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Writing a Good Technical Resume?
SuperMallen asks: "As a newly minted hiring manager, I've spent the last few weeks plowing through the large pile of resumes for one of my open positions. The varying formatting and quality of the resumes has stunned me. People do everything from a short list of jobs and positions to essays on each and every project they ever thought about in a job. Everyone seems to subscribe to the 'here's a giant pile of technologies I'm familiar with at the top' school, but I usually ignore this and go straight for their past work history and glean from there. Surely the Slashdot community can help point out what makes for good formatting and content in a technical resume. I'd love to also see some good sample resumes people have used in the past, and any good websites or book recommendations on how to write these effectively, so we can all spend less time reading and writing bad ones."
I write Perl, and I work writing Perl.
:)
And ever since I got to about 4 or 5 CPAN modules released, I haven't needed a resume at all since.
Generally it's just enough to say "My CPAN id is $foo".
It also works in reverse as well, in situations where I've been hiring or interviewing Perl people, my first question tends to be "Do you have a CPAN id?".
If so, you can immediately go see what standard they work to when they expect their peers to read their code.
If not, they general apologize or mumble something about always meaning to, and we go into why not. Often it's valid reasons, and all is fine.
If they don't know what a CPAN id is, well then they almost certainly aren't getting the job
As someone who sees a lot of CVs and has hired a lot of staff, I couldn't agree more with this.
Keep the summary short and concise - a few lines ideally.
Give more details about recent jobs than old jobs (I'm more interested in your recent experience, than your job as a barman when you were 18).
A good piece of advice I heard a few years ago - if you've got the experience - focus on the experience (ie if you are sysadmin, wanting another sysadmin job - focus on what sysadmin stuff you know), if you haven't got the experience - focus on the skills (ie if you are helpdesk dude - applying for a sysadmin job - focus on what transferable skills you've got - maybe how good you are at solving complex problems).
Personally I think quotes from referees is a bit cheesey - but each to their own. If you think a bit about what references are - would you really want to hire someone who couldn't fake a set of references ?
Fitting it all onto less pages by taking out all the white space and using a smaller font is cheating, and has a side affect of makeing your CV harder to read. If your CV is hard to read - there is a risk that people won't, most hiring managers will be faced by a pile of CVs you want yours to be the one that stands out, being well presented and easy to read is at least as important as the skills on the CV.
And last of all leave out anything you do that could be considered wierd (by the most narrowminded person). Ultimate Frisbee / caving / climbing / extreme ironing - ok, role playing games with wired names - probably not.
good luck,
Alex
PS - Don't come back with "its my skills that are important not my CV", presenting information in a concise easy to read format is an important skill.
I think it would be cool if the world had a standard XML resume format. Companies could have applications and using the XML tags each company could only view the information they want. Also each company could reformat the resume so that whatever they want to see is emphasized and those details they do not care about are hidden. A nice web front end with AJAX and all that web 2.0 stuff would probably sell many higher vice presidents (unfortunately).
.NET a year after .NET came out). Other ads are vague or just totally wrong. A job interview and the ad are part of a two way process. As much as a company wants to screen me out and interview me I want to do the reverse.
But a killer app would be a WYSIWYG resume builder that puts it into an XML format and the WYSIWYG resume reader that lets you pick what you want to read. It would make life even easier to submit the resume to monster too. Instead of rebuilding your resume 5 or 6 different times for each job site, you could build one and submit it over and over again (minimizing the chance of typos/etc.).
The variety problem would be solved because companies could put it into whatever format they want.
I agree with you 150% on job ads, I've seen many with typos/misspellings/wrong words/more years of experience in a technology then the technology has existed (I loved 5 years
The biggest resume mistake that I have ever seen is when everyone in some college / university program takes a course where *EVERYONE* has to format the resume exactly the same way. The result is that the entire classes resumes look almost identical.
After I read the first two of those resumes, every single one of them gets weeded out.
You really need to do something on the first page that clearly gives me a reason to hire you. When reading through a stack of resumes, I am looking for a reason to hire you. Why are you better than everyone else? If you can't give me a reason to hire you in the first page, then you are out. I am not reading the second page.
Incidentally, I went to one of these photostat resume courses once. I did a resume on blue paper. I was held up as an example of the worst possible resume you could write. That resume netted me a job interview with a prestigious high-tech company at the time.
Lesson: avoid having the exact same resume format/content that your classmates have.
For some jobs, I add a 3-4 line "Things I do for fun" section to my resume, highlighting relevant technical and non-technical hobbies and volunteer work not listed elsewhere.
It just might get me the interview if I'm on the bubble, and it may help me know which hiring managers see me as a person not just as a skill set.
The key is keeping it relevant and short, and remembering that the entire section is expendable if space is an issue.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Hmm, well, not exactly. If you only put down the skills that you have that are your best, you may miss opportunities. I have gone over many resumes, interviewed a lot of people in my day (probably 50) and have been a hiring manager. I like seeing a list of their skills grouped by their level of understanding of the subject. If using Linux is a must-have skill, but I don't need a guru, I might be willing to look at someone who has a decent understanding of it. I have talked to people who said "yes, I have used Unix". My next question is always "What shell do you use?" If I get a blank stare, I already got my answer. But it is much easier for someone to learn MORE about Unix than to have never used it at all. I don't have a problem with people putting everything they've ever used on their resume, as long as they qualify it. Oh, and aren't stupid about it... listing all the versions of Windows you have ever used is silly. I put on mine "MS Windows - 3.11 through XP" That covers it.
Yes, that can maybe be gleaned from job descriptions and whatnot, but things like programming knowlege can't always. I have a CS degree, and used to do programming. But I have been involved in QA and testing for my whole career of 13 years. I still have the various languages I am familiar with on my resume, with the caveat that my experience with them is fairly low. Of course, I still get people asking me about programming jobs, probably because they don't even READ my resume and probably have someone keyword matching on it.
I can tell you, finding technical QA people is difficult, so I make sure to point out on my resume that I do have a technical background. It makes a big difference when interacting with the programming team to have a CS degree. I can read Java and pretty much figure out what is going on, but I wouldn't want to have to write anything in it. I know enough to leave that to the experts. But if my job involved writing some Java, it wouldn't be too far of a leap for me.
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That's why I made our company post resume format requirements in our job listings. We also warn the applicant that we'll be calling in 2nd interviewees to prove their knowledge in person.
The number of incoming resume's shrank by 83% and now we mostly have qualified applicants. The problem now is choosing which one has the coolest sounding Mumbai or Hyberadad address.
(Just kidding on the address thing.....)
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