Suits.py: Or How I Came to "Love" Writing Resumes

Suits.py

Or How I came to "Love" Writing Resumes

    One piece of advice I have received over and over in my journey to finally get an interview over these past few years has been: "Have you tailored your resume for the job?" or "You just have to tailor your resume" or some other fashion of "tailor." And honestly I am of sick of it!

    I have applied for over a thousand plus jobs in the span of 8 years, and I think I'm shrinking that number. Normally, I tend to keep notes, trackers, but ever since I switched to Linux a lot of my old notes have disappeared (always backup kids!). And it is frustrating just trying to get an interview, to the point that I have only had 4 interviews in total (legitimate interviews, not counting MLM's that just try to scam those looking for work). It's to the point that if I see an email from one of the companies I applied to I already know it's the same "Thank you, but we'll be going with a candidate more suited to this role." 

    Mind you that the role I applied to was for a Media Specialist with over 5 years experience, I'm a Media Specialist II with 7 years! So great, thanks for telling me that for some reason I don't meet your standards. And yeah, you can blame it on the industry, the slump in jobs, rising unemployment, the overuse of AI, and that's perfectly valid. Maybe those are the reasons I'm not getting anywhere, but even then, you'd think after 8 years of this I'd actually get my way in to just one interview.

    So why not take that advice everyone gave me and actually tailor my resume. The issue is I don't know what their looking for, how can you define a "keyword", when is it just stuffing it to get past the actual posting fluff and the stuff the Application Tracking System (ATS) is looking for? And this is where my own unique kind of insanity really bumped up.

    I decided if they're gonna use a system to check my resume for all that stuff, why not make my own system to reverse engineer that? Hence: Suits.py, a python program that goes through several bullet points for each job I've ever had. Each bullet point is a different set of wording to fit with each possible keyword combination, such as, "Supported operation workflows for streaming media distribution" and "Assisted with media, equipment, and production support tasks."

    It scores the bullet points, and delivers 3 instances of the highest scored items to the top of the output, along with which 2-3 jobs best fit the job description. As well as presenting which skills to promote, and even projects I have created for teams. Below is how it currently works, if I actually get one interview from it I'll adjust it to a TKinter or PyQt application, or maybe Electron. I do think that having an SQL database might be helpful...

    Anyways enjoy the video:

    I've only used this on my most recent 11 applications and have no idea if this will actually work or not, but at the very least I'm trying something. That's all I can do. Wish me luck, and hopefully soon I will stop needing to write resumes.