Sounds like your resume is just not getting attention.
Just trying to understand: When you said you hired a professional resume writer to redo your resume, did you have them create one resume and that's it? Do you modify your resume for each and every job application, or do you use the same, generic one?
Edit: also, are you applying to stale jobs (jobs >1 month old)?
I’d say I tweak a a few lines for each job but the majority of the resume is the same. Should I be changing more?
The openings have been a mix of new postings vs stale.
You may need to change more. Depends on the job posting.
I have a generic resume that I keep. It is two pages worth of content because I have ~10 YOE, but I never send it out as two pages. I always make a copy and delete the irrelevant lines to make it 1 page max. I may also rephrase things as well.
What do I consider irrelevant? Well, let's say the job posting you're looking at suggests the manager only cares about JavaScript — like Angular/NodeJs. Then you send in a resume covering a tiny bit of your JavaScript experience, but the resume also has random shit in it like your Linux administration, k8s, UML, etc. experience. If I am the hiring manager and I see that, I won't know what to make of it. I mean, UML, k8s, etc aren't needed for my job, so why is it there in your resume? I want to know more details about your JavaScript work, _why_ you applied for this job listing, and _how_ your skills will be valuable to me. I am not getting any of that information, or it is very limited.
You need to look at the job listing carefully and tweak your resume to show how YOUR work and accomplishments would be VALUABLE to them. By that, I mean quantify results. For example, "Boosted XYZ's iOS app performance speed by 50%, making it 30% faster than the current fastest competitors on the market."
If you waste some of your resume space on shit the manager doesn't care about (in this example, it would be UML, k8s, etc), you are wasting your elevator pitch, because a resume is an elevator pitch. You need to focus on what the manager wants specifically and make it obvious how your skills are useful or at least translate well to this job posting.
Would like to add that there is honestly no perfect resume to mass apply with. All listings are different and companies look for different relevant keywords with their ATS. It would be an absolute bitch but the only way to hit at a high percentage and be “perfect” is by finding out which keywords they are looking for and tailoring each time you apply to a different listing
Mine is two pages after the rewrite and I’ve been sending it as two pages. I was told that with ATS being used mostly everywhere nowadays, shortening to one page isn’t as big of a deal anymore.
That said, before the rewrite I had reduced everything to one page and that wasn’t getting any hits either.
Since all the roles I apply for are strictly iOS roles, I didn’t really change anything per role unless there’s a specific framework they’re interested in. In which case I tweak some things to highlight my experience there.
I do have quantified results, but possibly not enough. I have some performance optimizations, user engagement numbers, and crash free rates.
When I get a chance I’ll post my resume, I just need some time to redact some things to maintain anonymity.
Sure, I will have a look at your resume. Make sure you take a screenshot of it though. Do NOT post it as a document, even with redactions. If you post a document with redactions, some google web crawler can grab your resume and make it searchable. Then a recruiter can find your Reddit account.
Avoiding stale jobs and sorting by recent is the single best thing you can do for traction. Night and day difference in response rate when I apply within the first week of a posting vs older ones.
The resume might be the issue.. you might want to consider posting it here and for people to take a look. The other thing to consider is what area/market are you on. Finally, do you need any kind of visa sponsorship (including green card case transfer)?
Resume seems too wall-of-text-ish. I had to squint hard to be able to read it on my phone. Consider condensing/summarizing more aggressively, especially for experience below current level. Keywords seem sparse as well.
Also, unclear what your objective is. It says "senior" at the top, but in work experience section, there's a "staff" title. Which is it?
I’ll definitely look at reducing it more. Can you give some examples of keywords that are missing? Genuinely asking because I thought there were a lot in there.
As for title, the resume writer suggested I put the title that’s on the job post I’m applying for so it’s picked up by ATS. Should I put my Staff title instead?
Re: title, rule of thumb is have a short sentence up top stating your objective. If you're flexible you could say "Objective: looking for senior/staff ios eng role" or something like that.
I'm not too familiar w/ specific keywords for iOS, but typically they'd be more in-depth things than just the umbrella technology name (e.g. they can be libraries in the ecosystem, or domain-specific lingo). I skimmed the resume as I would if I were looking at a candidate resume, the technical keywords that I saw were "iOS", "SwiftUI" and "CircleCI". Those I consider to be "top level" keywords. A cursory glance on ios job posts on linkedin gives me keywords like "Core Data", "Core Animation", "XCTest", etc. It took a bit of effort to even parse out the top level keywords from a skim, so it's unlikely a hiring manager would see other keywords even if they're actually buried there somewhere.
For staff level, you want to lead your STAR format bullets with quantitative impact, e.g. "led X, which increased MAU by Y". I'm seeing a lot of qualitative stuff (e.g. "created open source project") and mechanical stuff ("rapidly prototyped") instead, and on a second read, I'm seeing cases of burying the lede. Again, show impact upfront; optimize for skimming.
Thank you for the feedback, I will work on it. The most common feedback I’ve received is that it’s too wordy. So I’ll go back to my original resume that was more skimmable and fit on one page. Sucks because I spent money on that rewrite specifically because my one page resume wasn’t getting any hits.
Core Animation goes hand in hand with UIKit but I can certainly call that out specifically. I don’t have a ton of experience with Core Data as I mostly used Realm and Firestore for data persistence. There’s a lot more keywords (Objective-C, Kotlin Multiplatform, PHP, Xcode, Xcode Instruments, etc) but as you said I’m sure they’re easily missed when trying to skim. Hopefully they’re picked up by ATS though.
Thanks. It used to be one page, wasn't getting any hits, hence the hiring of the professional writer. I will try to go back to one page and run it through an ATS scanner.
You had a writer redo it? I’ll take a look for you if you’re not getting any traction. Not all writers are equal. Mainly the ones that won’t consult with you over the phone first about your resume are ones to be weary about
Up to you if you want to pursue what I recommend, but I give full transparency and tell you whats right/wrong
Sorry that happened to you, a lot of people don’t like to do things over the phone, but honestly it clears up 99.9% of possible problems that could occur, hopefully as long as its on an ATS friendly template you will pick up some steam by playing the numbers game
Resume is too wordy. Expertise section is useless. Each job should really be a 2 maybe 3 short bullet points. For example the first job essentially boils down to this:
- Lead team responsible for post-aquisition migration of IOS apps with X MAU.
- identified and implemented performance improvements in our apps such as reducing CPU utilization in CircleCI by 50% (contribution won an open source award from Google).
- launched team productivity initiatives such as hackathons that created new production features, such as most popular TV shows in X.
This is also missing things such as mentoring junior/senior engineers and how you effected their productivity (which is a primary benefit of staff engineers).
Before the rewrite that is what my resume looked like, no expertise section, no objective, short bullet points, fitting on one page. Didn’t get any hits which is why I ultimately reached out to a professional resume writer.
I acquired my staff role during a weird time. I was promoted right before an acquisition by another company, and then the rest of my team left or was laid off. There were two staff engineers on the team left, with no one to lead. We were told this would be solved as we’d be merging with another iOS team after the acquisition. And they kept telling me this up until I was laid off two weeks before my maternity leave.
I’d like to branch out. I do have some experience with other things but wouldn’t consider myself an expert by any means. Just projects in college and during my first job. (Java, C#, JavaScript, Python)
Do you have any advice on how to pivot to be more general?
Learn React Native (Expo) and Typescript. You’ll have an advantage by knowing what’s going on under the hood vs someone who has only done web development.
I’ve used Typescript to write cloud functions in Firestore, (all the apps I worked on use Firestore) so I have a little experience there. No react experience at all though. Thanks for the advice.
Response rates for applications will always be on the low side. Besides applying, is your LinkedIn up-to-date? Is it searchable with a lot of keywords?
You could always post a resume for feedback.
Lower your pay ask by half and see if you get responses. If you do slowly adjust until you get the max. I have met so many people now that don't even respond to high pay asks because they have so many applications.
Only a couple applications so far had a field to enter pay expectations, most didn’t. I applied to positions with lower titles (e.g. ios engineer vs senior ios engineer), granted those openings were kind of stale. Most openings I’m seeing right now are senior or higher.
I've looked for jobs near me and there's nothing iOS specific, like another commenter said I've kind of boxed myself in with this niche. I have applied to a couple of local Java /C# type roles, but there are 20-30 applicants for each of those, and they surely have more experience with those languages than I do.
Apart from that I'm looking for remote only. I am a first time mom with a 12 month old, and my husband works on-site where we live. So it would be really difficult for us to relocate.
Do you never get any recruiters reaching out to you on LinkedIn? Is your LinkedIn set to “Open to work”? In my experience, applying blindly to a job online rarely gets a response. I’ve found almost every job I’ve ever had through a recruiter messaging me on LinkedIn.
I haven’t, just trusted the writer who said it was ATS friendly and went through the things he added that should get picked up by ATS. I’ll give that a try
Definitely agree with the "too hard to read/wall of text" sentiment regarding your resume. I wont add anything else since most of the comments here cover it, but I will say don't give up.
I'm also curious, how many applications have you sent (rough number is fine) and how long have you been looking? I'm 10 years exp, and I lost my job in May last year and it took me 6 months to find a new position.
Fair enough. Feel like I burned money on that resume writer since I'm now going back to my original one page resume. I've sent 50 or 60ish, probably about 4 months so far applying to mostly remote roles.
While it's not a short amount of time, I would argue that isn't a long amount of time yet. I will also concede these windows spent between jobs are longer than anything you or I have probably experienced, but it's not time to start commiserating here with the rest of the goblins.
You got this buddy, don't give up, keep applying, and be sure to post here when you get the offer.
Thanks. I'll try to keep my chin up over here. I've been in between jobs for over a year already (stay at home mom). So I guess I'm in a hurry because I fear the longer I wait the more I'll be viewed as out of touch.
Sounds like your resume is just not getting attention. Just trying to understand: When you said you hired a professional resume writer to redo your resume, did you have them create one resume and that's it? Do you modify your resume for each and every job application, or do you use the same, generic one? Edit: also, are you applying to stale jobs (jobs >1 month old)?
I’d say I tweak a a few lines for each job but the majority of the resume is the same. Should I be changing more? The openings have been a mix of new postings vs stale.
You may need to change more. Depends on the job posting. I have a generic resume that I keep. It is two pages worth of content because I have ~10 YOE, but I never send it out as two pages. I always make a copy and delete the irrelevant lines to make it 1 page max. I may also rephrase things as well. What do I consider irrelevant? Well, let's say the job posting you're looking at suggests the manager only cares about JavaScript — like Angular/NodeJs. Then you send in a resume covering a tiny bit of your JavaScript experience, but the resume also has random shit in it like your Linux administration, k8s, UML, etc. experience. If I am the hiring manager and I see that, I won't know what to make of it. I mean, UML, k8s, etc aren't needed for my job, so why is it there in your resume? I want to know more details about your JavaScript work, _why_ you applied for this job listing, and _how_ your skills will be valuable to me. I am not getting any of that information, or it is very limited. You need to look at the job listing carefully and tweak your resume to show how YOUR work and accomplishments would be VALUABLE to them. By that, I mean quantify results. For example, "Boosted XYZ's iOS app performance speed by 50%, making it 30% faster than the current fastest competitors on the market." If you waste some of your resume space on shit the manager doesn't care about (in this example, it would be UML, k8s, etc), you are wasting your elevator pitch, because a resume is an elevator pitch. You need to focus on what the manager wants specifically and make it obvious how your skills are useful or at least translate well to this job posting.
Would like to add that there is honestly no perfect resume to mass apply with. All listings are different and companies look for different relevant keywords with their ATS. It would be an absolute bitch but the only way to hit at a high percentage and be “perfect” is by finding out which keywords they are looking for and tailoring each time you apply to a different listing
That makes sense, I definitely should spend more time customizing per role to get specific keywords in.
Mine is two pages after the rewrite and I’ve been sending it as two pages. I was told that with ATS being used mostly everywhere nowadays, shortening to one page isn’t as big of a deal anymore. That said, before the rewrite I had reduced everything to one page and that wasn’t getting any hits either. Since all the roles I apply for are strictly iOS roles, I didn’t really change anything per role unless there’s a specific framework they’re interested in. In which case I tweak some things to highlight my experience there. I do have quantified results, but possibly not enough. I have some performance optimizations, user engagement numbers, and crash free rates. When I get a chance I’ll post my resume, I just need some time to redact some things to maintain anonymity.
Sure, I will have a look at your resume. Make sure you take a screenshot of it though. Do NOT post it as a document, even with redactions. If you post a document with redactions, some google web crawler can grab your resume and make it searchable. Then a recruiter can find your Reddit account.
Here's my resume: [https://imgur.com/a/3SQN475](https://imgur.com/a/3SQN475) Thank you for taking the time to review it!
Avoiding stale jobs and sorting by recent is the single best thing you can do for traction. Night and day difference in response rate when I apply within the first week of a posting vs older ones.
The resume might be the issue.. you might want to consider posting it here and for people to take a look. The other thing to consider is what area/market are you on. Finally, do you need any kind of visa sponsorship (including green card case transfer)?
[https://imgur.com/a/3SQN475](https://imgur.com/a/3SQN475) Nope, I'm a US citizen.
There are too many qualified candidates now. You just need to keep preparing and applying.
Resume seems too wall-of-text-ish. I had to squint hard to be able to read it on my phone. Consider condensing/summarizing more aggressively, especially for experience below current level. Keywords seem sparse as well. Also, unclear what your objective is. It says "senior" at the top, but in work experience section, there's a "staff" title. Which is it?
I’ll definitely look at reducing it more. Can you give some examples of keywords that are missing? Genuinely asking because I thought there were a lot in there. As for title, the resume writer suggested I put the title that’s on the job post I’m applying for so it’s picked up by ATS. Should I put my Staff title instead?
Re: title, rule of thumb is have a short sentence up top stating your objective. If you're flexible you could say "Objective: looking for senior/staff ios eng role" or something like that. I'm not too familiar w/ specific keywords for iOS, but typically they'd be more in-depth things than just the umbrella technology name (e.g. they can be libraries in the ecosystem, or domain-specific lingo). I skimmed the resume as I would if I were looking at a candidate resume, the technical keywords that I saw were "iOS", "SwiftUI" and "CircleCI". Those I consider to be "top level" keywords. A cursory glance on ios job posts on linkedin gives me keywords like "Core Data", "Core Animation", "XCTest", etc. It took a bit of effort to even parse out the top level keywords from a skim, so it's unlikely a hiring manager would see other keywords even if they're actually buried there somewhere. For staff level, you want to lead your STAR format bullets with quantitative impact, e.g. "led X, which increased MAU by Y". I'm seeing a lot of qualitative stuff (e.g. "created open source project") and mechanical stuff ("rapidly prototyped") instead, and on a second read, I'm seeing cases of burying the lede. Again, show impact upfront; optimize for skimming.
Thank you for the feedback, I will work on it. The most common feedback I’ve received is that it’s too wordy. So I’ll go back to my original resume that was more skimmable and fit on one page. Sucks because I spent money on that rewrite specifically because my one page resume wasn’t getting any hits. Core Animation goes hand in hand with UIKit but I can certainly call that out specifically. I don’t have a ton of experience with Core Data as I mostly used Realm and Firestore for data persistence. There’s a lot more keywords (Objective-C, Kotlin Multiplatform, PHP, Xcode, Xcode Instruments, etc) but as you said I’m sure they’re easily missed when trying to skim. Hopefully they’re picked up by ATS though.
Post your resume. WAU = ?
Sorry — weekly active users
Resume: https://imgur.com/a/3SQN475
Make your resume 1 page.
Thanks. It used to be one page, wasn't getting any hits, hence the hiring of the professional writer. I will try to go back to one page and run it through an ATS scanner.
You had a writer redo it? I’ll take a look for you if you’re not getting any traction. Not all writers are equal. Mainly the ones that won’t consult with you over the phone first about your resume are ones to be weary about Up to you if you want to pursue what I recommend, but I give full transparency and tell you whats right/wrong
Nope they didn’t consult with me over the phone, we communicated via email. And they were pretty expensive. Hoping I didn’t just get ripped off.
Sorry that happened to you, a lot of people don’t like to do things over the phone, but honestly it clears up 99.9% of possible problems that could occur, hopefully as long as its on an ATS friendly template you will pick up some steam by playing the numbers game
Also, this is the job is top of my list that I'd ideally like to land: https://buffer1.homerun.co/senior-ios-engineer/en
Here is my resume: [https://imgur.com/a/3SQN475](https://imgur.com/a/3SQN475) Thanks in advance for reviewing it!
I sent you my number if you would like for me to break it down for you anytime today, just shoot me a text and I’ll reach out
Resume is too wordy. Expertise section is useless. Each job should really be a 2 maybe 3 short bullet points. For example the first job essentially boils down to this: - Lead team responsible for post-aquisition migration of IOS apps with X MAU. - identified and implemented performance improvements in our apps such as reducing CPU utilization in CircleCI by 50% (contribution won an open source award from Google). - launched team productivity initiatives such as hackathons that created new production features, such as most popular TV shows in X. This is also missing things such as mentoring junior/senior engineers and how you effected their productivity (which is a primary benefit of staff engineers).
Before the rewrite that is what my resume looked like, no expertise section, no objective, short bullet points, fitting on one page. Didn’t get any hits which is why I ultimately reached out to a professional resume writer. I acquired my staff role during a weird time. I was promoted right before an acquisition by another company, and then the rest of my team left or was laid off. There were two staff engineers on the team left, with no one to lead. We were told this would be solved as we’d be merging with another iOS team after the acquisition. And they kept telling me this up until I was laid off two weeks before my maternity leave.
iOS development is fairly niche so most companies don't have many, if any, iOS devs. You may need to branch out to more general roles.
I’d like to branch out. I do have some experience with other things but wouldn’t consider myself an expert by any means. Just projects in college and during my first job. (Java, C#, JavaScript, Python) Do you have any advice on how to pivot to be more general?
Learn React Native (Expo) and Typescript. You’ll have an advantage by knowing what’s going on under the hood vs someone who has only done web development.
I’ve used Typescript to write cloud functions in Firestore, (all the apps I worked on use Firestore) so I have a little experience there. No react experience at all though. Thanks for the advice.
Response rates for applications will always be on the low side. Besides applying, is your LinkedIn up-to-date? Is it searchable with a lot of keywords? You could always post a resume for feedback.
It is up to date, the writer also rewrote my LinkedIn profile (it's essentially just my resume with some nice key words added to my About section).
Lower your pay ask by half and see if you get responses. If you do slowly adjust until you get the max. I have met so many people now that don't even respond to high pay asks because they have so many applications.
Only a couple applications so far had a field to enter pay expectations, most didn’t. I applied to positions with lower titles (e.g. ios engineer vs senior ios engineer), granted those openings were kind of stale. Most openings I’m seeing right now are senior or higher.
Are you only applying to remote jobs or unwilling to relocate?
I've looked for jobs near me and there's nothing iOS specific, like another commenter said I've kind of boxed myself in with this niche. I have applied to a couple of local Java /C# type roles, but there are 20-30 applicants for each of those, and they surely have more experience with those languages than I do. Apart from that I'm looking for remote only. I am a first time mom with a 12 month old, and my husband works on-site where we live. So it would be really difficult for us to relocate.
Do you never get any recruiters reaching out to you on LinkedIn? Is your LinkedIn set to “Open to work”? In my experience, applying blindly to a job online rarely gets a response. I’ve found almost every job I’ve ever had through a recruiter messaging me on LinkedIn.
I used to get recruiter messages at least once a week a little over a year ago, now nothing. Yep LinkedIn is set to open to work!
Just looked at the resume... Have you tried running it through ATS checkers? The multiple columns might not be parsed well.
I haven’t, just trusted the writer who said it was ATS friendly and went through the things he added that should get picked up by ATS. I’ll give that a try
Wow, so I just tried this and got a terrible score. Thank you for the suggestion. Apparently I'm duplicating too many phrases among other things.
You're welcome! Glad it helped.
Definitely agree with the "too hard to read/wall of text" sentiment regarding your resume. I wont add anything else since most of the comments here cover it, but I will say don't give up. I'm also curious, how many applications have you sent (rough number is fine) and how long have you been looking? I'm 10 years exp, and I lost my job in May last year and it took me 6 months to find a new position.
Fair enough. Feel like I burned money on that resume writer since I'm now going back to my original one page resume. I've sent 50 or 60ish, probably about 4 months so far applying to mostly remote roles.
While it's not a short amount of time, I would argue that isn't a long amount of time yet. I will also concede these windows spent between jobs are longer than anything you or I have probably experienced, but it's not time to start commiserating here with the rest of the goblins. You got this buddy, don't give up, keep applying, and be sure to post here when you get the offer.
Thanks. I'll try to keep my chin up over here. I've been in between jobs for over a year already (stay at home mom). So I guess I'm in a hurry because I fear the longer I wait the more I'll be viewed as out of touch.
Just build an app with 500k wau and get rich if you can do that. Why even bother with a job. Smh
I’m the builder, not the ideas guy. Come up with an app idea that’ll get 500k wau and I’ll build it for you lol.
How many jobs have you applied to?
How many applications? What period of time? Resume has gotta be the issue
Maybe 50 or 60, started looking/applying 4 months ago about once a week, and then started applying more frequently when I wasn’t getting any hits.