At our university, University of Manchester, we had a careers service drone telling us to list your experience working as a waiter and highlight skills you learned there ('communicating in stressful environment' and what not).
Dear young readers. Seriously, don't do that. Waste of space at best. Looks just stupid at worst. It doesn't tell me anything about your ability as a programmer at all. Description about a weekend project is much more useful. And no, clarifying whether someone wants latte with regular or soy milk is not a 'communication skill'.
Do you (or anyone else reading this thread) have advice for current college students looking for internships or their first full time job?
Unfortunately, I don't have the breadth of experience detailed in the slideshow to even justify a multi-page CV. In my environment, we work with a 1 page resume and <2 minutes of interaction with a recruiter at a career fair (~30% chance they're technical).
I have a variety of side projects I've hacked on, but it's very hit and miss -- some recruiters care a lot, others care more about my GPA and what classes I have taken.
What can students like myself do to best position ourselves in these situations, especially when we can't have multiple resumes for every company there is (and are forced to generalize)?
I can't speak for everyone, but we get it (that you don't have experience to show). You are a student at the beginning of your career. Just be honest and enthusiastic. As the parent says, blathering about your experience selling coffee is pretty pointless. Hey, if you started a coffee cart, that could be interesting to tout.
If you don't have anything for your resume, all you can be is smart and engaging.
If you still have time in school, picking up an interesting project is very worthwhile. We could do side projects for credit. I don't really care if you wrote it in Javascript, if it is web enabled, or you did math with matlab; just give me something to talk to you about, and I can figure out if the several fairly well defined projects I have in mind could be tackled by you.
In other words, I don't look for a college grad with no work experience to be able to lead a team, design a product, and so on. I have a bunch of 'turn the crank' work, and a few challenges to throw out as well. I don't want to babysit you, but I also want you to ask questions and learn. Part of interning is giving back to the community, but part of it is I have work I need done. So, when I read your CV and/or talk to you, I just want to figure out if you can perform at that capacity.
If there is nothing left to talk about I resort to asking about your coursework. 'What courses are you taking'. 'Blah, and foodle, and a compiler course.' Okay, can you tell me what a recursive descent parser is? uhh...I've never heard of that" That is an actual conversation I had with somebody recently. I blame the school more than the person, but no offer was made. I wasn't going to have the candidate code a parser for me, either for the interview or the job, but I just wanted to have a conversation about anything where I could probe knowledge (less important) and ability (more important). Find an area that know something about, find the limit, inject a new piece of information, and see if they can assimilate it. If they can, that's an offer. If not, probably not.
To be fair, you'll probably get a lot of "code 'delete_node' for a binary tree type questions, so like it or not brush up on that crap.
Beyond that, for me at least, the CV isn't very important. If everything you list is about networking and databases, and I am looking for graphics programming, I scratch my head as to why you are applying and probably move to the next resume. A fit in interests is important, after all.
I graduated during the peak of the recent recession. I ran into this a lot. What worked best for me was to stop fine tuning my resume and do my best to skip HR. I got a few interviews by calling friends already in the field (some of those parents of friends) and asking to be put it contact directly with a technical hiring manager.
Of course, none of those panned out either. A few took hires with more experience and one offered me a job at an embarrassingly low salary (i.e., less than I made as a summer lifeguard).
Ultimately, what worked for me was getting in with a good company doing low level tech work (help desk) which got my recommendations for an internal position. This was my first lesson in corporate hiring: the most effective way to find a job is knowing someone.
>> Do you (or anyone else reading this thread) have advice for current college students looking for internships or their first full time job?
Do something and write it down. Most coursework is not relevant here, but classes that involve a large project - put down the what you did for it. Did you design something? Build something? Discover something? Win something? Lead something? I'm not talking about regular lab projects here, I mean big things that take at least half a semester.
This has been my approach, YMMV. People can appreciate if you demonstrate an ability to DO stuff.
can't have multiple resumes for every company there is
But you can target 3-5 companies which you reckon you stand the best chance of getting in.
Research up the wazoo on your selected handful. The best is if you can network into present employees and probe into what's actually going on in there. What technologies do they really use, what's griefing them, and most important of all, why's this req open.
By working backward from why THEY need that extra pair of hands, YOU stand out as the best person for the job.
You're being harsh - graduate CVs are tough because almost no-one has done anything useful. Yes it all looks rubbish but I'd rather someone who had made an effort to sell themselves and had shown they had the ability to pitch up to a job on a regular basis.
But in our industry, it's easy to stand out. Spend a weekend or two, make some web app, Android app, or whatever. Maybe make a commit to some open source project, if you are struggling with ideas (in that case, you are capable to work with code written by other people, amazing!). And you are ahead of majority because you demonstrated that you can make something practical, real world.
In my experience, development experience is relatively easy for students to obtain while in school. Internships are abundant (obviously not everyone is going to come out of school having worked for Google or Microsoft but most people who want to get development experience during college can find it). Personal projects are another way of doing something "useful" that have effectively zero barrier to entry.
It isn't too hard to do something "useful" as developer in college, if one has the motivation...
I beg to differ. For a graduate position, any professional experience is a big plus. I am prepared to teach people programming. I dread to teach people professionalism.
A large company might have an HR department that is insulated from any of the 'technical' branches that company might have. Imagine if they had to have all sorts of knowledge about what every individual branch of the company does? It's their job to be gatekeepers that make sure the people coming in for interviews are not raising any red flags, further along in the hiring process skill will be determined.
Actually I'm thinking of testing future candidates with a "dumb" response like this, just to see if the candidate clarifies the situation and is helpful, or if we are dealing with someone who is just rolling their eyes all day, because of all the dumb colleagues. Someone who feels the need to be condescending when someone lacks some knowledge.
I've been applying at our state government and keep hitting this. The standard joke is you could list your only experience as "Pizza Hut Delivery Driver", as long as you put the words "Linux, Javascript & Apache" in the description.
The HR people literally just do a "Find" for words without reading the rest, and that gets you a phone interview.
Great slides - thanks. One surprise "leave off education". Would like to hear some more thoughts about that - haven't seen that before. 18 yrs experience so I'm sure its not too important (I did nothing spectacular in college, but did graduate) - still leave it off completely?
I started putting an abbreviated education section at the very bottom (instead of a full section at the top, as is common) and it significantly improved response rates. I especially recommend this strategy if your field of study isn't traditional.
I made the change to education at the bottom after watching a recruiter read my resume in person--I could actually see the moment she got to the education section and tuned out completely. It turns out people in tech tend to be turned off by my chemistry degrees. (Aside: It would be cool to have some sort of service that allowed you to A/B test resumes against a certain hiring demographic.)
That's what I'm also curious about. I never finished my degree and understand I have to leverage work experience and a killer portfolio to get my next development job, but have yet to figure out how to structure my resume around this niggling detail.
Leaving off the education section is interesting... I'm assuming this strategy is to give you an opportunity to create interest as a candidate before the (inevitable?) question comes up, "I see you didn't mention education on your resume... Could you tell me more about that?"
If you graduated college, it might be worth 1 line - a few decision makers will filter you out if you don't explicitly say it.
Or, it's worth 0 lines if you think that's not the kind of company you want to work for.
I once had a hiring manager ask why my K-12 education was not on my resume... he said he had wanted to filter out my CV on that basis; then I filtered his company partly on that basis.
I have a bachelor of Software Engineering (certified Engineer) with First Class Honors, and I know I'm usually competing against people with a Comp Sci. degree, or even just a diploma. I think it's important to highlight my education, as it puts me a cut above.
Thanks for this, currently a PHP contractor looking for work in the UK and this certainly opens my eyes up to the issues with my CV. Probably explains why I haven't been getting many interviews!
What would you suggest for a contractors CV which is primarily filled with 1-2 month contracts?
I usually try get the last years work on the CV, but as you can imagine that starts to take up quite a bit of room when you have many short term contracts.
I would portray as one role, and a few really important projects.
For example:
Senior Consultant
For the past 24 months, I've worked with a large number of varied clients to realise true business value for them.
This has included Real Example A and Specific Detail B, but beyond the pure technical skills, it has highlighted the value of softer skills.
Most notably, I recently worked with the estate of Douglas Adams in an ecommerce towel distribution hub.
Don't panic, I'm the right chap for the job.
I put seperate contracts on as seperate jobs and find getting PHP jobs hilariously easy. People do ask why I change jobs so often, but the standard "I'm a contractor and finance dept don't wanna pay our rates" goes down well enough.
This is my CV, I try to be straight to the point and keep it under 2 pages on the word version.
Why are you perpetuating the myth that frequent switching of jobs is somehow detrimental to your career? Maybe that's true for corporate megacorp, but in the startup world I feel it's par for the course. At least all the best engineers I've worked with never stuck around long.
If I take you on I want some indication that you're going to stay around long enough for the investment we're going to make in you to be worthwhile. We'll normally pay a recruitment fee and then we'll pay you while you're learning about our product, our industry, our processes and the specific technologies you haven't worked with that we use, and we'll be paying our existing staff to take time out from coding to do those things. That's not inconsiderable.
Obviously your experience may render some of that irrelevant. If that's the case then if you're massively better than the other candidates I may take the risk but if you're not, then I can take you or I can take the person who is as good but will stick around longer. That's not a tough decision.
I'm not looking for gold watch territory or even an indication that you might be around for 5 years, and I'm not looking for a guarantee, but if your CV shows a pattern of you moving every 15 months I need to work out why I think I won't be your next 15 month stint and if I think I think I am whether it'll be worth my while.
As someone who has done a ton of hiring, switching jobs a lot is definitely a red flag. Not an automatic reject, but I frequently have to make choices like "It will take this person N months to become useful here, they switch jobs on average every M months. M-N seems like a pretty short time..."
It is not a myth. It WILL raise eyebrows, with HR mostly. A corollary of that is, if you don't actually have a HR department, there won't be any eyebrows to be raised.
However, even if HR doesn't like it, if you do get an interview, then you can tell them a happy story to explain what happened. It helps if you can convince them that this time you'll stick around, provided the necessary conditions are met. Then ask several questions to clarify the points that are important to you.
Depends what you mean by "long". I think people should move every two to three years. But you say "myth", and I can tell you categorically that CVs with lots of 6 to 18 month non-contract roles on them get rejected on that basis alone.
What's the Perl scene like in the UK? As a former Perl professional, I'm continually not impressed by the caliber of some of my colleagues. I've actually left for greener pastures.
"Candidate driven", which means: there's a lot more demand than supply. Mostly London centric. Good roles tend to be in mid-sized companies with large existing Perl codebases rather than startups (who often choose something a little trendier) or huge corporates who rewrote everything in Java 5 years ago[1].
[1] Or, tried to, but there are still pockets of Perl everywhere that no-one ever got around to rewriting. See: Amazon, the BBC, etc.
One thing I have been noticing lately with HR drones, is that unless you have stated specifically that you worked in technology X on a project at work, it doesn't matter how many off work projects you might have done in the said technology.
Even if there are other people using the said projects.
Speaking as a hiring manager this feels perfectly reasonable so I'd be interested to know why people might think it isn't.
I write a job spec which lists what we're looking for which is advertised and passed to recruiters - if you're interested in the job you've almost certainly seen that.
Assuming you do have the experience, using the spec you should be able to tweak your CV in about 5 minutes to highlight the key things we're looking for. If you do that, you've cleared this (very low) bar with a very small time investment and it's not a problem. If your CV makes it past the recruiter (or HR department or other non-technical screener) I then know that the CV I'm looking at is worth my time and the following interview is more focused as I know a bit more about what you've done where.
Yes you are having to spend time but, as I say, this should be a very short tweak to your existing CV so it doesn't feel like a big ask given that I'm going to spend longer than that reading it (and hopefully interviewing you about it).
Obviously if there is no job spec then this doesn't work so well but there's usually something, even if it's just stuff you've gleaned from the advert or conversations with the person you learned about the role from.
As an aside, please don't ever try to get round the keyword thing by listing everything you've done or used. I had a CV the other week which listed 43 skills, tools and technologies for one nine month role. From that I have no way of knowing what you used in passing and what you really know - you've provided so much information it just became noise. My rule when I'm working out what to put - if you put it on your CV you'd better feel happy answering (proper) questions about it and I don't believe that you passed that threshold with 43 things in a nine month period.
There's one very simple reason that this strategy fails: good developers can and do learn new technologies quickly. It's far more important to find someone willing and able to learn than someone who can copy and paste a few keywords.
Speaking as a developer, why do you feel it's reasonable to disregard side projects? If, say, I claim LLVM knowledge based on a publicly available language developed on my spare time, why shouldn't be taken into account in the recruiting process?
spoiler: he advises to just put the keywords, to please every layer in the hiring process.
This is a quite conservative document: your CV is a little piece of shit in the stack, people have better stuff to do than read your freaking CV, you stupid millennial, they hate recruiting and they are absolutely not willing to spend any time on it, and there are millions other people waiting for your job, so you'd better get in the freaking line before they retract the privilege they gave you by accepting your CV in their stack. And the lowest salary in the team does the actual interviews, because I told you I have better things to do.
I guess it might depend on the industry, but at most interviews I have done, the expectation has been to just wear jeans and whatever. I usually go with jeans and a polo shirt for safety.
It really depends on the place. If there's a recruiter involved, ask them. Otherwise, (the following is based on my experience in the US, YMMV, etc), if they're not a software company, or are a defense contractor or similar, probably safest to go with a suit. If they are a software company, business casual is probably fine. If they're a startup, jeans and a t-shirt is probably fine. If you're uncertain, consider dressing up slightly; i.e., you think jeans and a t-shirt is fine but aren't sure; go with khakis and a polo. You think business casual is okay but aren't sure, go with a dress shirt and slacks.
In general the commentary along the lines of "would you want to work there if they judged you on your clothes?" is probably true, however it misses a major point. In many roles, roles you may even enjoy, you will interact with executives or with customers, at some level. Even if that doesn't entail dressing up (and oftentimes it won't), being able to show that you can exude professionalism during the interview shows that you can do it in such a situation, and it's generally easier to do that when dressed nicely (though balance it against the discomfort of wearing something you're unaccustomed to).
I don't have all these different kinds of clothing. (And no I don't want to own them either).
Am I the only one who thinks this game should be played the other way around?
If a company needs my services, they should impress me. I am not a model and I am sure as hell not a wage slave. I don't do CVs, and I sure as hell don't talk to HR. I am performing a necessary duty, if I can fill my role then my other traits will be catered for.
From my experience some basic self respect ensures you only end up with good jobs. The positions you have to bend for are not worth bending for imho.
I work at a very casual office, when I've interviewed I've seen just about everything from jeans/t-shirt to a suit. My take away is "look nice" regardless of what level of dress you have chosen. I've been impressed by candidates that wore suits. It shows they understand their appearance is important, however, it is not a deciding factor in the job, just a nice to have. Also had people show up in a suit that is 10 years out of style or with hideous tie,etc. They would have been far better off to come in khakis and a polo.
Here are my basic rules on Interview dressing:
1 When in doubt, wear a suit. For all lifes clothing decisions, better to be over, than under dressed
2 Ask a recruiter whats appropriate, if you are dealing with one.
3 Whatever you wear, make sure it looks nice (no stains, ironed, fits well,etc)
How someone is dressed is a very small part of hiring (in the tech world, less so for other professions), but it does speak to attention to detail, and how they see themselves. Given two equally skilled candidates the one who presents themselves best (attire wise) is going to get the nod.
Yes, they do, and I've seen it once or twice on here from blog posts from company leads/founders talking about their applicants. I don't have it handy, because I don't bookmark that sort of thing, but they believed that you could overdress.
They're simply looking for someone who doesn't dress up because they believe that will indicate someone that they'd want to hire. You, as the applicant, may not be aware of this because there's often incomplete information on both sides of the table (that's what the interview is for). You can always ask indirectly, stop by their place and peek through the windows, or research this information yourself, like looking at company photos. Or you can just do what I do and dress up anyway because someone who believes that dressing up is a negative mark is probably not compatible with me.
> Another quick story before I really dive into this blog post. We had a gentleman over to interview for one of our account executive positions at 42Floors. He had strong experience leasing SF office space: great resume, great cover letter, did well in our initial phone screen.
> When he walked in the door, we could hear the clacking of his shoes on our hardwood floor. He was dressed impeccably in a suit that probably cost more than my first car and was carrying one of those leathery-thingys that seemed to exist only for the purpose of being carried during interviews.
> I stole a glance to a few of the people from my team who had looked up when he walked in. I could sense the disappointment.
> We’re all happily wearing blue jeans and sneakers. It’s not that we’re so petty or strict about the dress code that we are going to disqualify him for not following an unwritten rule, but we know empirically that people who come in dressed in suits rarely work out well for our team.
> He was failing the go-out-for-a-beer test and he didn’t even know it.
No, but if one wears an ill-fitting suit, and or is visibly uncomfortable because of their clothing; that could negatively affect an interviewer's perception of a candidate.
In the UK, I went for a Perl programmer job interview a few years ago in a suit and was told I was overdressed. I then went back to the same company for another interview a couple of years later, in jeans and a polo-shirt and nobody said anything, but I was looked up and down and it was pretty clear to me I was underdressed that time.
I wasn't offered either of the positions. No idea if the way I dressed had any bearing on it.
Example: UK and Nordic business dress codes are miles apart. In the UK every traveling sales person wears a suit. It's especially obvious when we have internal meetings where they dress up for work and can't wait to switch to casual before we go to a restaurant. Meanwhile the swedes all wear jeans to the meeting and dress as smart as possiblr for the restaurant.
For interviews I'd always just dress smart but not wear a suit unless I believe there will be at least one more person in the office wearing a suit. Dress for confidence. Being overdressed and uncomfortable (if you aren't used to wearing suits) isn't a confidence booster. Just be clean and at least as smart looking as the person interviewing.
I think it's more of an industry thing, I've worked in the UK in the games industry and dressing up was definitely not needed.
I actually dressed up once for an interview with Peter Molyneux and the first thing he said before even shaking hands was "oh, you dressed up" with a very confused face.
"Your CV should be about three pages" - I had always been told, keep your CV to two pages, so you can print it on one sheet of paper (both sides).
I like it as it ties back into the main message of these slides: "reading CVs is a chore" so keeping it condensed helps me to focus with showing only the most valuable information.
It's not necessarily bad advice. Brevity is appreciated in all things -- especially by an HR worker or hiring manager, who has to sift through a stack of 300 resumes in a week or so. But it's not a hard-and-fast rule. Also, the one-page advice originated on the non-technical side of the job market. Technical resumes are usually longer than non-technical resumes.
Three pages is pushing it, though, unless you've been around for more than 10 years, or if you have something unique about your history that doesn't quite fit into your Experience section. If you've been granted 20 patents, or if you've been published 20 times in the Harvard Business Review, then by all means, include a section on these things. (But only if you feel they're relevant).
Probably outdated - for my first job search, a recruiter shopped around a beefed up version of my resume that spanned two pages instead of the one I had it. I was surprised that the old adage was not used in practice.
It really depends where you live. In the US it seems you list every significant position you ever held. In Western Europe I have always been told the CV should never takes more than one side. I don't know about other continents or culture.
I've always tried to keep mine to one page. But I've been doing some interviewing at my current company recently and all the ones I see are 2-4 pages, so maybe I'm the only one doing that.
That seems the ideal length - first page is a bit more career context, second page is pretty much keyword pounding - a lot of recruiters and corporate HRs use automated keyword analysis (and are skimming over you anyway), I have bullets listing: languages, technologies, specific software packages and skillsets (no matter how "soft"), so once my experience section has hopefully piqued their interest, they can box tick after that.
I have yet to meet an employer that is actually looking for this. Caring about programming only gets in the way of the atrocities my employer needs me to commit to make things work. Now. One of the differences between academia & real life, I guess.
I am a hiring manager. I do want my people to "care" about programming, more specifically I want them to care about the quality of their work. Not all managers in all companies realize the costs incurred by doing garbage work and the follow on consequences. For those that do, it makes sense to have employees that care to do that level of work. If you are constantly committing atrocities, it may be time to seek out employment where you don't have to do that (I admit, that is far easier said than done)
I'm a hiring manager and it's a surprisingly rare but strong signal that someone has a record of contributions or portfolio, especially given how low the barrier to entry is. It's practically an automatic interview given the CVs I've seen and hire if you can talk intelligently and engagingly about what you've worked on.
Then why would you waste space (and interviewer time) by putting it on your CV. The CV is basically your first impression with a company (assuming you aren't coming in through backchannels). Basically everything you put into it should have a purpose.
Am I doing something wrong or is this website horribly non-functional, after 20ish seconds it just goes blank and tries to start loading a new page, if you try and download the slides it just pops up a blank modal.
I encountered the same thing and pasted in the following in the console to disable all timers(1):
// Set a fake timeout to get the highest timeout id
var highestTimeoutId = setTimeout(";");
for (var i = 0 ; i < highestTimeoutId ; i++) {
clearTimeout(i);
}
Ha! I'd never looked at at the value returned from setTimeout to see what it was. Obviously it was going to be some sort of ID but it never occurred to me that it was a simple counter. Neat trick.
I just hit ESC a bunch of times as the page was loading and it seemed to stop the offending code from getting a chance to execute.
Readit News
Dear young readers. Seriously, don't do that. Waste of space at best. Looks just stupid at worst. It doesn't tell me anything about your ability as a programmer at all. Description about a weekend project is much more useful. And no, clarifying whether someone wants latte with regular or soy milk is not a 'communication skill'.
Unfortunately, I don't have the breadth of experience detailed in the slideshow to even justify a multi-page CV. In my environment, we work with a 1 page resume and <2 minutes of interaction with a recruiter at a career fair (~30% chance they're technical).
I have a variety of side projects I've hacked on, but it's very hit and miss -- some recruiters care a lot, others care more about my GPA and what classes I have taken.
What can students like myself do to best position ourselves in these situations, especially when we can't have multiple resumes for every company there is (and are forced to generalize)?
If you don't have anything for your resume, all you can be is smart and engaging.
If you still have time in school, picking up an interesting project is very worthwhile. We could do side projects for credit. I don't really care if you wrote it in Javascript, if it is web enabled, or you did math with matlab; just give me something to talk to you about, and I can figure out if the several fairly well defined projects I have in mind could be tackled by you.
In other words, I don't look for a college grad with no work experience to be able to lead a team, design a product, and so on. I have a bunch of 'turn the crank' work, and a few challenges to throw out as well. I don't want to babysit you, but I also want you to ask questions and learn. Part of interning is giving back to the community, but part of it is I have work I need done. So, when I read your CV and/or talk to you, I just want to figure out if you can perform at that capacity.
If there is nothing left to talk about I resort to asking about your coursework. 'What courses are you taking'. 'Blah, and foodle, and a compiler course.' Okay, can you tell me what a recursive descent parser is? uhh...I've never heard of that" That is an actual conversation I had with somebody recently. I blame the school more than the person, but no offer was made. I wasn't going to have the candidate code a parser for me, either for the interview or the job, but I just wanted to have a conversation about anything where I could probe knowledge (less important) and ability (more important). Find an area that know something about, find the limit, inject a new piece of information, and see if they can assimilate it. If they can, that's an offer. If not, probably not.
To be fair, you'll probably get a lot of "code 'delete_node' for a binary tree type questions, so like it or not brush up on that crap.
Beyond that, for me at least, the CV isn't very important. If everything you list is about networking and databases, and I am looking for graphics programming, I scratch my head as to why you are applying and probably move to the next resume. A fit in interests is important, after all.
Of course, none of those panned out either. A few took hires with more experience and one offered me a job at an embarrassingly low salary (i.e., less than I made as a summer lifeguard).
Ultimately, what worked for me was getting in with a good company doing low level tech work (help desk) which got my recommendations for an internal position. This was my first lesson in corporate hiring: the most effective way to find a job is knowing someone.
(this was not my case because my first ever internship was through word of mouth)
- Basic info (of course)
- Courses/Certificates
- Voluntary experience
- Personal projects
- Conferences/seminars attended
- Skills (programming languages, etc)
Don't worry if it's half a page, but you may want to increase spacing/font size
Do something and write it down. Most coursework is not relevant here, but classes that involve a large project - put down the what you did for it. Did you design something? Build something? Discover something? Win something? Lead something? I'm not talking about regular lab projects here, I mean big things that take at least half a semester.
This has been my approach, YMMV. People can appreciate if you demonstrate an ability to DO stuff.
But you can target 3-5 companies which you reckon you stand the best chance of getting in.
Research up the wazoo on your selected handful. The best is if you can network into present employees and probe into what's actually going on in there. What technologies do they really use, what's griefing them, and most important of all, why's this req open.
By working backward from why THEY need that extra pair of hands, YOU stand out as the best person for the job.
In my experience, development experience is relatively easy for students to obtain while in school. Internships are abundant (obviously not everyone is going to come out of school having worked for Google or Microsoft but most people who want to get development experience during college can find it). Personal projects are another way of doing something "useful" that have effectively zero barrier to entry.
It isn't too hard to do something "useful" as developer in college, if one has the motivation...
This actually happened to me a couple of weeks ago, and I do have JavaScript listed in my languages section...
The HR people literally just do a "Find" for words without reading the rest, and that gets you a phone interview.
I made the change to education at the bottom after watching a recruiter read my resume in person--I could actually see the moment she got to the education section and tuned out completely. It turns out people in tech tend to be turned off by my chemistry degrees. (Aside: It would be cool to have some sort of service that allowed you to A/B test resumes against a certain hiring demographic.)
Leaving off the education section is interesting... I'm assuming this strategy is to give you an opportunity to create interest as a candidate before the (inevitable?) question comes up, "I see you didn't mention education on your resume... Could you tell me more about that?"
Edit: Grammatical fumbling.
Or, it's worth 0 lines if you think that's not the kind of company you want to work for.
I once had a hiring manager ask why my K-12 education was not on my resume... he said he had wanted to filter out my CV on that basis; then I filtered his company partly on that basis.
I have a bachelor of Software Engineering (certified Engineer) with First Class Honors, and I know I'm usually competing against people with a Comp Sci. degree, or even just a diploma. I think it's important to highlight my education, as it puts me a cut above.
Am I being a little stuck-up?
What would you suggest for a contractors CV which is primarily filled with 1-2 month contracts?
I usually try get the last years work on the CV, but as you can imagine that starts to take up quite a bit of room when you have many short term contracts.
For example:
Senior Consultant For the past 24 months, I've worked with a large number of varied clients to realise true business value for them. This has included Real Example A and Specific Detail B, but beyond the pure technical skills, it has highlighted the value of softer skills.
Most notably, I recently worked with the estate of Douglas Adams in an ecommerce towel distribution hub. Don't panic, I'm the right chap for the job.
This is my CV, I try to be straight to the point and keep it under 2 pages on the word version.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/allandegnan
To be fair the advice is largely still apt.
#1 First step is generally clueless recruiters who'll want you to have 9 years experience with Java 12.
#2 Convince them, your CV goes over. If it has any meat or interesting projects, you'll get called in.
#3 Smile, be likable and be able to talk about $foo at a resonable level and you've got the contract.
If I take you on I want some indication that you're going to stay around long enough for the investment we're going to make in you to be worthwhile. We'll normally pay a recruitment fee and then we'll pay you while you're learning about our product, our industry, our processes and the specific technologies you haven't worked with that we use, and we'll be paying our existing staff to take time out from coding to do those things. That's not inconsiderable.
Obviously your experience may render some of that irrelevant. If that's the case then if you're massively better than the other candidates I may take the risk but if you're not, then I can take you or I can take the person who is as good but will stick around longer. That's not a tough decision.
I'm not looking for gold watch territory or even an indication that you might be around for 5 years, and I'm not looking for a guarantee, but if your CV shows a pattern of you moving every 15 months I need to work out why I think I won't be your next 15 month stint and if I think I think I am whether it'll be worth my while.
If you had a business, would you want to hire someone who is probably going to jump to another job in a few months?
However, even if HR doesn't like it, if you do get an interview, then you can tell them a happy story to explain what happened. It helps if you can convince them that this time you'll stick around, provided the necessary conditions are met. Then ask several questions to clarify the points that are important to you.
What's the Perl scene like in the UK? As a former Perl professional, I'm continually not impressed by the caliber of some of my colleagues. I've actually left for greener pastures.
[1] Or, tried to, but there are still pockets of Perl everywhere that no-one ever got around to rewriting. See: Amazon, the BBC, etc.
One thing I have been noticing lately with HR drones, is that unless you have stated specifically that you worked in technology X on a project at work, it doesn't matter how many off work projects you might have done in the said technology.
Even if there are other people using the said projects.
They just go top to bottom looking for keywords.
I write a job spec which lists what we're looking for which is advertised and passed to recruiters - if you're interested in the job you've almost certainly seen that.
Assuming you do have the experience, using the spec you should be able to tweak your CV in about 5 minutes to highlight the key things we're looking for. If you do that, you've cleared this (very low) bar with a very small time investment and it's not a problem. If your CV makes it past the recruiter (or HR department or other non-technical screener) I then know that the CV I'm looking at is worth my time and the following interview is more focused as I know a bit more about what you've done where.
Yes you are having to spend time but, as I say, this should be a very short tweak to your existing CV so it doesn't feel like a big ask given that I'm going to spend longer than that reading it (and hopefully interviewing you about it).
Obviously if there is no job spec then this doesn't work so well but there's usually something, even if it's just stuff you've gleaned from the advert or conversations with the person you learned about the role from.
As an aside, please don't ever try to get round the keyword thing by listing everything you've done or used. I had a CV the other week which listed 43 skills, tools and technologies for one nine month role. From that I have no way of knowing what you used in passing and what you really know - you've provided so much information it just became noise. My rule when I'm working out what to put - if you put it on your CV you'd better feel happy answering (proper) questions about it and I don't believe that you passed that threshold with 43 things in a nine month period.
This is a quite conservative document: your CV is a little piece of shit in the stack, people have better stuff to do than read your freaking CV, you stupid millennial, they hate recruiting and they are absolutely not willing to spend any time on it, and there are millions other people waiting for your job, so you'd better get in the freaking line before they retract the privilege they gave you by accepting your CV in their stack. And the lowest salary in the team does the actual interviews, because I told you I have better things to do.
I guess it might depend on the industry, but at most interviews I have done, the expectation has been to just wear jeans and whatever. I usually go with jeans and a polo shirt for safety.
It really depends on the place. If there's a recruiter involved, ask them. Otherwise, (the following is based on my experience in the US, YMMV, etc), if they're not a software company, or are a defense contractor or similar, probably safest to go with a suit. If they are a software company, business casual is probably fine. If they're a startup, jeans and a t-shirt is probably fine. If you're uncertain, consider dressing up slightly; i.e., you think jeans and a t-shirt is fine but aren't sure; go with khakis and a polo. You think business casual is okay but aren't sure, go with a dress shirt and slacks.
In general the commentary along the lines of "would you want to work there if they judged you on your clothes?" is probably true, however it misses a major point. In many roles, roles you may even enjoy, you will interact with executives or with customers, at some level. Even if that doesn't entail dressing up (and oftentimes it won't), being able to show that you can exude professionalism during the interview shows that you can do it in such a situation, and it's generally easier to do that when dressed nicely (though balance it against the discomfort of wearing something you're unaccustomed to).
Am I the only one who thinks this game should be played the other way around?
If a company needs my services, they should impress me. I am not a model and I am sure as hell not a wage slave. I don't do CVs, and I sure as hell don't talk to HR. I am performing a necessary duty, if I can fill my role then my other traits will be catered for.
From my experience some basic self respect ensures you only end up with good jobs. The positions you have to bend for are not worth bending for imho.
Here are my basic rules on Interview dressing:
1 When in doubt, wear a suit. For all lifes clothing decisions, better to be over, than under dressed 2 Ask a recruiter whats appropriate, if you are dealing with one. 3 Whatever you wear, make sure it looks nice (no stains, ironed, fits well,etc)
How someone is dressed is a very small part of hiring (in the tech world, less so for other professions), but it does speak to attention to detail, and how they see themselves. Given two equally skilled candidates the one who presents themselves best (attire wise) is going to get the nod.
And a sense of fashion is relevant to the job...how, exactly?
As general advice, this is wrong. There are a lot of positions where wearing a suit to the interview would automatically mean you won't get hired.
Of course, it depends on the locale, the position, &c, but the idea that a suit is always safe is somewhat outdated.
They're simply looking for someone who doesn't dress up because they believe that will indicate someone that they'd want to hire. You, as the applicant, may not be aware of this because there's often incomplete information on both sides of the table (that's what the interview is for). You can always ask indirectly, stop by their place and peek through the windows, or research this information yourself, like looking at company photos. Or you can just do what I do and dress up anyway because someone who believes that dressing up is a negative mark is probably not compatible with me.
It's come up a few times on HN that some companies do do this. They are widely regarded as completely nuts.
> When he walked in the door, we could hear the clacking of his shoes on our hardwood floor. He was dressed impeccably in a suit that probably cost more than my first car and was carrying one of those leathery-thingys that seemed to exist only for the purpose of being carried during interviews.
> I stole a glance to a few of the people from my team who had looked up when he walked in. I could sense the disappointment.
> We’re all happily wearing blue jeans and sneakers. It’s not that we’re so petty or strict about the dress code that we are going to disqualify him for not following an unwritten rule, but we know empirically that people who come in dressed in suits rarely work out well for our team.
> He was failing the go-out-for-a-beer test and he didn’t even know it.
http://web.archive.org/web/20140618142018/http://blog.42floo...
I wasn't offered either of the positions. No idea if the way I dressed had any bearing on it.
For interviews I'd always just dress smart but not wear a suit unless I believe there will be at least one more person in the office wearing a suit. Dress for confidence. Being overdressed and uncomfortable (if you aren't used to wearing suits) isn't a confidence booster. Just be clean and at least as smart looking as the person interviewing.
I actually dressed up once for an interview with Peter Molyneux and the first thing he said before even shaking hands was "oh, you dressed up" with a very confused face.
I like it as it ties back into the main message of these slides: "reading CVs is a chore" so keeping it condensed helps me to focus with showing only the most valuable information.
Three pages is pushing it, though, unless you've been around for more than 10 years, or if you have something unique about your history that doesn't quite fit into your Experience section. If you've been granted 20 patents, or if you've been published 20 times in the Harvard Business Review, then by all means, include a section on these things. (But only if you feel they're relevant).
That seems the ideal length - first page is a bit more career context, second page is pretty much keyword pounding - a lot of recruiters and corporate HRs use automated keyword analysis (and are skimming over you anyway), I have bullets listing: languages, technologies, specific software packages and skillsets (no matter how "soft"), so once my experience section has hopefully piqued their interest, they can box tick after that.
(mostly in Canada)
I just hit ESC a bunch of times as the page was loading and it seemed to stop the offending code from getting a chance to execute.
With AdBlock it's working perfectly.
I also saw requests to LinkedIn going from SlideShare, I wonder why.. https://twitter.com/NicolaeNMV/status/527092523987402752
[0] http://www.slideshare.net/about