3 posts tagged with "resume"

Note: The insights in this article are based on observed patterns in tech recruiting workflows, industry best practices, and documented recruiter behavior rather than a specific research study.

The tech job market in 2025 is not short on candidates. It is short on attention.

Recruiters and hiring managers operate under severe time constraints, supported by ATS filters and internal heuristics designed to reduce volume quickly. The result is a screening process optimized for signal extraction, not holistic storytelling. Understanding this constraint explains nearly every resume decision that actually matters.

This post distills recurring patterns observed across tech recruiting workflows - without anecdotes, quotes, or folklore. Just what consistently survives review.

If you are an experienced engineer, you have probably revised your resume dozens of times. The familiar ritual of tweaking bullet points and selecting fonts is no longer enough. Currently, the first "reader" of your resume is often software. Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) parse a document and extract structured fields such as job titles, dates, skills and education. Recruiters then search and filter based on those fields to manage hundreds of applicants. Meanwhile, job-seekers are using AI to generate generic resumes and cover letters, so the competition for attention is fierce. This post argues that the static, one-size-fits-all resume is dying. Instead, modern hiring pipelines reward resumes that are both role-specific and machine-readable.

Ask any developer about the most frustrating part of job hunting and they'll likely mention wrestling with resume templates. Word and PDF files force you into rigid layouts, and tweaking a single bullet point can break the entire design. Worse, these files don't always play nicely with automated hiring systems. Modern applicant tracking systems (ATS) are everywhere - according to a 2023 study, nearly 98% of Fortune 500 companies and approximately 75% of employers overall use ATS systems to filter candidates. Yet complex designs and fancy formatting can confuse ATS parsers, causing important information to get lost. When a significant majority of employers report they may be missing qualified candidates because resumes aren't ATS-friendly, it's clear that our approach to resumes needs to change. Enter the resume-as-code movement.