HACKER Q&A
📣 SMAAART

Dumbing Down Resume?


Today I met with a supposedly top-notch career coach / executive coach.

We went over my resume, my linkedIN, my online presence, my experience, education, work....

In a nutshell I am an executive, in operations, with a long career in high-tech/Life Sciences.

I am very technical, a lot more technical than my peers. Besides the standard operations skills, I had deep knowledge and experience in "systems", and then, in the past decade or so, in data science/data analysis; and more recently AI/AI tools.

I have an online portfolio with tools that I built, papers I wrote, best practices, etc....

My present job search is not going well, kind of crickets so to speak.

So, the outcome of my session with my career coach was to dumb down my entire resume and collateral:

- downplay my title

- remove all the data skills, tools, and certification

- remove my online portfolio

- change my email from name(at)industry.ai to a generic gmail (he was very adamant about it)

He's probably right. Is he?

In a world where all companies/hiring managers are compaining that there are not qualified/good workers, here I am with a long career (yes I am old), stellar performance, proven and demostrable mastery of systems / data / AI tools (but I am not a SWE) and.... are all those skills too intimidating for a plan vanilla operations job, yet not enough for a real technical job?

What does HN think?

T.I.A.


  👤 lschueller Accepted Answer ✓
Maybe your salary expectations are a limiting factor? I am not implying to go down. I just sometimes had the impression from both sides of the table, that a more junior person with lower salary (meaning within the assigned salary budget for that position) will be preferred... In the end, that means, you should try to approach the directors or c-level directly, who are desperate to find an expert in your field. Because the recruiter would simply not be able to decide spending a bit more than planned is worth hiring you.

👤 austin-cheney
If you don’t have a PMP then get it. Otherwise it just comes down to the bias of the receiver.

👤 gus_massa
How long is your resume?