
What is a dead experience?
A dead experience is your stint that either doesn’t make sense to the hiring manager or is totally disconnected (and therefore irrelevant) to the Job Description in question.
Consider this experience from a resume
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​Managed end-to-end deployment; demonstrated diligence by providing prompt response during production support.
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Spearheaded the initiative of helping the team stay updated with latest trends & business/technology best practices.
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Designed and reviewed technical specification documents based on requirements; developed modules as per design.
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Noticed something? You feel betrayed after reading the three bullet points. They don’t advance your curiosity about the candidate. They do not inform the hiring manager of your product skills or experience.
A lenient takeaway of such an experience is neutral. But more often, dead experiences end up becoming a negative take away for the hiring managers. Remember the hiring manager is actively eliminating resumes until he/she reaches to a set of resumes that are under a manageable size. Resumes with dead experiences often are the best candidates to get eliminated - unless, of course, there is some other strong area in the resume that compels the hiring manager to shortlist your resume.
Such experiences need a serious rewrite after a recall