Over the past year, I found myself job searching. This was a challenging and time consuming effort, but I learned a lot, and feel it would be valuable to share my insights with others. This post will probably be quite short, and just outline things that I thought helped me.

Not everything here will be strictly useful for everyone, this is just what I did that I found effective.

1. The resume

Recommendations on building your resume

For my resume, I used the tool resume.lol which allows you to build your resumes using markdown. This (in theory) makes your resume easier for agentic systems and ats systems to read your resume.

I personally recommend this resume template.

When you are building your resume, you can use Claude by pasting your existing resume and the template from resume.lol and asking Claude to replace the template information with information from your resume.

Recommendations on improving your resume

Writing an effective resume that captures a recruiters attention is quite challenging. What I found effective was the following.

  1. Upload a PDF of your resume to claude and then tell Claude I am a recruiter at <company> looking for elite candidates. Is this resume representative of an elite candidate who would succeed in the following role? <role description>

This will allow you to understand how strong your resume is, and then also get feedback on your resume as you build it.

When performing this exercise, I encourage you to be intentional with what model you choose to have evaluate the strength of your resume. Sycophancy, which can loosely be defined as 'a models tendency to respond with insincere flattery', is a current feature of many models. This is problematic, especially when looking for feedback, as a model may give you signal that your resume is great, not because your resume is truly great, but rather because the model is sycophantic.

Measuring sycophancy is a topic in research today, and is still an imperfect science.

Things that I have found beneficial to deal with this problem when looking for resume feedback is to first choose a model that is less sycophantic but still intelligent. I would personally try both Haiku 4.5 and Sonnet 4.5. My girlfriend apparently has "beef with Sonnet" because it gives her feedback straight up, and its not always kind.

Something else that I've found useful is using a persona that is not you. You are a recruiter looking to hire elite candidates, not a job seeker looking for resume feedback. In this hand wavy argument, you are at a minimum aligning the incentives when you do this such that even sycophantic models should still give useful feedback. Why do I say this? Well, a job seeker is looking for a good resume. A model that want's to please this user would respond with praise for their resume, rather than true feedback. A recruiter, on the other hand, would be disappointed if a candidate that was supposedly high quality ended up being a dud. Thus, the model would be incentivized to be more critical when grading the resume for the recruiter.

This graph outlines sycophancy of various Claude models. You can find more details on the information here. claude_battle_card

2. Your Github

I figure that recruiters are outsourcing an increasing amount of work that they would have done to agents.

Because of this, making sure that the right context about you is available online in a way that these systems can consume is important.

You should set up your Github README.md file (instructions here.

This readme can contain anything that you want on it. Tailor it to interesting facts about you and the work that you have done.

There is an added benefit of working hard on this. It also partially defines part of your identity (at least it did for me). Its a representation of who you are, but you are in control of what it says.

Here is a screenshot of what my github looks like github_readme_screenshot

3. Your Linkedin

I think that Linkedin is generally pretty important when you are recruiting. It is your first line of defense when someone is trying to judge you as a possible candidate.

This means a few things.

  1. Have an updated profile photo

  2. Have a Linkedin banner in your profile (it could be anything, just not nothing).

  3. In your job history, have a consice description of what you did and why you liked it.

It is true that Linkedin can be painful, you do not need to update Linkedin that often, and doing it is another step towards creating a strong recruiting presense.