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Resume Tips For Jobs
JerseyTom writes "SAGEWire reports that with the economy speeding
up, more and more people
are freshening up their
resumés. They've printed an article by Tom
Limoncelli, co-author of TPoSaNA, that offers specific advice for geeks writing resumes." 'Course, I'm not sure how much I believe the economy speeding up - but still good information.,
1: Try and sound interesting in your Hobbies / Interests section, you'll just come across as a twat. Be honest. And DON'T mention Stanley Kubrick. Everyone does that!
2: Go too far ahead in 'Career Objectives'. Think 2 or 3 years, not 10!
3: Forget to spell check the thing.
Last time I had to update my CV, it took about a week in order to get all my skills in an easy to read, yet eye-catching format.
:)
I never realised all I had to write was
404 Error; Page not found.
Right then, lets send this baby off
What economy are they referring to? Certainly not the American economy...
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
you can always add "did volunteer work rating messages submitted to a public web site. Work involved reading posted comments, deciding quality and relevance of posting, and moderating accordingly. Also did oversight work rating moderators performance."
or
"managed a wide area information distribution network involving the exchange of compressed aural and adult entertainment products. Work involved maintenance of clandistine anti-detection systems and frequent network reconfigurations for various Internet service providers".
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
First of all, it is no longer sufficient to simply mention that you are a programmer. It isn't even sufficient to mention that you know C++. I've seen requirements that specifically want 2+ years of experience using Visual Studio. This is the most idiotic thing I've ever seen, but that doesn't stop companies from putting that in the job description. And we all know how HR departments are. If you don't have exactly what they're looking for, you don't get called back.
Another thing is the certification hang-up. I've known people with certifications that don't know sh*t, but that won't stop them from getting a job before me, because I don't have any certifications. Hiring managers (particularly those who are non-technical) are fooled into believing that certifications somehow equate to a higher quality employee. It doesn't matter that this isn't true; it can easily keep you from getting a job.
Thirdly, the "Jack of All Trades" background is getting harder to place. Employers want someone with large (sometimes unreasonably so) amounts of experience in particular (sometimes obscure) areas. It used to be that having a generic background was a good thing. It meant you could easily adapt to new technologies, and had a wide range of experience to draw on for coming up with novel solutions to problems. Nowadays, employers don't want you to solve anything. They want to purchase a solution-in-a-box and hire a technician (not really a programmer) to implement it. Finally, employers are looking for more on your resume than "I wrote some software". They want to see how you drastically reduced the running time, or saved a bunch of money, or lead a team on to beat a tight deadline, save money, and make the manager look like a champion. Remember: they aren't hiring you to just get a job done. They are hiring you so that they can pad their own resumes with accomplishments that you pulled off. So, make sure that the things on your resume support what your potential manager would want on his resume.
After all this, I would like to mention that I am starting to feel burned out, and am looking towards getting back into academia. I'd rather do research than spend the rest of my life feeling like a corporate flunky.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
I'm not asking for much. I just want a chance to live at least as well as I did with no income at college (meaning: don't starve, basic cable, internet, and shelter), not default on my loans, and most importantly to me gain experience toward building a better career. I'm looking for an opportunity, not compensation.
Screw the job market. I'm going back to the college life, late nights, late mornings, parties, beautiful women everywhere, lots of beer, and no drug tests. In a few years, I'll have at least a Master's, but that's only if I completely fail to achieve a PhD. Screw the job market. Screw the job market. Stay in school. A teaching assistantship + college lifestyle if far superior and better for your future than developing an ulcer at 23 trying to get an entry level job.
I first wrote a real resume (i.e., not just a high school assignment) about 10 years ago. I spent a lot of time worrying about the format and language. Up until recently, every time I updated it, I assiduously read tips given by job-hunting and other professionals. I spoke with friends who were technical writers and document design specialists. Earlier this year I read a few books on it and asked all my professional friends and a few unprofessional friends and finally, and after much ado the conclusion I came to....
The advice is often useless.
Well, not totally useless. But very, very subjective. Some people will tell you to put in an objective. Others will tell you it's irrelevant. Some people will tell you hobbies are irrelevant; others will tell you it shows a holistic person who'll have more to give to a job. Some people will tell you being holistic is important; others will tell you that focus on skills relevant to the job is all that matters. Some people will tell you to use action buzzwords; others will tell you those will get you dismissed as a charlatan. You get the idea.
My guess is they're all correct. Resume design is an art, not a science. Every person looking at your resume is looking for different things from a slightly different perspective. I've come to the conclusion that there's no set of tips you can follow to get you a resume that will get you in the door. You just have to design and refine as professionally as possible, think a little bit about your audience, and hope the message you intended to send gets across.
And sometimes I think that your own judgement may be as important as someone else's. If you walk into an interview with a resume you are confident in, that's a good precursor to success.
This is the result of my thinking. Feel free to send/post critiques of the thing. Or job offers, for that matter.
Tweet, tweet.
Avoid spelling mistakes and typos. Come on folks, this is a resume. If you misspell something, then your chances just got cut in half. Once we were interviewing for a documentation person, and she misspelled 3 words on her resume. She had no chance after that.
A good tip about experience with different things is to rate your experience. I know on mine, I broke up technical experience into three categories: experienced, some knowledge, familiar. That way when you say "familiar with dbase" you can expand on that in the interview to tell them exactly what "familiar" means.
Know what you say you know. We were hiring someone into our QA group, and we were testing on Unix servers. We had to have someone with Unix experience. One guy had the word "unix" in several places on his resume, but when we got him in the interview, he couldn't even answer my basic questions. (what is your favorite shell in Unix?) He asked me what I meant. He didn't know what shell scripting was, but he thought he could learn it. Then came the blunt questions "how well do you know Unix?" He said "pretty well". Guess what, for proclaiming to know Unix and not knowing a damn thing about it, he got to see the door.
Don't put the standard, tired, canned crap on your resume (Objective, hobbies, etc). Believe me, they all start to look the same. What you say in your objective really doesn't help at all, it can only really hurt you. If your objective isn't worded for the position you are interviewing for, then HR may not even pass your resume on. And if I want to know your hobbies, I'll ask you about them in the interview. And printing your picture on it is dumb. Being "clever" for the sake of being clever probably won't help.
Show that you know how to use your experience, put down some quick details about projects that you have worked on (# of people on the project, the type of project, etc) Don't go into too much detail, but don't just say "coded in C". Be specific, but not boring. If you read what you wrote, would some questions about it come to mind? (and not - what the hell does that mean?) Pretend to have been interested in past projects, even if you weren't. Nobody wants to hire someone who is just there to get a paycheck and doesn't care about what they are doing.
Be honest. Really, that is about it. Don't blow smoke up anyone's butt, don't interview as someone you are not. Be yourself, that is who they should be hiring. If you aren't right for the job, then it is because you aren't right for the job, not that you didn't put on the right game face.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I can't tell you how many resume's [sic] we see that have *gross* spelling errors or serious grammar issues.
Plus, we get a ton of resume's [sic] without cover letters.
People aren't handing jobs out anymore and there's alot [sic] of competition for them now, even for really qualified and experienced people, so that means you have to compete for the job, which also means you have to actually put effort in to [sic] getting it.
Is this supposed to be humorous, or are you just a manager?
The current job situation in the IT industry reminds me of the energy industry nearly two decades ago. At that time, I was graduating with a bachelor's degree in geology and was looking forward to employment in an oil or mineral exploration company.
Then the price of oil dropped to less than $20 a barrel.
The immediate fallout was that oil and mineral companies put a hiring freeze on new undergraduates. Several of them were holding on to their graduates and PhDs in the hope that oil prices would recover leaving them with a core exploration group to field when it was needed.
It wasn't long before energy companies started laying off the people with masters degrees and, soon, the PhDs. In short, there was blood in the streets. The old joke was renewed: "Why did the guy with a bachelors in geology fail to get a job at McDonalds? Because he didn't have his PhD."
I couldn't stand the idea of going back to school. I was tired of school (starvation) and wanted to start working again. I gathered up all of my networking contacts and pressed them hard for any job available. None of them were offering jobs in geology. So I started looking in other related industries.
I figured that if I could get inside of Exxon or Shell, then I could post for internal positions when they started arriving. My foray into the petrochemical industry started with a job in a small formaldehyde plant. I was the only operator with a degree. Heck, I was the only one in the plant with more than a high school education. That experience, however, gave me an in-road into another field - industrial hygiene. I went from plant to factory performing routine studies of industrial exposure to workplace hazards.
After a few short years, I had learned enough about the field that I considered certifying as an industrial hygienist.
But I found an ad in a local newspaper that was offering a job as a well-site geologist who had industrial safety training. Because I had taught industrial safety as a hygienist, I got the job. It was a lateral move with fewer benefits and was a contract position. But it was in geology, a field I had long given up hope of getting a job.
I was eventually hired on permanently and have been here for the last 10 years. I now have more work than I can perform myself. I will have to farm the excess out to people who have more education and work experience than myself.
The point? Don't stop working just because you've graduated and can't get entry-level work in your field. The IT field will eventually shake out the deadwood and under-qualified. If you continue to keep your skills up, the day will come when your skills are not only needed, they are hard to find. This translates into greater job security than if you were to have taken the first job you could find in your field only to be laid off 8 months later.
Don't give up.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
everybody hates job-hunting, so my advice is to make it like a role playing game. you "roll up" a resume and send it off to do battle with various hr creeps. if you "win" (get the job) you gain some experience and skills that you add to your character.
/dev/urandom
right now my resume looks like this:
name: frymaster
class: paladin (web)
level: 6
alignment:
str: 12
int: 16
wis: 15
dex: 17
char: 9
hp: 45
bonuses:
+9 vs. enterprise applications
+4 vs. venture capitalists
spells:
exercise stock options
exorcise stock options
dispell windows
summon libraries
banish end user
read documentation
evangelize
skills:
hide in office (+20)
comment code (+10 elvish)
languages:
java, php, elvish
2 1337 4 u!
First off, nobody should look for a job without reading Nick Corcodilos' excellent Ask The Headhunter.
Second, think like a hiring manager. Remember that the hiring manager has 50 resumes in a folder that HR has dumped in his lap, or worse, 50 emails that have been forwarded from HR.
Tell me, as a manager, exactly what you can do for me. This might mean some extra work on your part customizing a copy of your resume, and of course writing a job-specific cover letter. DO IT. Don't skimp here.
I want to know exactly what the applicant can do to help me out. Make a thumbnail sketch of what you are. The top of my resume looks like this:
Five lines sum up my background and experience, and highlight my key skills. Compare this with the standard meaningless "Objective" heading. Besides, "To obtain a position as a developer that will utilize my skills & experience" is just cargo-cult resume writing.Other little notes from my resume sins file:
Ask The Headhunter makes the key point that managers WANT to hire you. They want to find someone that they can hire so that we can all get back to doing real work. Make it easy for me to see that you are the person for the job.