So if I'm reading your resume, I am personally trying to get a quick scan of you as a person before I meet you. Do you have an education? Or are you self-taught? Neither one is bad. Do you have an education in a completely different field, and is it interesting to me, could we bond over it? How long have you been in the industry for, was it at one place or a bunch of places, was that place dedicated to tech or was it a small tech team adjoined to a larger company doing other stuff. If I am diving into those it is because I want to know more about the level of responsibility you took on at that job. I wouldn't put it into bullet points because it shouldn't be long enough that you need bullet points, I need to know were you leading the team, mentoring others (more dev experience vs more leadership qualities--neither is bad), or were you a solid engineer, or were you transitioning from say security work to development. Just give me one or two sentences about who you were at that job.

Basically, reading is much faster than listening, so I would like to not waste your time in the interview getting to know things that you already told me through a faster, asynchronous medium.

BUT. But. A bunch of places that I have worked at also have a process by which a non-technical person pre-processes your resume before handing it to me. They are looking to see whether you have checked the boxes. IDK what boxes, it depends on what those folks are taking out of the posting. It probably helps if you have a section of buzzwords so that they can say “they say they have React experience, I can check the React box!” For me most of those criteria are fungible, but you have to put something for the HR folks to screen out half the applications.

Now, the interview is where it gets a bit trickier. I used to have a great approach to this, when I worked at smaller companies and had more say in the hiring process. That was just, “your resume is a claim that you are a certain sort of person, my interview just tests whether you are who you say you are, are you faking it or are you selling yourself short?” In other words if you say you managed your coworkers I want to devote 15 minutes to see what sort of manager you are, even for a non-management role.

But, now I work at a Big Tech company and I don't really have that freedom... Now when I am interviewing you, I have usually been asked to either assess culture fit or technical chops... If technical chops, I am usually not tailoring my questions too closely to your resume, but to the forms that I have to fill out after the interview. The actual programming exercise will usually be amorphous, the actual work will be simple but the scope will be unbounded relative to the interview length—and so I am not expecting you to complete it so much as to parcel it up into smaller workable chunks and execute on one or two of those. Based on how you do this I can usually give decent feedback on my forms without feeling like I have fed you a trick question.