I looked at 200+ FAANG resumes that actually got interviews. Here's what I found.

I went into this expecting to find some secret sauce. What I actually found was more boring and more useful than that. Over the past few months I've been obsessively collecting anonymised resumes from people who got into Google, Meta, Amazon and similar. Specifically ones where I could also see the version that didn't get through. Two hundred and something applications, plus conversations with a handful of recruiters who work at places recieving millions of apps a year. The patterns that emerged were pretty consistent. Annoyingly so, actually... The recruiter attention thing is real, and it's brutal. There's a Ladders eye-tracking study that gets cited endlessly, and I used to roll my eyes at it. Six or seven seconds before they decide? Surely not. But after talking to actual recruiters who are processing hundreds of resumes a week, I believe it now. They're not reading. They're scanning for signals, numbers, company names, technologies they recognise. If those signals aren't visible i