Holy crap you wrote 200 cover letters? I don't want to say it doesn't matter but if you think you can apply to substantially more companies by not bothering with a cover letter, I'd probably take that route. Or maybe prioritize and only write cover letters for jobs that are better fits (in a way you can explain in a cover letter) and put more effort into it while bulk-sending resumes elsewhere. We don't really look at cover letters when we hire and if you screw up, it's just as likely to be used against you. Personally I haven't written any cover letter this time around or last time I was looking for a job.

Not saying this is wrong but I don't know if this makes sense for penguinpoker in particular. If you have a lot of work experience, I'm sure there are a lot of different ways to present your history but if you're coming out of a bootcamp and looking for an entry-level job, that doesn't seem to leave a lot of room for customization and I'd say it'd be very hard to make each one high-enough quality if you have too many different versions. And I don't think he has enough experience to know what would look good to this employer but not another. And no one has enough time to give him targeted advice on how to customize his resume for 200 different companies.

If you care a lot about targeting a specific company, I think a much better way to go about it is to find someone who works there through your network. This should be possible with some level of effort. Definitely apply as much as you can but networking should also become an important part of this component - an internal referral is much more likely to result in an interview and most people are incentivized to refer even random strangers and help you during the process because most companies have referral bonuses.

But I guess it comes down to effort level - like if it takes you 30 minutes to write a good cover letter and a well-customized resume and willing to do that for every job that comes along, sure why not.

i think the cover letter would be the hard part. the job posting should give you all the details you need to highlight from your resume, no?

Regardless of your resume, I think you want a cover letter, and I think it needs to reflect the job posting. The person reading it is going to look for keywords and there is a non-zero chance they toss it if they don't see the keywords. Making it past the very first filter is a big deal. Once they have gone to the trouble of calling you, they are invested enough to carry through.

I literally can not imagine applying to 200 places. I am impressed with your perseverance.

trying to go through the acceptance process with a/A.

They have four documents for you to sign and return. Three of them they say to explicitly use a site called HelloSign (which was used for the JumpStart program) - two .txt files and one .pdf.

Another .txt they ask you to sign and email to them.

The three hellosign docs they don't specifically tell you who to send them to (the site requires an email address for recipients). Maybe the same address that the other .txt goes to?

Also, given that lone one is a .txt, there's not a great way to sign it, per se. Whereas with a .pdf I can add signatures through Preview in MacOS. Not sure why the .pdf isn't the emailed one and the other three are signed on helloSign.

Additionally, HelloSign lets you send THREE docs per month for free, after that it's $15 a month. Small quibble, but c'mon, if I can realistically sign and return a pdf and use Hellosign for the three .txt files, why not do that?

Yeah these two points are what I mean. You don't need to gather a bunch of in depth intel about a company. If the job posting is looking for a junior software developer your resume should say that, not software engineer or applications developer or any other generic job title. If the job posting says they're looking for certain soft skills like communication or team work, your resume should mention that somewhere.

These things matter because there's a good chance the first screen your resume gets is by someone just looking for the minimum requirements, if you have it you go to the "maybe" pile. If they can't tell within 30 seconds of skimming your resume and they have plenty of other options, it's much easier to just throw yours out.

You're also signaling that you're not just firing out your resume to anyone (even if you are). If they have a choice between someone who wants to work for them and someone who just wants to work, they're going to lean towards the former. Much more likely they're at least getting a committed employee who won't bail on them after a few months. They also know right away you at least took the time to read the full job posting, and you've determined there's a good enough chance you're qualified that you took the time to customize a resume just for them.

Again, I agree with this but like those interview questions about trade-offs, if you're applying to 200+ places and are about to apply to 200 more, you're probably past the point you're trying to optimize response rate on a per-company basis - there thousands of other places that you're literally unable to apply to because you don't have time. In that case, the metric you're optimizing may be response per time spent and I just don't see how you come out ahead if you spend a lot of time on each application. I guess it's possible that the limiting factor is not the time spent on applications but simply the number of decent opportunities one can find but I'm not sure that's the case here.

Usually fresh grads out of schools and bootcamps don't have much in the way of specific expertise that employers are looking for; their skill level in any particular technology is generally low and they need to highlight all the things that are going for them, regardless of whether they match. For entry-level hires, it's all about your general awesomeness and aptitude; impressive things that you've done that bode well for your ability to learn in the future and this doesn't depend that much on what's on the job posting. I mean if you've done this for a while, it's not impossible to read from the job description what kind of person wrote it and what kinds of things they are looking for but that's more art than science, not something entry-level job-seekers can discern and very often the person who wrote the job description isn't the initial screener anyway. I've seen tons of entry-level resumes and cover letters that try way too hard to fit the job description and it usually makes them look worse, not better. I don't think I've seen a single cover letter, out like 50 maybe, that made a positive difference for me and I've seen a few that killed the application, with horrible writing, incorrect statements about the company and other blatant errors. I've read like one cover letter in my entire life that didn't sound like it was copy-pasted from the previous one and seemed vaguely sincere.

Did you just make up the 30-60 second figure or is that real? I have yet to find an article online that states employers spend even close to that time frame. In fact, I don't think I've found a single article that states employers spend > 10 seconds reviewing a resume.

Because if penguin can increase the odds of a single resume resulting in an interview by a factor of x, it makes sense to do so as long as takes less than around x times as long to prepare each resume. Keep in mind that penguin's current rate is very low, so bumping it up to even a small percentage is going to be a pretty significant x.

It's worth noting that there's often a long tail on hearing back from job applications, so penguin's rate will likely go up. That's why if you consistently apply to like 50 jobs per week, you eventually get consistently inundated with responses. And it's why it's important to not let up.


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Well it's a distribution, not just in terms of people looking at the resumes but also in terms of candidates/resumes. You can definitely eliminate some people in ~10 seconds, for others it takes much longer. I think the bulk of the decision gets made in the first 20 seconds or so but I can go through maybe 20 resumes in an hour so it definitely takes some time for those who make the cut. There's no way to do anything in less than 10 seconds per resume short of some kind of automated process.

Yeah I'm sure that's mathematically possible but if you tailor resume/cover letter for every job, aren't we talking about a fairly large factor? It probably takes like 5 minutes to apply for an average job with a stock resume and I would imagine it takes at least 30 minutes for basic customization and more like an hour or more if you want to do major customization. I don't know, I guess it's possible you can get really good at it if you keep at it but it's just as likely that you get lazy and mechanical, defeating the purpose. If you have a passable resume, it's hard to imagine that anything could change your response rate by even a factor of 2 - entry-level candidates are fairly fungible and most of the time, you're not being rejected based on presentation or perception of fit, you're being rejected because you are not what they are looking for. At that level, I don't think it's even a guarantee that any customization helps at all - you could make mistakes, you could inadvertently leave something off that may sound impressive and you probably don't have enough impressive accomplishments to fill out a full page anyway. It's also much harder to get opinions from friends and connections about how your resume looks if you're sending a different one for each job.

Do you do any resume screening yourself? If so, at what point are you in the process? Do you filter resumes filtered by hr? etc

The customization I posted above wouldn't take anywhere near 30 minutes. They're minor changes primarily designed to (1) make it past an initial screening when some non-technical HR worker is asked to screen out the resumes which don't meet the job requirements and (2) signal that you care about this particular job at least more than someone who's just spamming resumes hoping to see what sticks. If even 1% of hiring managers would look at that as a reason to interview, you've justified spending at least 3x as long submitting your resume, or an extra 10 minutes using your numbers. I think the number is >1%.

That plus customized cover letter plus sufficient proof-reading, etc should take 25 additional minutes or more because you also have to spend more time researching the company and the role. Otherwise you're likely to introduce errors - sitting on the other side of this, easily over half the resumes and cover letters contain obvious errors - or otherwise sound mechanical. For entry-level candidates out of bootcamps, what would you put there that would not have been there otherwise? You should list every major technology you're familiar with that's a potential keyword anyway. If all you learned is Ruby and JavaScript, are you going to put Java because that the job description says? Would you not list Ruby because that's not what they are looking for? Entry-level HR people of the sort you're talking about don't really care about ordering or emphasis because they are just scanning for keywords. They are perfectly able to find keywords buried deep in your resume - it's easier if you're not reading - we're not talking about multi-page resumes. What's worse, not many quality employers care that much about skill match at the entry-level to start with - when an employer says they need JS expertise, they are not talking about someone who learned it in a bootcamp and has zero professional experience. It's more about potential. You never know what kinds of experience the hiring manager has and what kinds of experience and skills they respect. And as a hiring manager, I hate resumes and cover letters that look like insincere copies of our job description. We're not that stupid - it's very easy to see what's going on if you're going about it in a half-assed way.

Penguinpoker's response rate is at least ~3% (6/200) and could be quite a bit higher so I think you're off at least by an order of magnitude here.

Like every job ad I have seen lists about 15 programming languages you should know. The listings that are more specific towards a particular language usually want 5+ years experience.

I see almost no listings asking specifically for a junior develop

Then people here say someone in a boot camp a couple of month knows more than a CS graduate, then people saying CS grad start at 150k??? AA curriculum has like 5 languages covered and we are talking like a week or two max each???

how do the CS guys get hired?

Only looking at resume for 10 seconds when the listing was 500+ words and listed 15 languages you should know?

I do all screening myself. At one point it was done by some non-technical employee (not a recruiter) but I noticed that some perfectly reasonable candidates were being screened out for superficial reasons (mostly because he doesn't really care) so I took over that part as well. We're not hiring constantly so it's not that big a burden. At most companies, your resume is gonna be reviewed by someone who knows what they are doing (could be the hiring manager or someone from the engineering team or at least a high-level recruiter who's trusted by the hiring manager) before you get any kind of interview. The fear of being screened out by HR people is somewhat overblown - most of the time they are correctly screening out people who are obviously unqualified or otherwise just not what they are looking for.

I've never seen a job posting that lists 15 programming languages you should know. What is common is something like JavaScript + SQL + some server-side language + server-side framework + JS framework + other tools (VCS, CI, testing, etc).

Well there's virtually nothing in this world that only junior developers can do.

That's possible but not common.

150K is a strong entry-level offer at the most prestigious tech companies in the world with exceptionally competitive processes. Very few people out of school are gonna make that - it may be more than most programmers would make in their peak earning years. Talking about a "CS graduate" generically as though all CS graduates are equivalent is extremely misleading.

Well I recommended possibly bolding the key words/requirements, so yeah, hopefully you're smart enough to realize that the wording and organization on the resume was influenced by the things you said were important. I would hope most people see that as an effort to say "I've read and understand what you're looking for and I want to make it clear I'm your guy" and not some kind of personal attack on your intelligence, but who knows.

As for the part I cut out, it doesn't really apply to my advice.

His onsite rate is 0/200, which suggests an effectiveness almost definitely <1% and likely <0.5%.

I'm curious if penguin knows the average size of the companies he's applying to.

For example, I think a/A suggests aiming for small to midsized startups. This might mean you're less likely to have to get past an HR person and more likely to be contacting the person who would interview you, yes?

I started my first programming job just under 1 year ago. Like candybar is suggesting, I originally tried to tailor my cover letter according to which company I was applying to. The reality is that I would spend time googling (or browsing the companies site) and was not able to learn anything beyond what their job post stated. It sounds good in theory but is in practice is dead wrong imo.

It's not about being an attack on intelligence - if it's done wrong, it feels inauthentic and often leads to highlighting or pointing out ridiculous things to force a fit between who you are and what the job description says, which may very well be something some HR person happened to put there 5 years ago and no one bothered to update. What you see very often is something like a job description saying "expertise or significant experience with with X and X ecosystem a plus" and someone trying to write a cover letter talking about some little bootcamp project with 100 lines of code and touting that as evidence of their expertise. And engineers reviewing resumes may not have read the job description at all and your resume may look a little strange. Very often, if you're an entry-level candidate, it's okay not to match the job description and most of the job description wasn't meant for you but you're still okay because they are open to hiring you for who you are anyway. And if you look good in a general sense, just not a great match for that job, there may be another opening that wasn't posted that you may be contacted for! This is what you said:

You mentioned three things - that's more than possibly bolding the keywords/requirements. And I'm also potentially recommending skipping the cover letter, which I assume you're not. Writing and proof-reading any kind of reasonable custom cover letter can take a lot of time. But either way, I'm not disputing your specific recommendation which I think is on the more reasonable side for most people but addressing general concerns with customization because a few others have also recommended customizing everything without specifics.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned is that if you do minor edits for every job, that does have a chance to improve your main resume because you're forced to review it every time. That to me seems like the biggest potential gain - most people haven't come close to maximizing their base resume effectiveness.

Still, I think what you guys are saying are largely correct if you're working with a relative limited number of employers but in that case I think you do need to take more time. If there are 20 companies you'd like to really work for, you should do more than what we're talking about and try to network your way in as well. But I'm not gonna lie - I'm too lazy to do this for that many companies; I've used referrals for 3 companies this cycle, randomly resume-pushed around 13 and talked to a handful of head-hunters which lead to another couple of phone interviews. I guess if it wasn't working I would've tried harder. What's more important is probably managing internal morale and getting better at interviews and talking to people.

Failing phone screens probably has nothing to do with resume effectiveness though. Bolding requirements in his resume isn't going to magically cause him to pass technical screens.

Yeah this is kind of what I was getting at - it's really hard to know what you need to optimize for, which leaves you grasping at straws and making a big deal out something that just happens to be there and lose sense of proportion. It's not that the advice doesn't make sense but in practice, you don't see anyone pulling this off successfully. I think some HR types will just ding your application slightly for not having a cover letter so having something is not the worst thing but the more effort you put in, the more you can come across as a tool so even if you were inclined to do it, unless you can really bring that company-specific enthusiasm, I'd write a quick note that sounds like "well I had to write something" not a long list of vague matches between what's on the resume and the job description. I don't even bother with it personally but it's just possible that I'm lazy and not desperate enough.