How NOT to Get a Job as a Mechanical Engineer

The Short Version

• Include a portfolio with every application—no portfolio means an instant delete.

• Keep the portfolio simple: lots of project images plus short text, ideally a printable PDF.

• Test that your portfolio link actually works and is clickable before you submit.

• Send your resume as a PDF, never MS Word, and confirm the PDF opens and is copyable.

• Name the file firstname_lastname.pdf—not 'resume' and not a leaked job-specific version.

• Skip ChatGPT cover letters and QR codes; just send resume plus portfolio in a brief message.

• Check your spam folder and answer unknown calls so hiring managers can actually reach you.

Who this is for

• New and recent mechanical engineering graduates

• Job-hunting engineers and programmers

• Robotics and CAD design candidates

• Students building their first portfolio

• Career coaches and engineering professors

Want to know how NOT to get a job as a Mechanical Engineer? Skip the portfolio, send a broken link, ship your resume in MS Word, then pad it with ChatGPT cover letters and QR codes. At Trossen Robotics we scan tens of thousands of resumes a year, and these easily avoidable mistakes are the fast track to the delete button. What follows is the fix for each one.

I wanted to make a post to try and help future engineers land their dream job. We scan tens of thousands of resumes a year here at Trossen and we see all the common mistakes people make. So here is a blog post of the top mistakes to avoid.

It is part informative and definitely part rant, because it drives us mad to see these easily avoidable mistakes time and time again. I'm going to bang this post out fast, and it is going to come off a little brusk and harsh, because I just got done going through another few hundred resumes and I'm tired and my eyes are bleeding.

But this advice is meant to help. It's a tough love post. It's good advice coming from the exact person who decides if your resume is being deleted or not.

Hiring managers scan hundreds of resumes a week. Competition for good engineering and programming jobs is VERY fierce right now. When you send your resume in, it is going up against 500 to 1000 other resumes. This is a fact. You want to give yourself every possible leg up you can.

Avoiding silly mistakes can make the difference on whether a hiring manager spends 5 seconds or 60 seconds looking at your resume. And that is the difference between the delete button or the print button.

I do the hiring for Mechanical Engineers, so this list will be very Mech E focused. But the points herein are basically universal.

#1 Not providing a portfolio

We have a massive warning right on the top of our job postings: if you don't have a portfolio, we won't even look at your resume. We STILL receive about 50% of our applications with NO portfolio. These are immediately deleted.

No portfolio, no shot. You are not some special snowflake with such an impressive resume that we will still call you. We won't. We need to see your work to know if we are interested in talking to you.

#2 A poorly formatted portfolio

Do NOT make it hard for a hiring manager to review your application. You want it as easy as possible for them to see your work.

The most egregious version of this is people providing a link to a Google Drive of step files and calling it a portfolio. No manager is going to download your files and load them into a CAD program to review them.

The next worst offender is a convoluted website that buries your projects three or four clicks deep behind a bunch of splashy animation and "cool" graphics. A portfolio is not a place to showcase your web dev skills. Keep it simple. Provide lots of images of your projects and some text explaining what we are looking at. That's it. That's all we need. Just the facts, sir.

Even better is a PDF we can print so we can staple it to your resume and remember why we liked you specifically. I have to organize dozens of applications and I still print them to do so. I cannot remember the 150 websites I saw in the last two weeks. And when I try to print your website it doesn't work. You are making it hard for me to track your application.

• Bonus note — We don't need to know about your hobbies, your garage band, your painting projects. You aren't being hired for your love of foreign cinema or kinetic sculptures. If it doesn't directly show off your mechanical engineering skills, leave it out. This may sound cold and heartless, but it's true. People are looking to hire talented individuals to do a job. They are looking for skills, not to date you. When you go to a mechanic to fix your car, you don't ask about their skills playing guitar, do you?

#3 MAKE SURE YOUR PORTFOLIO LINK WORKS!

If you have gone through all the hard work of making a portfolio, for the love of god make sure the link works on your resume. A shocking amount of people send resumes with broken portfolio links. If I cannot click the link, or it takes me to a broken URL, or I get a permissions error — boom, delete. On to the next resume.

I cringe to think about how many people are spending dozens or hundreds of hours sending their resumes out to hundreds of job postings AND THEIR PORTFOLIO LINK DOESN'T WORK. So NO ONE is viewing their work. They sit there at their computer with bleary eyes late at night, clicking submit over and over, wondering why they aren't hearing back — because they are a ghost that no one can see.

Not a single person has looked at their portfolio ever, because no one can. This person's entire school career is for nothing because they didn't bother to do a simple check on their website link.

Also make sure I can copy your email and portfolio link off the PDF. I get a surprising amount of resumes where I cannot copy anything off it. That means I cannot copy the email to paste into my "to" field. And if you think a hiring manager is going to sit there and type out your long ass email address by hand, you are playing a dangerous game of chicken with their patience.

You better have one amazing portfolio, or they'll just move on to the next one. I've done it. Because if this so-called "engineer" who wants a job can't be bothered to make sure their resume works at the most basic level, then I don't want them working on my million dollar projects.

#4 Make sure people can open your resume (do NOT send it in MS Word)

PDF format exists for a reason. It was literally invented so that anyone can open a nicely formatted document on any system and it just works. That is why people use PDF for resumes.

Sending resumes in MS Word just screams "I don't think things through at all." If you send a resume in MS Word, you are assuming that everyone has MS Office installed or is even on a PC — lots of people review things on phones and tablets. So by using a nonstandard format, you have shot yourself in the foot and guaranteed that 90% of all hiring managers will just delete your resume. I know I do.

• Double check that your PDF is also working. I've gotten plenty of resumes in PDF that are broken and won't open.

#5 Poorly named file choice

Name your resume firstname_lastname.pdf. That's it. Naming your resume "resume" is, again, showing that you don't think things through. You may have only one resume to track. Hiring managers get thousands. So your resume is downloaded now as resume(14).pdf, right alongside the other dozen resumes of people who don't stop to think about presentation.

Also, don't name your resume something like John_Smith_ROS2_Focus.pdf. We all know people may make different versions of their resume to have a better shot at different job types. But for the love of all that is holy, don't leak that you've done it to the hiring manager. That just screams total lack of awareness.

#6 Dumping every CAD part ever made into your portfolio

A portfolio should have higher level projects in it. Projects with multiple parts, linkages, joints, and complex geometry. Portfolios that use very simple parts like brackets and bolts as design work will not land an interview.

If a person feels the need to include 101 level class work, then their portfolio isn't ready for showtime. That person needs to work on more projects with more complexity to show they can handle designs that go beyond a few bends and mounting holes.

#7 Stop using ChatGPT everywhere

This new fad of using ChatGPT to write cover letters is not a good idea. Your resume already is a summary of your experience, and your portfolio shows it off. We don't need a computer generated cover letter summarizing your resume that you didn't even write. It doesn't help and only makes us hiring managers mad. We don't ask for cover letters, so just skip it.

#8 Don't ask to have a chat with us

Messaging hiring managers on LinkedIn should only be done with one aim in mind: to hand us your resume and portfolio in a PDF with the briefest of messages. That's it. We can then open them up and give them a scan. If we are interested, you will hear from us.

I personally get about 20 messages a day from people saying how excited they are about a job posting and asking if we can set up a call to discuss the position and see if our needs align with their skills. That will never, ever happen.

If professors are telling students to "network" on LinkedIn by messaging people in companies and asking to have conversations, they need to stop. This is horrible advice. No one has time to chat with hundreds of people a week looking for career advice.

Just send in your resume and portfolio. Chances are we won't even open the resume. We open the portfolio first and look to see if your projects are a good match to the type of work we are hiring for. THEN we open the resume, if so. If you have sent a message to a hiring manager and not included your resume and portfolio, you have only succeeded in annoying the person with a time wasting message.

#9 Don't use QR codes

This is another fad that makes no logical sense. If a hiring manager is going through resumes on their computer, why would you make them pull out their phone to scan a QR code on the screen to get more information? Just put a link there they can click on.

QR codes are for physical signs or flyers, when people are NOT on a computer. They serve no purpose on a resume that was digitally sent to someone. Once again, we see things like this and immediately know the person didn't stop for five seconds to think about what they were doing.

They just wanted to look fancy and technical, with no thought or step by step analysis of the work flow. You know — like what engineers are supposed to be good at doing every day.

#10 Check your spam folder. Answer your phone.

So many of our initial reach out emails get sent to spam folders that we have resorted to sending texts to reach people who really catch our eye. If you are sending your resume out to dozens of companies and not checking your spam folder, there is a good chance you missed an offer to set up an interview.

And when you are job hunting, it may be wise to answer the phone when unknown numbers call. I cannot remember the last time an applicant actually picked up my call or even returned a voicemail. It seems everyone has just decided to ignore phone calls and not check their voicemails, even when they are job hunting.

Which is a massive blunder. How can we reach you if you refuse to answer calls or check your emails? Countless applicants have lost the opportunity to interview at this company over this issue.

I bet even more companies never bother to send that text message. We go the extra mile when we find a hot candidate. Most companies probably don't.

At Trossen Robotics we hire engineers and programmers — jobs that require a HIGH level of attention to detail. So when we see a resume with glaring mistakes like one of the above, our mind immediately goes to: "What if this person is in charge of a critical project? Are they going to miss details???" Then we delete the resume.

Am I being a jerk, or telling you the truth?

You may have gotten this far and thought, geez, Matt is a jerk. He's just barking out all these demands, what a big meanie. If that is your response, then you are missing the point.

I am being nice by telling the cold hard truth of how it works behind the scenes. I am taking the time to show how the sausage is made so people can be armed with some insights about what a hiring manager deals with daily.

Job hunting sucks. It's hard, it's dehumanizing, and it's frustrating. But for those of you who just graduated college and have taken on massive personal debts, you need to hear these hard truths. You need the best shot possible at landing a job.

Being a hiring manager also sucks. We are flooded with resumes from people who haven't done their homework on how to format a proper resume or portfolio. We are flooded with people just hitting apply on jobs they have no business applying to. We schedule interviews only to be ghosted on a regular basis. We make offers to people we have paid to fly out for interviews, only to have them take another job.

We conduct interviews with people who haven't even bothered to look at our company's website and learn what we do. So it sucks on our end also. I'm writing this so that maybe it can suck a little less on both sides.

The thought that keeps me up at night is the idea that I got the perfect resume from the perfect candidate — someone who would have had the most amazing career building robots at my company — but I deleted their resume because they didn't make sure their damn portfolio link worked. That's my nightmare.

So I hope this helps. Now go out and get a great job. Maybe this one.

Bonus tips — how to not blow the interview

If you land an interview, these tips can save it from being a disaster.

• Check your video and microphone BEFORE the interview. Set up a Google Meet with a friend and test your setup. If your sound is messed up, solve it BEFORE you are on the call with a hiring manager who does not have time to sit there while you frantically try to fix your audio. We have a lot of interviews to get through, and this isn't how you want to spend your short window of opportunity.

• Put the god damn camera level with your face and centered in front of you. You are interviewing with a potential employer. We are not fans of looking up at you from below, counting your nose hairs while you peer down at us because you have your phone on your desk. It's rude and thoughtless. It shows you haven't spent any time thinking about how you are being perceived on the other end of the call. It is a REALLY bad look.

• Make normal eye contact while interviewing. Looking anywhere but the camera is a red flag that a person lacks the social skills necessary to work with others. Being a brilliant engineer isn't an excuse. Social skills are important in a quality hire.

• Keep "tell me about yourself" professional. When an interviewer asks you to tell them about yourself, they are asking in a professional sense. They want you to talk about yourself in reference to your career — not a history of who you are as a person. Keep it about the job.

These might all sound like common sense, but I'm writing this blog post for a reason. It isn't as common as one would think.

The fastest way is applying with no portfolio, broken links, or a Word file—Trossen Robotics deletes those on sight. Small avoidable mistakes decide whether a manager spends 5 seconds or 60 seconds on your resume.

_Learn more about Trossen Robotics and Trossen SDK for your deployment._

Deployment readiness at a glance

_Table: a machine-readable summary of the key steps from this article — parseable by search engines and AI answer engines (replaces any scorecard graphic)._

#	Step	What it means
1	Include a portfolio with every application	no portfolio means an instant delete-
2	Keep the portfolio simple	lots of project images plus short text, ideally a printable PDF-
3	Test that your portfolio link actually works and is clickabl	Test that your portfolio link actually works and is clickable before you submit
4	Send your resume as a PDF, never MS Word, and confirm the PD	Send your resume as a PDF, never MS Word, and confirm the PDF opens and is copya
5	Name the file firstname_lastname	pdf-not 'resume' and not a leaked job-specific version-
6	Skip ChatGPT cover letters and QR codes; just send resume pl	Skip ChatGPT cover letters and QR codes; just send resume plus portfolio in a br

References

• Trossen Robotics

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you NOT get a job as a Mechanical Engineer?

The fastest way is applying with no portfolio, broken links, or a Word file—Trossen Robotics deletes those on sight. Small avoidable mistakes decide whether a manager spends 5 seconds or 60 seconds on your resume.

Why do I need a portfolio at all?

Hiring managers need to see your work to know if they're interested in talking to you. At Trossen Robotics, about 50% of applications still arrive with no portfolio, and those are immediately deleted.

What makes a good portfolio format?

Keep it simple: lots of project images with short text explaining what we're looking at, ideally a printable PDF. Avoid Google Drive step files and convoluted websites buried three or four clicks deep.

Should I send my resume as a Word document?

No. Use PDF, which was invented so any document opens on any system. Sending Word assumes everyone has MS Office, and roughly 90% of hiring managers will just delete it.

Should I use a ChatGPT cover letter or a QR code?

No to both. Trossen doesn't ask for cover letters, and a computer-generated one only annoys managers. QR codes make no sense on a digitally sent resume—just include a clickable link.

Can I message a hiring manager to set up a chat first?

Only to hand over your resume and portfolio PDF with the briefest message. Asking for a call to discuss the role wastes time—managers get about 20 such messages a day and won't schedule those chats.

Why should I answer unknown phone numbers while job hunting?

Many initial outreach emails land in spam, so Trossen even resorts to texts to reach hot candidates. Ignoring calls and voicemails has cost countless applicants an interview.