Resources for Tech-Layoff Resume & Profile Audits

After a layoff, the three surfaces a recruiter will judge you on — before a single human conversation — are your resume, your LinkedIn, and your GitHub. Most laid-off software engineers spend a frantic weekend editing all three, ship them, and then wonder why the callbacks don’t come. The reason is almost always the same: each of these surfaces signals something different, and most people optimize them as if they were the same document.

The three surfaces, and what each one actually does

Your resume is an ATS artifact first and a human artifact second. It gets parsed by a keyword extractor, ranked against the job description, and then — maybe — looked at by a recruiter for 20 seconds. The failure mode here is vague scope and missing numbers. “Led backend work” tells a recruiter nothing; “Owned a 40-service payments platform handling $2M/day” tells them your seniority, your domain, and your risk appetite in one line.

Your LinkedIn is a discovery artifact. Recruiters search it with Boolean queries, filter by keywords, and skim the headline and “About” in under five seconds. The failure mode here is copy-pasting your last job title as your headline. That makes you interchangeable with 50,000 other people carrying the same title — and invisible to anyone searching for the thing you actually did.

Your GitHub is a proof-of-work artifact. It matters when someone is trying to verify that you can actually build the thing you claim to have built. The failure mode here is a pinned list of half-finished tutorials, no READMEs, and a contribution graph that stops the day you joined your last employer.

Why laid-off SWEs get each one wrong differently

Resumes get over-polished in the wrong direction — we add adjectives instead of numbers. LinkedIn profiles get caught in a trap of “I was a Senior Software Engineer at [Company]” where the job title does the talking, even though the title is now detached from the company. GitHub usually gets ignored entirely, because we’re busy, or we assume nobody looks. Recruiters for early-career and switcher roles look. A lot.

How the three audits complement each other

A good audit on one surface usually surfaces problems with the other two. If your resume audit flags “scope unclear on the payments project,” your LinkedIn probably has the same gap, and your GitHub probably has a repo that could show the work but has no README explaining what it is. Fix the resume first, then push those same rewrites into LinkedIn and pin the matching repo on GitHub.

What an audit will not fix

An audit is a lens, not a résumé ghostwriter. It can’t give you projects you didn’t build, interview answers you haven’t practiced, or a network you haven’t invested in. If your last production code was three jobs ago and you’re applying for staff roles, no amount of resume polish will rescue the gap. That’s a different kind of work — and one the audit will, if we’re doing our job right, tell you plainly.