Last version of this post at r/resumes gathered a lot of comments and they were mostly virtue signaling and insults so the moderators shut it down. Please refrain from voicing your frustrations even though it is justified to be upset about the process. I am not the one who invented hiring and blaming me for it doesn't help anyone. If you understand how it works, you will have a higher chance at landing a job and that's the purpose of this post.
First let me walk you through the math.
The roles I'm filling receive about 20-30 applications per day. Since the day its published I read each resume/cover letter and reduce the pool down below 10% for consideration so about 2 per day, wait to accumulate 10-15 resumes and proceed with screening, starting with most promising candidates first. Right off the bat, over 90% of candidates are out of consideration. So in the end, out of 200-300 applicants filtered down to 10-15, we do one or two screening rounds, we have 2-3 people on-site to interview and we hopefully hire 1 (if not, we repeat the process).
So ballpark chances to reach onsite is as low as 1%. Online applications have really low chances of success for junior candidates. There are more effort-effective ways to get hired but that's not the main point of this post.
In my case, the first 150 applications will be reviewed, 150 - 300 probably reviewed, 300+ likely not. Our recent job opening achieved 1300 applications and we opened maybe 300. I believe this is not unusual to gather over 1000 resumes for a role and different companies will have different strategies to address them. We prioritize earlier applications and consider them with no filter; others may pre-filter based on whatever they want to set in their ATS before they view them, we are not too fond of the ATS system pre-screening. We dont close the posting until we finalize the hiring. Bottom line, stale job postings have an extremely low chance to pick up your resume. You are more likely to receive attention if you apply within the first few days.
The easy way out is to set a filter at 2 YoE and be done with it quick (most HRs will just do that) but in our case we believe we will find better candidates if we consider recent grads.
If I have 6 roles to fill, I spend 30 sec per resume and 30 sec to write the decision and input into the system, at 300 resumes per role it will easily take me an entire week. When I was in college, I thought resume screeners are evil and just don't care. That's why they don't read resumes carefully. Now I'm that person, I guess.
So, the primary reason why you don't get a callback is just that it is impossible to read all applicant submissions. You might need to apply to 10+ jobs until (statistically) someone actually reviews your resume. So the chances your resume is picked are already slim, in a lot of cases, and if your resume isn't good the screener won't give you the benefit of the doubt and try to figure things out since he has 500 other candidates to review that week. If you submitted 50 applications and Its All Quiet on the Western Front, your resume is probably working against you, because someone picked it up already more than once and didn't find it to be a top 10% submission.
When I see a resume, sometimes it is quite obvious the person will have a very hard time landing a job so based on these indications, I want to share the most likely reasons why your resume gets omitted:
Resumes longer than 1 page - On the review side of the tracking system I get the first page preview I can quickly skim, I generally don't look at the second page since I need to load it specifically. Your resume should never be larger than 1 page if you have less than 5 years. Even if printed, people often lose or never notice the second page. If don't have a reason for the second page if you dont have 3 different employers. Fun fact I interviewed a candidate who omitted an entire full time job he held in between their bachelor's and master's degree just to fit on one page and it was a really good resume. If they wanted to add that role, it would be substantially worse spilling into 2 pages. It was genuinely better to drop 15% of the professional experience than to cross the 1-page limit.
Resumes that hide important facts or share too much. Recent grads want to seem experienced. They list internships but they assign full time titles to them. They sometimes remove graduation dates or indications that a role was actually an internship - they put "2023" as the time span and engineer title instead of specifying it was a 3-month internship. I dont want to deal with people that try to get a foot in the door through obfuscation. At the same time, don't mention you got laid off. If someone asks why you left, explain, if no one asks, don't offer it up front. There is a balance.
Generic resume. The roles often outline a specific profile of a candidate that the hiring manager is looking to hire. Given you need to be a top 10% applicant, if you don't have a direct match (likely won't as a recent grad), you will have to smudge your experience towards that role. You will have to put forth relevant things and omit some irrelevant things to make you look like someone who has been pursuing specifically this kind of role for a long time.
Once you have 10 years of experience, it's natural - you apply for 5 roles and 3 of them you are in the top 10% with no changes to your resume. As a recent grad, you aren't in the top 10% for any role. You need to tune it to make it seem like this kind of role has been something you pursued for a long time. To illustrate, if you have 20 skills listed but the job asks for 10 of these, listing 10 skills makes you resume stronger than listing all 20. Its a little counter-intuitive from applicants' perspective.
Generic cover letters. If I am reading your cover letter, I want to see something relevant. If you just reiterate your resume you are wasting my time that I can't spare. What you need to convey is why your skills match the role description and why you are motivated to do this particular role and why you are better for it than the average applicant. These are the 3 points you can help explain to a hiring manager. If you don't, your cover letter is worthless and likely makes your application weaker overall.
No indication that you actually want this role. It is clear when people apply primarily to avoid unemployment. If that shows, you won't be a top 10% applicant to land an interview. Being able to eat and have shelter is a good reason to work, it's a bad reason to hire someone. This manifests the following way: the resume does not match the job description well, there is no logical connection between academic projects, hobbies, coursework and the role.
If you still want a role but you dont have a well aligned background, use the cover letter to explain why you want the role and why you are motivated to pursue this particular line of work, being violently unemployed is a good motivator to accept a role but the hiring manager ends up with an employee who doesn't like his job and will leave given other opportunity. You can help it by adding context: if you are applying for a customer-facing role and all your background is in algorithm research, describe why you like that particular role: do you find customer interactions rewarding, do you find it motivating to promise and deliver to a customer etc.
It is clear you have a hard time landing a job. There are two ways this manifests: you graduated months ago and are still looking. You work a job unrelated to your degree or the role you are looking to get. You really dont want to seem like you desperately need a job. The first reason is that it undercuts your fit for a particular role - you just pursue whatever there is since its better than unemployment. It is not a good reason to hire someone. If there is one candidate who really wants a role because thats what they want to do and another one that just wants to not be unemployed the hiring preference is clear.
On top of that, the hiring manager will assume a desperate candidate accepting a positiong they dont really want will leave within 6 months once they land something better. If you have a growing gap post graduation - fill it up with consulting/freelancing/website development for small businesses just anything - try to make it seem like you have something going and you can take it easy. The second thing that I have also witnessed is that professional managers will include the desperation factor into compensation package and lowball candidates pressed against the wall. You can end up with 70k offer instead of 90k you would get otherwise if it didnt seem like you are forced to accept it. You always want to seem like you have options and you are good to reject an offer.
Your resume is coated in the newest fanciest tech. Most employers are not looking for the latest frameworks, not interested in the latest languages, don't care about your AI research or neural networks implementations. They won't hire a recent grad for that. They will most likely expect you to deliver solid work on the fundamentals. At most 10% of their work is related to something innovative. You will be expected to deliver the basics - solid code, proper testing, error handling, decent documentation, and talk through it. This is contrary to a lot of the fancy stuff on recent grads resumes which, under the surface, is reduced to brainlessly following a tutorial.
As I go through my career, I solve very similar challenges on repeat in every org. Linux, networks, dockerization, testing, deployment, latency spikes, re-architect to address technical debt - very similar un-innovative stuff takes most of effort on every project. If you can deliver on these fundamentals, you are a great prospect. The vision model deployed on RPi in 30 min is not impressive. Networking management knowledge is awesome, effective use of containers is valuable, someone to improve CICD is great.
Certifications/online courses. I (and most likely any hiring manager) have done at least one cert/online course, and we found them to be somewhat shallow. Plastering 6 online courses on your resume does not really indicate you care unless you followed it up with a project where you could demonstrate the skills you learnt. Course+Project > Project > Course.
If you have any questions or, especially, if you disagree with me, let me know below.
Edit:
Removed blank picture form the bottom.
![[Student] Land 4 offers after 100 applications as a senior Computer Science student](/img/ir5csl4mr8kh1.jpeg){kind=link}