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."

Comments

Re:I know your pain. (not exactly)

[gosand]

Long lists of skills mean nothing.

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.