How does a résumé get read when the reader has a stack of them and a trading day going on outside? This note describes that reading, using a project about parsing public trades as the kind of line that survives, for internships and full conversations in New York, London, and Hong Kong.
The first pass is a search for evidence
A first pass looks for evidence that the candidate has finished something hard and can say what was true at the end. A list of interests does not do that. A line that names a dataset, a difficulty, and a check does. The reader is not scoring prestige. The reader is trying to find a conversation worth having. Internships and experienced roles are read with the same appetite and a different expectation of scope. An intern line can be a class project. An experienced line should not read like a class project that has been inflated.
The offices share the reading. A résumé aimed at London does not need a different theory of merit from a résumé aimed at New York or Hong Kong. It may need a work authorization the firm must respect, which is a legal fact and not a quality. This note does not state that fact for any reader. It says the technical reading is one reading. Candidates who rewrite their projects to flatter a city are spending the time on the wrong edit.
A résumé is read for probeable evidence that something was finished, including what was true afterward. Adjectives and personal performance claims are not that evidence.
A project line that carries weight
Consider a line that says the candidate parsed a public file of trades, found that unfiltered rows included a condition the study did not want, and added a test that fails when those rows return. That line can be discussed in an interview. The interviewer can ask what the condition was, what the test asserts, and what the candidate chose not to drop. A line that says the candidate is passionate about markets cannot be discussed past the adjective. The public-trade project is the example of evidence. It is not a required project. It is a shape.
Numbers on a résumé are read with suspicion when they are results. A claim that a personal project beat the market is not evidence the reader can use, and it is not a genre this firm’s public pages use. A claim that a parser handled a stated file without crashing is evidence of a kind. The difference is whether the sentence can be probed. Internships are a good place for probeable sentences about small files. They are a bad place for sentences about capital. The reader is relieved when those sentences are absent, not disappointed.
Gaps and odd paths are not automatically strikes. A person who built the parser while studying something unrelated has a story the interview can test. A person who lists tools without a finished object does not, yet. The reader’s job in the first pass is to find the object. New York, London, and Hong Kong readers should find the same object if the résumé is the same. If they do not, the process is drifting, and the drift is the firm’s problem to fix rather than the candidate’s cue to pander.
Write the line the interview can use
A résumé gets read, in this hiring process, as a set of claims the interview might test. Write claims that survive the test. Name the file, the failure, and the check. Leave out the performance story and the speed boast. Say which office you are willing to sit in, among the ones the firm actually has: New York, London, and Hong Kong. Then expect the interview, intern or otherwise, to talk about the work rather than about the adjectives.
The public-trade parser is only a picture of a legible line. Other pictures exist. The reading does not change with the skyline outside the room.
This piece does not rank schools, state how many résumés arrive, or promise a reading time. It describes a first pass used for internships and experienced roles in New York, London, and Hong Kong. A project that parses public trades and tests its own filter is the example of a line that can be discussed.
