I'll share my secret for getting past HR. I have been consulting for the past 30 years, so I get to job hunt more frequently than most of you. I have a good resume, but I am older than most of you and I run into age bias in small startups. So I have most success with young companies with 100 to 300 employees where the first generation product hack has to be rewritten, extended or whatever. I have a resume for buzzword content, job history, and project stories. Experiments with content and style have shown me that it has little impact on securing initial interviews.
It's the cover letter that has the most impact. During the dot com implosion I was having little success with a cover letter targeting technical hiring managers. This was after all San Francisco and I was competing with laid off dotcomers and programmers for all the infrastructure companies.
I changed it to target HR and technical directors. I rewrote it to show a little wit and to soften the jargon. I even quoted a Johnny Cash song, "been everywhere". Immediately the interviews tripled, which is good when you are middle aged and expensive (putting three of your cohorts through college).
It's the cover letter that has the most impact. During the dot com implosion I was having little success with a cover letter targeting technical hiring managers. This was after all San Francisco and I was competing with laid off dotcomers and programmers for all the infrastructure companies.
I changed it to target HR and technical directors. I rewrote it to show a little wit and to soften the jargon. I even quoted a Johnny Cash song, "been everywhere". Immediately the interviews tripled, which is good when you are middle aged and expensive (putting three of your cohorts through college).