Joel Rants About Resumes

rbrandis writes "Mr. Spolsky's latest rant is about writing a resume that will be read "Please do not use cover letters that you copied out of a book. If you write 'I understand the position also requires a candidate who is team- and detail-oriented, works well under pressure, and is able to deal with people in departments throughout the firm' then at best people will think you're a bullshit artist and at worst they will think that you were not born with the part of the brain that allows you to form your own thoughts and ideas.""

Comments

Resumes

[ackthpt]

Do not lie. Lies are eventually revealed, you waste your time and theirs.

Keep it to what's current and to the subject.

Make it readable and non-technical. It's going to be screened by HR people, they're typically really bad with technical details.

Keep a text copy, some people want to receive resumes through horrible web interfaces.

Nobody gives a crap about your hobbies, unless then involve lots of theft of past employers property, in which case they'll appreciate your candor.

One *really* common resume blunder

[Fortunato_NC]

I hire a lot of interns every semester, so I see a lot of resumes. If you're applying for a position, and know for a fact that a lot of people from your school will be applying to the same position, don't use the resume template provided by the career services office unaltered. Your resume cannot possibly stand out from the others if it looks the same as everyone else's.

Same thing goes for Word's resume wizard. You can use it to get started, but if you stick completely with its format, your resume is going to look just like everyone else's. You and your work experience are different, your resume should reflect that.

Don't be afraid to take risks. One of the best resumes I've seen used color and graphics - it was definitely eye catching, and it worked, because when I called the young man back, he'd already accepted an internship somewhere else!

Re:We saved the best for last.

[ergo98]

Joel, as I'm sure you know, was one of the technical guys behind VBA in Excel, along with some other fairly big projects. He apparently made enough money from these gigs that he went off and started his own company, initially focusing on consulting (at the most unfortunate time to be in consulting...), and then moving into shrink wrap software. Apparently they're doing okay as they recently moved into a pretty impressive new office, still in swanky (and expensive) New York City.

Joel is a big advocate of treating developers well, and is respected for generally being pragmatic and insightful, with a humorous writing style that is informative while remaining entertaining. On the flip side, a couple of his recent posts have been blatant quid-pro-quos with some friends of his, and he's selling out a bit with the Programmer's Paradise gig.

As usual, Joel's whines contain some truth

[Theatetus]

The trick with resumes is to get noticed, but not for the wrong reasons. A resume (at least in the tech world) has to walk a fine line: you want to get past the HR people who will be looking for keywords, but you also have to prove to the tech person who will end up reading it that you are not a total tool.

My last resume worked pretty well; I sent it to 5 employers and got 3 interviews (the other 2 were, frankly, out of my league but it never hurt anybody to aim high). The 3 interviews got me 2 offers, and I have a job from one of them.

From the resumes and cover letters I've been seing lately, I would offer this advice to job seekers:

• When you list job experience, include some bullet points of specific things you did. Simply saying "Systems administrator" or "developer" doesn't tell me much. Saying "Managed 3 DNS servers for 500 domains" tells me a lot more.
• Remember what you learned in Freshman composition and use it. Keep your writing short and to the point, and make sure your letter has a beginning which includes a sort of abstract, a middle that goes into a little detail of why you want the job and why you'd be a good choice, and an end which at least tries to close me.
• Don't be afraid of buzzwords but don't spam me with them either. If you think you're a motivated self-starter with good communication skills, it's not too bad to say so but it's much better to offer concrete examples of that.
• Do some research into the company. All of our names are on my company's website; don't be afraid to address the letter to one of us. Mention what we do and how you can help our specific projects; that is always impressive.
• DO include a list of your skills but DON'T list a skill that you don't really have (reading "DNS Administration For Dummies" doesn't mean you can run a BIND cluster).
• Finally, don't come across flat. Your resume should tell me something about you that gives me a little insight into who you are. What are your interests? What experiences made you who you are today? Don't worry if parts don't seem entirely relevant to the job. I'd rather know that somebody learned viniculture over a summer in France than that they took a 1-week class in Flash and Director.

Anyways, that's just me and YMMV. Selling is easy it just takes the will to close the guy.

Re:doing it right

[FreeForm Response]

Plural possessive should be spelled " peoples' ".

Sorry, I had to do it. =)

Other than that, looks good. And yes, I know my period is outside my quotes. I know it's not the rule, but the rule is stupid, and I don't follow it in informal correspondence.

On a slightly related note, I'm starting to think that I should look into getting a job in the IT publishing industry. Almost every computer book I buy nowadays is positively littered with spelling errors, typos, and poor grammar. I understand that the geek authors may either not know English well or not care too terribly much, but it pains me to read things like "Also, Python's error handling is a helpful for the programer to" in a (presumably) proofread, edited, spellchecked, and PUBLISHED book that I paid good money for. :-P

Re:doing it right

[The Only Druid]

Actually, you're mistaken. If you're referring to the possessed object[s] of several individuals, it would be "people's", whereas if you're referring to the possessed object[s] of several groups of individuals, it would be "peoples'". The distintion is this: "people" means a collection of individuals, whereas "peoples" means a collection of several groups that would be identified as a "people".

As for periods/commas/etc. and whether they should be inside quotes, its a convention and not a rule: according to American MLA format, punctuation occurs always within quote marks, whereas Australian and European equivalents require the punctuation to be outside the quote marks. I personally employ the Australian convention both because of my time spent there, and because I think it more accurately reflects the verbal structure of the language.

Reason for applications

[frenetic3]

(N.B. I interviewed candidates for tech jobs at a startup. With companies with a large HR dept, the experience may be slightly different.)

Applications are great, from an employer's perspective.

If you've ever put up a job posting in any kind of public space/forum/job site, you would know that you will start getting flooded with absolute shit resumes that don't match and by desperate people cutting pasting and clicking send. (I've even seen candidates put up autoresponders to job posting sites.. no shit.)

An application, besides the marginal advantages that other respondents have already pointed out, tells me that 1) you've at least read the fucking post and what we're looking for 2) are not just some jerkoff spamming any job posting he sees and that you 3) will at spend ten minutes actually CONSIDERING and THINKING what you're about to apply for, since reading your resume and phone screening/interview will definitely take up (i.e. waste) a lot of my time (and conversely, if you can't be bothered to fill out a 10 minute app, you're not going to do very good work on the job.)

BostonWorks let me put up 3 simple 'interview questions' beforehand -- loved that feature -- and I made them have easy 2 sentence max responses. It was amazing how many people submitted blank responses or how many I could screen just from reading their absolutely braindead replies. It was GREAT.

And finally, enough people will apply that frankly I only need to consider those who submit a thoughtful, properly formatted app.

I agree though that it wastes time on both ends, which sucks. But realize the root cause, which sucks more; the whole process stems from the fact that you need some way of putting up enough barriers to entry to keep obviously unqualified idiots from wasting your time.

-fren