CrashSpace Week of Professional Development Day 1: Resume-A-Thon

January 26 was the first day of Crash Week of Professional Development. We focused on our resumes today.

We started by thinking about what we want in a job and listing what we needed to learn and get to that dream job.

We then spent 2 pomodoros writing the first draft of our resumes. This is not fun work, but all of us together focusing made the work easier.

Once we got the first draft done, we started researching the bane of every modern job seeker’s existence: Application Tracking Systems.

An Application Tracking System, or ATS, are designed to filter applicants based on criteria to fit the job.

This generates an ever escalating conflict between people who key-word stuff their resumes to get past the ATS and people trying to read the flood of Key-word stuffed resumes.

Regardless! We did a research dive and looked for tools to help us with this task. We found two interesting solutions:

ATSAnalyzer: https://resume-ats-mu.vercel.app

ATSAnalyzer gives a score for your resume and suggests changes and keywords to hopefully get past the ATS. It’s scores and suggestions seem legit, but I want to be careful suggesting it without proof.

Another piece of software that requires command line install we found was Resume Matcher.

This software requires command line install with both Python and Node.js and an AI API key (I used OpenRouter). It takes a “master resume” and gives suggestions to update it. It then tailors every resume to the job description.

Once again: we have not verified the results of using these tools for job search. We are curious what you think!

It was a hard days work of focusing on things that we as hackers don’t really want to focus on, and that itself was rewarding.