huge amount of people on this site will have something to offer that others will find incredibly useful so hopefully this will have a knock on affect and we'll see more and more offers of legitimate, useful assistance.

I'm particularly interested in whether you think the order of sections (education->work->general->personal) works, and whether my copy sells.

Thanks for the offer!

PS: I'm not looking for work at the moment, so please prioritise my request lower than those who are currently seeking.

Whilst the paragraph descriptions are well written my suggestion on your current role for example would be to keep the first paragraph in place and immediately after that I would bullet point a list of your primary responsibilities.

Overall it is a decent CV but I'll have a proper look and send you the feedback directly over the next day or two.

Chronologically (earlier first) it went like this:

Company 1 (1 year)

University (1 year)

Company 2 (3 months)

Company 1 again (nearly 1 year)

Does it raise questions that I left Company 2 after only 3 months, and that I went back to Company 1?

(not listing company names here so it doesn't get into their search results)

It does and you will be questioned on this.

The fact is, if you have a reasonable, logical, verifiable reason for returning then it won't be an issue.

If the company 2 role was a contract position I would highlight that on the CV.

No, I've never done contract work. I won't go into details here, but I feel I have good reasons for leaving C2. They were great to work for, but just weren't quite in line with my career goals.

This totally impressed me.

Also, I love this: http://www.geekwallpapers.com/3d-wallpaper-office-plan/

Glad you like line about SEO. I'm not sure I could repeat the success without puremango being an established & well-ranked blog already, but I like to think I'm good at SEO. Geek Wallpapers ranks highly for several keywords too and that's been going less than a year, so I must be doing something right! :)

I would say 95% of every CV I get has swimming and/or reading listed. Even if it is a particular passion (which I suspect it is in this case) just don't mention it :)

(I like the swiss army knife mention though, a bit of "unique" is always good)

I think I'm going to leave education at the top though. I think my university has good initial impact on the reader. People raise their eyebrows when they see 'Oxford'. This is a good thing. I do personally believe the commercial experience can be more important for most jobs, but I still want to draw attention to my academic background.

The majority of clients I deal with prefer to see the education & relevant qualifications listed first if the candidate has left University within the last 5 or 6 years.

Once again it's a matter of opinion but I have researched it a bit and this seems to be the general consensus.

From my experience (and I suspect most developers would agree) real world development experience is a much better indicator of performance than university.

Are the candidates you normally field changing sectors ? - in the case that a candidate doesn't have industry experience I can see why a company might want to see educational background first, but it seems strange that a company would care more about educational level than directly relevant experience.

I'm guessing something along those lines led you to specify this as a generalisation.

Excellent SEO ability; this resumé is ranked in the top results for “php CV” and “php programmer CV“.

Cus, it aint. Not that you're looking for work, just sayin'

Just forward their emails (w/ attachments) to upload@crocodoc.com, or upload them directly through crocodoc.com. Either way you'll receive a unique crocodoc URL you can use to view, mark up, and share each resume with its creator.

Would love to hear your feedback if you end up giving this a try!

Note: You don't need to create a crocodoc account to use the service (which is free), but I'd suggest doing so to keep track of all the resumes it looks like you'll be working on :)

Example document: https://crocodoc.com/demo1 (note: since this is a demo document your changes won't actually be saved)

KoZeN's offer to review CV's is really (really) nice, but with well over 40 to read, his offer won't likely meet the demand.

I've thought a few times that there must be something wrong with my resume and I'd like to have it reviewed professionally.

Has anyone paid to have their resume reviewed? If so, where, how much did it cost and was it worth it?

Google brings up plenty of options, but I'm nervous to use any of them for fear that they may not have experience in tech / I.T. / programming or worse, that they'll simply find a couple of grammar mistakes and charge me a few hundred dollars.

Any help?

Firstly, regardless of the size of the response, I will uphold my promise and provide feedback on every single CV I get, it may take some time but I will deliver.

Secondly, as for a paid service, you absolutely hit the nail on the head as far as your concern about for fear that they may not have experience in tech / I.T. / programming or worse, that they'll simply find a couple of grammar mistakes and charge me a few hundred dollars.

This is the sole reason I haven't set up a paid service myself. How can you charge $100 dollars only to receive a CV that is essentially perfect or even convince your market that you won't just give generic feedback?

Send me the CV and I will do my absolute best for you.

Well, that case is easy. If you can't help them, don't charge.

Unfortunately, I don't have any idea about convincing your target market. I think word of mouth would be most effective, maybe you could come up with some ways to generate that (like what you're doing now!)

I think a big problem is that the return varies a lot, some people have absolutely awful CVs and some people have great CVs. If you're charging a flat-rate for CV reviews then some people will obviously get far more value out of it than others. If you charge variable-rate that's likely to put off customers who want to know upfront how much something will cost.

Maybe you could get away with a flat rate if you provided additional services besides the review. Maybe taking the CVs and turning them into a profile for them that's indexable by Google or creating a "reverse job application" like a couple people have been floating around lately here?

Search for "Neil Rauch resume doctor" to find his contact information.

I don't think it's cheap though.

first:

http://www.reversejobapplication.com/

and in response:

http://www.thejohnnybrown.com/?p=21

I thought this was a really entertaining read. Will it generate his dream job on it's own merits? Probably not. Will it generate a ton of job offers due to the publicity it's received? Probably.

More and more employers want 'celebrities' working for them. I recently placed a gentleman who had a relatively average CV but he had been published in numerous Insurance related publications and his name was well recognised throughout the industry, when people heard he was open to offers I had multiple interviews lined up for him within 245 hours.

That's a minor example but it's definitely a growing trend.

I believe it's the credibility factor. If someone has a lot of positive exposure be it online, in print media or what ever the case may be, then that is going to attract attention to who the person works for.

Take actual celebrity examples; almost everyone in the world knows who David Beckham is and now most of those people know who LA Galaxy are. I can assure you, before he joined the team few people in Europe had ever even heard of LA Galaxy and now they are a recognised and respected brand purely because of their association with Beckham. On an infinitely smaller scale the same applies to certain industries in larger cities.

http://snikolov.weebly.com/uploads/3/9/0/4/3904101/snikolov-...

if you or anyone else has time to take a look. My goal with the colors was to make it scan-able by highlighting where I worked as well as approximate position titles and letting gray-colored description stay in the background. But it might also be too harsh on the eyes.

Another concern is having too many things and not saying very much about any one of them. I am a student, and many companies seem to want to hire people who get things done for internships, rather than people with very specific skills. So I want my message to be "I've done things", rather than "I've done these very specific things that your job description lists." Is this misguided? Should I take certain parts of it out depending on where I am applying?

Thanks again.

On a side note, I see you worked @ Numenta Inc. A colleague & I have been experimenting with various potential applications for NuPIC. When I have a more detailed look at the CV I'll throw in a few side questions that you might be able to assist with.

re: Numenta -- certainly shoot me an email (snikolov@mit.edu) and I'll see what I can answer (if I am allowed to answer it :-)) If I can't, I can direct you to people who would be a lot more knowledgeable.

Currently I do not really have a CV anymore, I link to my linkedin or make a dump of my linkedin to doc/pdf.

What do you think of this practice?

Anyone else who has opinions on "moving the CV to linkedin"?

If you can't go to the effort of compiling a detailed CV for me to send to my clients then I can't be bothered going to the effort to try and get you an interview with people who pay me top dollar to find the strongest, hungriest applicants.

If I sent a linkedin page to an employer instead of a candidates CV I am almost certain they wouldn't even bother looking at it.

I believe it's a bit lacking in some areas eg, I recall it does not have anything about human languages (when you are moving around in europe that is kind of useful). I may be wrong though.

To be honest any recruiter posting someones CV publicly asking advice on suitability for a specific job is going to get torn to shreds.

Recruitment is an incredibly cut throat, incestuous market and any recruiter worth his salt won't be faced with ambiguity over whether or not a CV would be suitable for a job.

Most CV's that are difficult to interpret tend to be specialist skillsets and 9 times out of 10 a vacancy that requires a niche skillset will have agencies that specialise in that area and understand the skillset working on it.

I intend on responding to everyone who has emailed me up until now and I am going through each request chronologically.

Thank you so much for all your messages of support.

I recently rewrote it from scratch, as my previous CV was simply thrown together when applying for a random job. When I decided to put myself on the job market seriously, I figured I'd go ahead and spiff it up a bit.

Put your Skills in as a Tagcloud. Strong skills get a bigger fontsize than minor skills. Additionally I used grey tones to indicate which skills have been used more recently and which are older (more grey than black, paling so to speak.)

It is somewhat daring, because not necessarily everyone gets tagclouds yet - but I was invited quite a few times for the tag cloud to interviews.

I've also decided to upload it here. http://www.alanhollis.com/Alan_Hollis.pdf

Please note I'm not actively seeking employment at the moment but might as well take advantage of the opportunity to get some constructive criticism whilst it's here.

Page 3 is ridiculous. Shorten your borders and margins and get it onto 2 pages.

Overuse of bullets for my liking, esp when really you're putting paragraphs in. Bullets are for <5 word points ideally. Nested bullets are always ugly.

Tell people what they care about. Eg:

> Livenumber, a blackberry application...

Nobody cares that it's called Livenumber. Say:

> A blackberry application...

It looks a bit wall-of-texty.

Just my opinion though, don't take it for gospel!

Thanks very much for your feedback!

I have had a look and there is plenty of advice I could give you. I'm facing a pile of almost 100 CV's now but I promise you that I will get round to it although it may take a few days if that's ok?

Also, I'm a French citizen seeking employment in the US (Orlando, Florida to be precise), do you have some special advice for what I should change in my CV in regard to this ?

Firstly, my market is London & the South East of England so advice on modifying your CV to suit the American market is probably best fielded by someone with more experience in that area.

Secondly, you have been working on your own company for over a year and you have surmised that experience in 45 words whereas you spent 6 months with INA and your description for your time there is almost 90 words. Simple things like that raise a concern in my mind about your current position and how relevant it may be to your career.

i'm attempting to write my first CV as a developer applying for an open position and am feeling a bit overwhelmed.

thanks for the offering up your expertise!

If you're looking for structural ideas, take a look at user24's CV that he linked below. His structure is ideal. Simplistic and logical but make sure you read the feedback I gave him on listing his responsibilities.

Once you have the CV put together, send it to me and I'll do my best to be as constructive as possible as it's much easier to advise when referencing a specific CV.

As a recruiter I get frustrated when I hear about great candidates not even getting a look-in purely because of their CV.

Unfortunately few people are willing to pay to get their CV reviewed because a lot of people believe that it's purely a matter of opinion which can vary from employer to employer which is essentially true but there are a lot of fundamental errors that are universal and that's the advice I'm hoping to offer.

As stated in the original post, I'm prefectly fine with people censoring their personal details as well as employer details. If you believe that a CV can furnish you with enough info to steal peoples identity then pay a job site $100 and you will get instant access to tens of thousands of CV's.

If one single member of this website comes back to this page and complains that I abused this oportunity for my own personal gain then I will officially hold my hands up and accept the title as 'Worlds Biggest Idiot'. If you click my username you can clearly find my full name as well as the name of the company I work for. A quick google search with that info will furnish you with the address of the office I work from along with my direct line number.

Considering the fact that my career would be at stake, do you honestly believe I would abuse peoples trust like that?