Creating Concise Technical Resumes?

Mycroft-X asks: "I was polishing my resume today, preparing to fish for another job when I realized that with all the new information I put on, it was over 3 pages long! Because our industry is so meritocratic, I included such things as skills with operating systems, programming languages and various applications (sticking to major ones only). How do you deal with the fine balance between skills, education, experience and brevity in an industry that feeds off of all of these?"

Comments

Show us what you have

[ajuda]

Don't just ask what should be on your resume. We need details! What type of job are you looking for? If you want to be a Unix admin, I don't think that you need to mention that you can use power point; if you into tech upport, you might want to leave it in.

Also, how can we know to cut, unless we see what you have? Post the sucker and let's see what you got. Who knows after seeing your resume, I might hire you... then again, I'm still in college, so don't hold your breath.
This message was encrypted with rot-26 cryptography.

Priorities

[JediTrainer]

As someone who has just gone through the process of hiring a developer to help out on our team, I think I can give you a few hints as to what got the candidates to the interview. So here's my top 10 list:

1 - didn't care about education. Looked at it, but it wasn't a requirement for me, so I completely ignored whether the candidate had a degree/diploma or not

2 - don't list everything. DO NOT make that mistake. Customize your resume for the job you're applying for. If the job posting asks for Java, write lots about Java and don't go overboard mentioning the other 15 languages you know. Otherwise the person looking at your resume might have trouble finding the word "Java" amongst the rest of it. Don't care if you're an MCSD or a Perl Guru. You can mention it, but don't take up a lot of room with that stuff.

3 - if you're going to list certifications, be precise. I've seen resumes that said "Java certification", but didn't mention which particular one, or even whose certification it was. It could have been Sun's program or Joe's Java Palace, as far as I could tell.

4 - do not list every single trivial API and technology you know. Too many resumes throw out every acronym out there (as we've seen in marketing) in an attempt to catch my eye on the ones I want the candidate to know. Generally, either the person's talking out of their ass (and they don't really know all of this stuff), or they've dabbled a bit in all of them but haven't mastered any. Not good. I can't tell you how many resumes I've seen that had lines reading like: "ASP, JSP, XML, DTD, ADO, COM, JDBC, ..." and it goes on and on. Meanwhile I can't find what I'm looking for in there because I'm blinded by the acronyms.

5 - I know I said this before, but CUSTOMIZE your resume for the particular position you're applying for! I don't care about every OS and word processor you know how to use...

6 - list experience and list it well. Focus on the times you've used the technology that you're being hired to work with. If I'm hiring you for Java, I don't want every detail about your Visual Basic experiences.

7 - do not list every technology you have a passing knowledge of. Show only the stuff you know really well. The rest can come out in the interview. If I read a resume, I assume that the person knows what they're talking about. For example, if you mention JDBC in the resume, I don't want to hear in the interview that you're not all that comfortable with databases (or worse, I catch a mistake in the answer to a question I asked because they were trying to cover up the fact that they really didn't know this stuff), or that you haven't a clue what a transaction is.

8 - do indeed shorten it and format it nicely. Too many resumes I've received have been ugly and hard to read, and that only agitates me. I try to have patience, but sometimes it's a bit frustrating.

9 - following that, I know this one's offtopic completely, but proofread once, twice, three times and THEN have someone else proof it too. One mistake (grammar or spelling) I might overlook, but two and the resume goes back to HR. I hire programmers who pay attention to detail and take the time to do things right.

10 - did I mention customize your resume for the position? Good. Do it. No more than 2 pages.

Once at the interview, I ask questions about the contents of the resume. If the candidate made it to the interview and they hold up to the questions, then the only thing I check after is their attitude. Lots of energy and enthusiasm wins, even if that candidate has a little less knowledge/experience than another person. A willingness to learn and grow is also a big plus. I also ask about other technologies not on the resume, but they're more out of curiosity and I don't give the answers the weight I give what I just mentioned above.

I wish you the best of luck! Happy hunting!

Re:Priorities

[raju1kabir]

I know I said this before, but CUSTOMIZE your resume for the particular position you're applying for! I don't care about every OS and word processor you know how to use...

This is exactly it. The easiest way is to keep it as a great big file, and just make a copy and delete the irrelevant sections when applying for a specific position.

And never rule out the power of powerful typographic tools when you really have to get a few extra lines in. With QuarkXPress you can pull in the tracking a little, monkey with 1/10-point leading, change the type size from 10-point to 9.752, and change those full blank lines between sections into 3-mm gaps.

Re:Priorities

[KyleCordes]

That was a great post. However, I have heard some ideas on that contradict some of your comments, from people who specialize in (and are very successful at) getting developers hired. The alternative ideas I put in below are targetted towards getting senior developers, technical leads, etc. hired.

[1 - didn't care about education.]

Some hiring managers have resistance to hiring someone without a certain level of higher education for high level positions - so make sure to list it accurately and where they will find it.

[2 - don't list everything. DO NOT make that mistake. Customize your resume for the job you're applying for.]

Customize and focus, but try to leave other stuff in there. You never know where it might end up and whether they might have been asking for X but get really excited when they see you also know why.

[4 - do not list every single trivial API and technology you know.]

"Buzzword bingo helps" get the job, especially if there is a human resources professional involved who doesn't specialize in the technology but can see that applicant X has 15 buzzwords that apllicant Y does not.

[7 - do not list every technology you have a passing knowledge of.]

Same as above. They might have said Java, but they have some VB apps around, and your VB knowledge might give you an advantage over the next equally good Java developer who knows only Java.

[8 - do indeed shorten it and format it nicely.]

[No more than 2 pages.]

Format it nicely, get everything vital on the first pages, but don't be afraid to have a 3 page resume if you have 3 pages of information that can get you hired.

[Lots of energy and enthusiasm wins, even if that candidate has a little less knowledge/experience than another person. A willingness to learn and grow is also a big plus. I also ask about other technologies not on the resume]

This will work for lower level positions, but to get in at a high level you need the right attitude, lots of knowledge and experience, proven value in the specific technologies the company needs, and breadth of knowledge of related areas.

Again, I am no expert in this, these are just ideas I have picked up from people who appear to know.

Re:Priorities

[Evil Grinn]

I can't tell you how many resumes I've seen that had lines reading like: "ASP, JSP, XML, DTD, ADO, COM, JDBC, ..." and it goes on and on.

Many job-seekers assume that the pool of resumes will be grep'ed for the relevant TLAs before even being read by a human being. This is what I've always heard.
---

Re:Priorities

[JediTrainer]

I appreciate your response, and I'd like to follow up by giving my explanation for some of the points you've made (very good ones, I might add).

[Some hiring managers have resistance to hiring someone without a certain level of higher education for high level positions - so make sure to list it accurately and where they will find it.]

Agreed. I was only indicating my thoughts on the subject, since I was the one hiring in this case. You're right though - do list it, but don't expect that it alone will get you the job.

["Buzzword bingo helps" get the job, especially if there is a human resources professional involved who doesn't specialize in the technology but can see that applicant X has 15 buzzwords that apllicant Y does not.]

My experience has been that it's a myth when I've been job hunting. Nowadays, being the person hiring, I ask lots of questions about the buzzwords indicated on the resume. More importantly, I interview people who have the CORE knowledge and experience that I'm looking for, and I check the minor stuff during the interview. I'd rather have a candidate surprise me with extra knowledge during the interview than disappoint me by demonstrating a lack of knowledge in an area they listed on their resume.

[Same as above. They might have said Java, but they have some VB apps around, and your VB knowledge might give you an advantage over the next equally good Java developer who knows only Java.]

Same as above for me too, except that one person having VB on their resume won't increase their chances of getting an interview with me. I check the Java (in this example) and the Java only. I'll ask about VB in the interview, and then and only then will it make a difference to me. Not on the resume. I want the resume to just cover what I've asked for in the job posting, plus perhaps a little bit extra (but don't bury the core competencies I've asked for in it!)

[This will work for lower level positions, but to get in at a high level you need the right attitude, lots of knowledge and experience, proven value in the specific technologies the company needs, and breadth of knowledge of related areas.]

Right attitude is the key. Knowledge is essential for the job, of course, but your attitude will make and break both you and your team. I think that attitude is even more important in the higher positions because you become both a role model, and you have the power to raise or break the self-esteem of the individuals who may be below you through either praise or constant complaining about their jobs. The good people don't have to know all the answers, but they do need to know either how to find them or how to find people who can answer those questions.

Good points - I appreciate your feedback!

Re:Priorities

[JediTrainer]

Perhaps it is by headhunters (I've seen so), but in my company I see ALL resumes that are submitted for my job-posting that meet the core requirements. Relevant means that if I ask for Java in the job posting, there should be Java on the resume somewhere. If it's not there, it goes back to HR (or, actually, it never makes it into my hands). We don't process anything by computer - we read them all, one way or the other.

Re:Priorities

[bluGill]

while I agree with don't list everything, be careful of what you leave out. My former boss was applying for a position as manager of a networkign companies test group. She had come through the ranks, and to show that decided to put in "tested gated". At the interview they suddenly spotted that line and spent 5 miutes on gated. She admited freely that it was gated 1.0, 10 years ago and for the last 5 she hadn't been in a technical position at all. That didn't matter, it gated is extreemly complex and few are qualified to test it, they just discovered someone who once did a task everyone else was dreading.

So the lession is make sure there are examples of various tasks you have done, if you have to pick and choose, you never know what will be discovered to be a big deal to the interviewer. In the case of my former boss she went from interviewing for a position she had expirence in but was competing with others with exprience to interviewing for a position that few people in the world had done. It is impossibal to lose the latter interview.

My own advice is to keep a long resume with everything up ever did with dates. When they you create a custome resume copy in outline format what you think would be interesting, making sure to cover a broad range. If they are interested in any of those broad catagories you have the full resume with you. If they ask you to send anouther copy of your resume tommorow put in more detail about the secions they asked about and remove those they didn't care about.

You never know what will work. I've heard of people getting a interview with a 22 page resume. Most people will not. I've heard of people getting a interview and job with a one page resume half of which was a picture of the canidate. Both of the above are big no-nos, but they worked. the person who created them understood why they would work. The first because he needed to prove in detail he had expirence for that job, the latter because he needed to prove he was creative.

Re:Priorities

[Mr. Slippery]

1 - didn't care about education. Looked at it, but it wasn't a requirement for me, so I completely ignored whether the candidate had a degree/diploma or not

Well, you're probably in the minority there. If you've got a relevant degree, I suggest you list it. If you're fresh out of school, or still in school, go into a little bit of detail about the focus of your coursework.

2 - don't list everything. DO NOT make that mistake. Customize your resume for the job you're applying for.

At one place I worked, a resume came in that was ten pages long. It listed every single brand of PC hardware this guy had worked with!

But as for customizing...maybe it's the just the point I'm at in my career, maybe it's the state of the industry, but I'm rarely applying for a specific job. I keep my resume up on my website, and when I'm actively looking I post it on Monster, DICE, Net-Temps, and the like, and let recruiters come to me. Ergo, I keep the resume pretty general.

It's three pages in hardcopy, but all the important stuff (education, programming languages, and other technical skills) fits on the first two-thirds of a page; the rest just details my work experience. Every time I update it, I remove a bit of detail about older jobs, to keep the length down.

Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/

Re:Priorities

[smatthew]

Here's a couple hints i've picked up:

• If you don't want to emphasize your formal education, don't put that as the first thing. Resume's are not set in stone. Yes - there are things that one should follow in order to have an attractive resume, but you don't have to put the sections in the order that the template you started with with.
• Conversly, put the section you want to show off the most at the front. If you learned while on the job, put your skills section first (well, after your objective statement).
• Please, nobody cares about your last 15million jobs. If they want a full employment list, they'll ask. Keep the previous employment to under a page
• No "References available upon request" shit. Of course they want your references - so either put them on your resume or have another sheet that shows them
• I have to back up the previous poster, CUSTOMIZE YOUR RESUME. But I'll add on this, customize your Cover Letter too. If there's info on there that I don't need to see, i'll probably wonder why you're wasting my time. Arrgh
• Don't list your hobbies, unless they are soo completely and totally relevant. For example - president of a LUG and you're applying to VA Linux? Then you can show it. But 99.99736% of the time they don't care/want to know.

Any other hints? Check out all the stupid sites out there....

• Monster.com Tech Resume Tips
• Monster.com DotCom Resume Tips
• Techies.com - Technical Resumes - what works

There's plenty of other resources out there - just look.

Re:Priorities

[SnapShot]

It has always seemed to me that the real trick is to make it past the HR person to actually get the interview with the programmers/engineers. If XX doesn't appear on the resume and he doesn't know that YY is the functional equivalent then you never make it to the interview. At least if they turn you down you know you've been judged on your technical merit not simply had buzzwords checked off a list.

HR person takes over for Peter at the gates of Heaven when Mother Theresa appears.

"Hmmm, let's see here Mother Theresa, your resume lists sacrifice, merciful works, moral goodness, and charity, but I don't see compassion listed. The bible specifically lists compassion, hmmm'kay. I'm sorry, better luck next time.

what I've done

[ksheff]

In the past, I have usually split up my resume into two sections. One section is an expertise summary outline. It lists the types of work I've done followed by the operating systems, languages, and tools that I have moderate to extensive experience with. This can also include any certifications you hold or professional training courses you've taken. The next section contains my recent employement history where I list about 3 of my most recent employers. For each one I give a very short description of what my job was and list a few of the major accomplishments. Be consice, but like a previous person had suggested, don't go overboard on the acronyms. It would be nice to have a customized resume for each job application. In my Technical Communications courses, the profs usually suggested a customized cover letter that would explain how your knowledge and experience matches what the company is looking for an employee.

Once you've come up with a first draft, have as many other people review it and give you feedback. Try taking it to a recruiting professional (either at a college or at an agency) and see if they will critique it for you too.

A definitive article on sysadmin resumes

[ader]

Around the time I was starting to look for a new job, an article entitled "Resume Writing" by Christopher M. Russo appeared in the July 2000 issue of ;login: (the USENIX journal). It is written from a hiring manager's perspective and targeted specifically at resumes for sysadmins. I found the advice extremely useful in tightening my own CV and focusing on the requisite details; I highly recommend it to others.

If you are a USENIX member, you can read the article online. Alternatively, a quick search on Google found another, freely accessible copy here.

Basic advice: remember that your experience should illustrate exactly how you used the skills and technologies listed elsewhere in your resume. Don't just say "administered large server farm and deflected dumb luser queries"; say how you went about doing these things (e.g. wrote automated Perl scripts, installed project tracking s/w, etc.).

Good hunting,
Ade_
/

Here's how I solved it

[tzanger]

Here is my current "general" resume. It fits into two pages but remains fairly general. I have a broad range of interests and abilities and I had the same problem you did... Polished it up and boom... 3 pages.

What I ended up doing was keeping the actual job details kind of skimpy and putting my abilities and experiences up top. I also dropped off a few older jobs which didn't really show too much.

Lastly, I stuck on some keywords at the very bottom to help bots find the right resume. I get about two to three requests a week for more info so I think it seems to be working alright. :-)

When I get a request for more info they usually ask for the resume in Word .doc format. What I do then is adjust the resume to target the job more specifically.

Re:Here's how I solved it

[tzanger]

man that is bad, what is up with that big LEAF?????

While criticism is welcome, I need more to go on. And the leaf? Easy: I'm Canadian. Sorry about the link to the Government of Canada, I don't feel like digging up a witty link this morning. :-)

Euro model

[babbage]

As I understand things, the convention in the UK & Europe, as well as some fields here in the US (medicine, law, etc) is to have two documents: a resume, which provides a broad overview and works as a cover sheet, and a CV [curriculum vitae -- "life's work"] that goes into detail about the various things you've done.

The latter can be very similar to an artist's portfolio, in that (in the case of IT workers) it might have things like code samples, screenshots of various projects, etc. It's okay for it to be fairly long too, because the resume complements it with a short version that hiring personnel can use to weed out clearly inappropriate candidates, while the CV can be used to provide a fairly detailed snapshot of your experience.

Having these two documents isn't AFAIK common practice in the American IT sector, but it seems like a good idea to me, and I would think that most potential employers wouldn't be put off by receiving two documents like this.

Do NOT say "I am ubergeek who can do anything".

[dmorin]

• Toss out the applications, unless it's some industry specific thing. I don't care if you can use Word and Excel. Are you looking for a secretarial position?
• List important skills up top in summary. Make sure that all skills you list are backed up by experience in the Work blocks! Don't say "Prolog" and then fail to tell me where and how you used Prolog. I will ask, and if you say "Oh, nothing much, I just downloaded a free Prolog compiler and hacked around a bit" I'm going to move on thinking that you tried to mislead me.
• You're not expert in everything you think you are. Prune. I did a PKI system 4 years ago, and haven't really touched the field since then. So it goes low on my skill set, maybe off altogether if I think I don't have space.
• If you're all over the place in your experience, then think about where you want your career going and shape it in that direction. A friend of mine with 10+ years in the biz showed me his resume the other day and asked what I thought of the "flow". It was very clear that he saw himself as a technical lead, specializing in Oracle, and all of his experience showed how he'd gotten to that position. It did NOT scream "I'm an ubergeek who can do anything you put in front of me."
• Hobbies, personal, and all that other stuff is important and people will look at it. But it doesn't have to be on the first page. If you're going on that old "Make it fit in one page" rule, skip it, I don't really think it's valid for people with significant experience. It's valid for kids fresh out of college, but that's about it. 2 pages is fine. More than 2 and you start to lose your reader, I think.
• Ask yourself "What's the thing that I'll bring to the table that is uniquely me?" Maybe your flexibility with new technologies is what yuo want to sell. Use that. Or maybe you really see yourself more as a mentor to younger geeks. Those are the sort of things that are not in the job description, but give the interviewer a good feeling for who you are over and above your technical skills.
• Time starts to become your enemy. In my position I interview people for web positions. Every now and then I see a resume that goes back to the 1980's. While sometimes it's interesting to see a person's background (you worked on military simulators? Cooool), it's not worth spending an extra page or two. Especially if there's stuff *after* that that (like education, personal) you expect me to get to.

Keep it to a Page and Check Your Spelling

[InitZero]

I don't do much hiring. However, since my boss is fairly new to the company, she had me review the resumes for my new peer. I can't even begin to tell you how poor those resumes were.

Strike one: if you've run your resume off on the office copy machine, it's poorly reproduced, not on heavy paper and is not square, I ain't going to read it.

Strike two: if your resume has spelling errors, grammatical errors or typos, you're toast. I am a lousy speller, make more typos than I care to admit and use the word 'ain't' often but I'm damn sure going to have a few eyes check my resume before I send it out.

Strike three: keep it to a single page no matter what. If you want to add some color, slap a short cover letter on the front. I don't care about your hobbies or where you went to high school.

Of the 43 or so resumes I saw, 29 were taken out of the running based on the above criteria.

Here are a few additional resume tips...

* Bullet items are good. Paragraphs are bad.

* Don't put jobs on your resume that lasted fewer than six months. This is especially true if you've got a string of them. A few people (had they not gotten the above three strikes) would have been taken out of the running because the had a string of jobs that lasted three to eight months each. (And the person wasn't a contractor.) It takes longer than three months to get an employee up to speed even in the best of shops. Why would an employer even consider such a short-timer? I know I wouldn't.

* Don't mention salary on your resume. It won't help you and stands a good chance of hurting you. If you set it too high, you won't even be considered for the position. If you set it too low, you're may not get what you're worth or even what they are willing to pay. The chances of your request being what they have in mind is slim at best. (In fact, don't discuss salary till an offer is on the table.)

* References are a double-edge sword. I tend to suggest folks leave them off the basic resume but make them available on request. Not only does this shorten the length of the resume, it gives you another opportunity to interact with the interviewer. When you get the call asking for references, make sure you ask the person what type of reference they would like (peer, supervisor, character, subordinate, etc.). Also, When I call a reference, it is to confirm what I already know for the most part. If I have a bad feeling about someone, I'll call. If I have a great feeling about a candidate, I'll call. If I have no feelings one way or another, a reference isn't going to do me much good.

* While important to grab one's attention, do it in a classy fashion. High quality paper with water marks is good. Glitter glued to the printed bullets is bad. Construction paper, if done right, is good. Fluorescent green paper is bad.

* I don't care that you were employee of the month in August 1998. If you got a Creativity and Innovation award because you saved the company $27,000, list it.

If you want to see a resume that was headed in the right direction but isn't there yet, you can check out my resume from three years ago. Since I've got a job, I haven't spent any time updating it. (Yes, it's in PDF format. That's far better than the MS Word or even Word Perfect formats I often see.)

InitZero

Re:Keep it to a Page and Check Your Spelling

[raju1kabir]

If you want to see a resume that was headed in the right direction but isn't there yet, you can check out my resume from three years ago. Since I've got a job, I haven't spent any time updating it. (Yes, it's in PDF format. That's far better than the MS Word or even Word Perfect formats I often see.)

1. The corner triangles are needless ornamentation. Plus, when printed, they won't go to the edge of the page (unless someone prints on tabloid with crop marks and trims it - what's the chane of that?). Since most printers have different physical margins on the top and bottom vs. sides, they will look uneven.
2. The name/address block is not visually centered because the weight of the section beneath is to the right. Normally the name/address block should be moved slightly to the right to counter that. However, with the triangles, that would look strange. So the page looks unbalanced.
3. The 'M' and 'S' in your name are too bold. Either use a typeface with purpose-built small caps (like one of Adobe's Expert Collections) or use one with a reasonable number of weights, and use a weight one less for the caps than the smaller letters.
4. The tiny indentation of 2nd-and-following lines in the experience area is weird. Get rid of it, or indent enough that it doesn't look like a mistake. Since the indenting serves no particular purpose, getting rid of it is preferable.
5. Your right tabs (employer name) are not aligned with the horizontal rule above. The tab should be out as far as the rule's right edge.
6. Why are "Experience:," etc., in Courier?
7. You failed to italicize publication names such as The Palm Beach Post
8. You used the wrong dashes for time ranges ("March 1997 - Present"). They should be en dashes.
9. "WebMaster" is one word or two words, but correctly presented it does not have an internal cap.
10. What is with this "no fewer than 45," "no more than 70" stuff? It was awkward the first time, downright strange when it showed up again.
11. "Quark" is a company. "QuarkXPress" is the product.
12. "Novell" has two L's.
13. "QuattroPro" is one word. I suspect that there are other similar product name errors as well. It only takes a second to check the box, the "about" screen, or the vendor web site.
14. "References:" is aligned differently from the parallel headers above.
15. "PowerMac" is not the name of any product that I'm aware of. Apple's "Power Macintosh" line ran on the "PowerPC" chip.

Anyway, I'm sure you got hired, but with that many problems leaping out in a 30-second scan, I wonder whether you should be preaching about proofreading!

Re: Keep it to a Page and Check Your Spelling

[InitZero]

I've learned much in three years. Like I said, it ain't great but it's a start. (By the way, most of your suggestions are based on style and not fact. There's a big difference between style and spelling.)

InitZero

Re: Keep it to a Page and Check Your Spelling

[raju1kabir]

(By the way, most of your suggestions are based on style and not fact. There's a big difference between style and spelling.)

I didn't claim otherwise. But that's all part of proofreading. I am always amazed at the sloppiness of documents people will prepare for formal situations (I'm not talking about your resume anymore; that's pristine by comparison). An unfortunate side-effect of the apparent empowerment provided by laser printers and home-perm DTP software.

Experience as a technical lead

[jmaslak]

I worked for a couple of years as a technical lead. One thing I did a lot of was review resumes.

If you know that there are only a few people applying for a job, go ahead and send me 2 pages. Otherwise, send me ONE page. Hiring managers are busy. Programmers are, too (hiring managers usually refer resumes to a few programmers). More than one page *WILL NOT GET READ* - it will be skimmed. Do you want someone skimming to not see your Oracle reference for the DBA position? Besides, most people (sorry) don't have more than one page of qualifications. List your skills (the ones that matter for the job), tell me that you've been in the industry using various languages for x years, and tell me about your last two or three jobs. If your talking mostly about your skills, more than three years isn't useful anyhow - except to tell me that you know the art of programming. Say that in one sentence instead of two pages.

If you email a resume, it is NOT an excuse to make it longer. Make sure it is SHORTER than one page, as I might be using a slightly different printer than you. Don't send anything but Word, Plain Text (nicely formatted), or PDF. My preference was PDF, BYMV.

Put a web link on your page. This should be a site completely seperate from your personal homepage. It shouldn't talk about cats, dogs, or what you thought of your last employer. If you have a personal homepage on www.example.com/~bob, and you give a link to "www.example.com/~bob/work", you can bet I'll check both pages. They both better sell yourself.

What do I put on this web page? I put my "LONG" resume there and call it a "work history". I usually put a little "about myself" info there, and some "career goals". This way, if someone is interested, I didn't give them 3 pages to wade through for information - I gave them one with a pointer to get more info.!

On this "work" home page, make sure you pay extra so that you can see the web logs. It is always useful to know if a company is considering you or not. If they are, you'll usually see multiple hits from them on multiple days (more than one person will review resumes). If you see the hits, you know one or two things: One: you barely meet the requirements on your resume, and they are trying to see if you might actually know your stuff. Two: They are VERY interested. Use this to negotiate. You'll usually know what end of the spectrum you are on. (yes, this is similar to the time honored references aproach, where you tell your references to call you the minute they get called by a potential employer).

Good luck!

hack, hack, hack

[The Pim]

Take inspiration from Pascal's definition of perfection. Read, revise, reread, until you can find nothing non-essential and nothing that could not be expressed more concisely. Then go to bed and do it again the next day. Convince a friend to help you. You will be amazed by the amount of content you can get onto a page, and how much better the whole thing comes across.

Unless you have a truly impressive background, and are applying for a very special position, you don't have more than a page's worth to say. Remember that in most circumstances, the hirer is looking for a reason to reject you.

PS. Don't even think about squeezing the font or skimping on margins.

Objective statement

[crow]

Be sure that your objective statement is useful. Do not say you want a "software development" position. Especially if you're applying to a large company that has a wide variety of positions, you need to do everything you can to get your resume routed to the right groups.

Likewise, if you list familiarity with many languages, indicate one or two as favorites.

Observe and imitate

[Galactic-Geek2000]

The Web is a great research tool. I used to do the resume "my way" till I stumbled upon some really great resumes on the Web. Now even before I start writing my own resume, I surf the Web, looking for cool-sounding phrases and words; and then modify them to suit my needs. As long as it is not blatant plagiarism, it is okay.

Another thing: If you can get your resume in a PDF format, that is very cool.

Galactic Geek