Target Practice: Resumes, But Better

Target Practice: Resumes, But Better

I recently got a job, but it was a bear going through rejections on repeat. It almost felt like nobody was even looking at my resume. Which made me think šŸ¤” that might be the case.

It turns out that hiring managers are swamped with stacks of resumes. Surprisingly (to me), theyā€™re not really using AI to auto-reject, they just arenā€™t reading carefully.

If youā€™re a hiring manager with a stack of 200 resumes on your desk, how do you process them? I think Iā€™d probably:

  1. Scan for the most critical info (e.g. years of experience, industry focus, tech stack, etc.)
  2. Read the remaining ones more carefully.

So you have to spoon feed the hiring manager. Sounds easy.

Except itā€™s not. One single resume wonā€™t work, because itā€™s basically impossible to satisfy all potential job postings and also have it be succinct enough to properly spoon feed.

It seems you need to generate a different resume for every job opening. But thatā€™s a ton of work. So I made a tool for myself, and Iā€™m open sourcing it today. Here it is.

This breaks it down into 2 steps:

  1. A huge verbose ā€œresumeā€, thatā€™s more of a knowledge bank
  2. A targeted resume, generated to be tailored to each job posting

Step 1: The Big Resume

The flow is:

  1. Start with your existing resume
  2. For each job:
    1. Open a chat dialog
    2. AI offers some icebreaker questions, like ā€œwhat challenges did you run into while developing Miopter Pengonals for Project Orion?ā€
    3. Answer the question. Well, just type anything really. The point isnā€™t to interview, itā€™s to get everything in your head down on paper.
    4. AI asks followup questions
    5. Repeat 3-4 for a few turns
    6. Review/edit summarized version & save
  3. Have the AI suggest skills and accomplishments based on these AI interviews

Iā€™m not gonna lie, this is the most fun Iā€™ve ever had writing a resume. Most of the time I want to tear my hair out from searching fruitlessly for something I did that can sound cool. But with this, you just kick back, relax, and brain dump like youā€™re talking with a friend over drinks.

And while all that is great, the most electrifying part was when it suggested accomplishments, and it struck me that, ā€œdang, Iā€™ve done some cool stuff, I never thought about that project that wayā€.

All of that, the summaries, the full conversations, all of it is stored alongside the normal resume items. For each job, I have like 30-40 skills and 8-12 accomplishments, mostly generated with some light editing.

Step 2: The Small Resume

The flow is:

  1. Upload a job posting
  2. Analyze the job posting for explicit and implied requirements. Again, this is an AI collaboration, where an AI can go off and do recon on the company.
  3. Generate resume.
  4. Review and edit
  5. Export to PDF

The strategy is to use as much as possible verbatim text from the big resume. So generally you put effort into the big resume, not the small one.

When generating, very little generation is happening. Itā€™s mostly just selecting content from the big resume thatā€™s pertinent to the specific job posting based on analyzed needs.

Side Effects

Outside of generating the small resume, I also had a huge amount of success throwing the entire Big Resume into NotebookLM and having it generate a podcast to help prep me for interviews (šŸ˜ they are so nice šŸ„°šŸ˜˜). Iā€™ve also done the same thing with ChatGPT in search mode to run recon on interviewers to prep.

The big resume is an XML document. So you really can just throw it into any AI tool verbatim. I could probably make some export functionality, but this actually works very well.

Status

Iā€™m open sourcing this because I got a job with it. Itā€™s not done, it actually kinda sucks, but the approach to managing information is novel. Some people urged me to get VC funding and turn it into a product, but Iā€™m tired and that just makes me feel even more tired. Idk, it can work, but something that excites me a lot is enabling others to thrive and not charging a dime.

The kinds of people who want to use it are also the kinds of people who might be motivated to bring it over the finish line. Right now, thereā€™s a ton of tech people out of work, and thus a lot of people who are willing, able, and actually have enough time to contribute back. This could work.

Why use it? Because, at bare minimum youā€™ll end up recalling a lot of cool stuff you did.

Why contribute? Because, if youā€™re an engineer, you can put that on your resume too.

Again, if you missed it: Github Repo Here