Hints for Resume Writers

I’m in the midst of wading through about 100 resumes for a few job openings we have, which is in a highly technical area. I have found a few good ones, but my pile of not so good ones is much, much bigger. None of the ones I’ve gotten are stupid, they are all nicely formatted and spell checked, but here are a few higher level things I’d like to see.

It is good to put the type of job you are seeking. It is even better if this objective has something to do with the jobs posted. However, it is not good to give objectives about advancing your career, having a good time, etc. I’m happy to hear that you want to make more money for our company, but you are just out of school and our company has tens of billions of dollars in revenue, so you had best show me something about how you intend to do it. Otherwise, let us figure it out.

I’m glad that you read the job description, and care enough about submitting your resume to modify the objectives to match what we are looking for. However, you might want to see if there is anything in your experience relevant to this job. If not, I’m not going to be very convinced.

If you are at a school with lots of students, and they give you a resume template, throw it out. One very well respected university seems to give its MS students such a template, and I have 30 at least resumes that look exactly the same. Too much choice means no choice. Exactly one had something in addition - that one got looked at.

I’m in engineering and CS, so a list of tools and languages you have experience with is very helpful. What would be even more helpful is a line or two about how you used the tool or language. Class project? Internship? Looked at the manual? Looked at the website? We fully expect to train new people, even prefer to, but this helps.

This is in no way a rant. I worry that some great candidate is hidden by a bad resume. There is nothing I’d like better than to hire you, have you help us, and get back to more fun pursuits.

Hiring people, other suggestions?

In the IT (development) world, a big thing is knowing your technology.

A few hints, guys:

  1. Visual Studio is not a language. If I see “Skills: Languages: C, C++, C#, Visual Basic, Visual Studio”, that means that you either are careless or don’t actually know what the difference between a programming language and an IDE actually is.
  2. Know what frameworks and libraries are, and what makes them different from a language and different from an IDE. .NET is not a language. ASP.NET is not a language. ASP.NET can be called from any language that targets .NET.
  3. When listing responsibilities of prior jobs, list the actual technologies used. For example, instead of saying “Principal developer for the Floobigoob Management System, an enterprise resource management system (ERM).”, say “Principal developer for the Floobigoob Management System, an enterprise resource management system (ERM) built with C#, .NET 3.5, ASP.NET MVP, and SQL Server 2005.” We do actually want to see the actual technologies, because we don’t want to have to train you for 6 months. We want you to be productive within the month.

This probably doesn’t come up in your field (I hope!), but it does for graphic designers and other art types: Please, don’t be too creative with your resume. The information on it is more important than the design, and if you forget that I’m going to think you’re a bad designer as well. (I haven’t done hiring in a long time, but yeah.)

Do your job listings include instructions like these? If not, why not?

Though I don’t speak for the OP:

It’s not our job to spoon feed applicants about how to prepare a resume. There are ridiculous amounts of resume advice out there. There are books, for students there are career services centers…the applicant has responsibility for the documentation they submit, not me. My job postings state the required and preferred qualifications. If the applicant doesn’t let me know they meet the required quals, I can’t even consider them past the initial screening.

And I do what I can to make sure people job hunting in my field know this. I volunteer as a resume reviewer at our major annual conference, I review over the phone, but when I’m hiring, I cannot and will not say “please do this thing so you have a better chance”.

The OP pleases me. It seems like every time a hiring manager complains about resumes, it’s always the same deal: poor spelling, nonstandard layout (like, say, prose), obvious contradictions, and other basic mistakes. Great, just make sure your resume is polished, I think everyone knows that.

But with the way things have been going, there’s plenty of jobseekers out there who know how to turn in a mechanically perfect resume. So now it’s useful to know how to add the extra touches that will get the hiring manager to look at the resume over and above the adequate stuff.

And half the complaints are along the lines of “stop taking X advice” and only half the time are they along the lines of “Y is not qualified.” Well, frankly, I don’t have much sympathy. As a person offering a job, it should be no surprise to you that people who don’t have exactly the right qualifications are going to give it a try anyway. Can you realy blame them? People need jobs. They wouldn’t be applying if they didn’t.

And if somebody does have the right qualifications and the main complaint is that they haven’t explained it in exactly the right way, then I’m not all that sympathetic to that complaint either. If you can tell they’re qualified, then it’s on you.

If its’ a routine issue that people who are qualified aren’t telling you that in exactly the way you want to hear it, then I think that’s a sign that you either should be more explicit in your listings. Otherwise, I don’t really see what you have to complain about.

This, and more.

Can you really really blame people who submit apps for jobs, even though they don’t have exactly the right cred that your are looking for? When your job postings list six pages of sought skills that Og Himself doesn’t know?

(This phenomenon isn’t new, of course. Job seekers in 1970 had the same complaint. But it’s gotten vastly worse now.)

The day that IBM first announced the IBM PC, did you really think you could hire programmers with 5 years experience doing that? Did all you HR toadies, hiring AS400 computer operators, really think that an experienced CDC7600 operator couldn’t learn the job quickly?

I just got a Certificate in Network Administration, which also included coursework in Windows Server, Active Directory, SQL Server programming and admin, and Linux admin. It was well understood by everyone in these classes that the whole curriculum barely scratched the surface, if even that, of what an real employee in the field needed. Where do you HR people think new grads are going to get that kind of real-world experience to fill that gap, if you won’t hire people right out of school?

I rarely see job listings for “entry level” jobs any more. They all want multiple years experience with all kinds of things that our textbooks covered in only 1 page or less. Even the few so-called “entry level” jobs are anything but, as even those require very substantial and broad experience. You HR folks who are writing these fantasy wish-lists know who you are – it’s ALL of you.

Any you wonder why there are so many jobs available these days that you can’t find qualified applicants for. It’s because companies aren’t willing to train (much) to fill in that gap. What will you do when all the skilled people start to retire, and you have no next generation of younger people ready to take their places, because you’ve left them in the lurch out of school?

And one last thing: Please stop calling us “candidates”.

What is it about the term “candidate” that bothers you?
What would you prefer and why?

I’m not saying that they have to tell me in any specific way, but that they have to tell me somehow. I work for a state agency. If our posting says, in the required qualifications, “experience working with financial information databases” and you don’t give me any hint that you have that experience in some way, shape or form, I have to set your materials aside. And I’m not in a bleeding-edge profession, so no, you’re not going to get the “5 years experience working with X” when X has only existed for 2 years from us.

I’ll say this too: we’re generous in letting applicants (FWIW, they’re applicants until we bring them in, then they’re candidates) tell us how they meet the qualifications, and sell themselves to us. Just because we wouldn’t have thought that your job A gave you skill B, if you find a way to tell us that it did, then fantastic and we love to see that.

Regarding applicants who are not qualified, I blame HR. I can’t tell you the number of times I see “must have MS or BS” when they ROUTINELY accept people with lesser degrees, and the person who is needing the talent doesn’t care about an MS when a BS will suffice. So what the heck I will apply to anything I am remotely qualified for. What’s the worst that can happen? It gets thrown out and I’m no worse off than had I never applied, but potentially there’s a miscommunication and I get an interview.

A couple of years ago I was on the hiring committee for an entry-level position, and received two memorable applications from college students who were about to graduate.

One was a journalism major and had a fairly impressive list of internships and college media experience (editor on the school paper, DJ on campus radio)…but nothing that seemed related to the actual job we were hiring for. Her cover letter didn’t address this either. I might have considered her for a job in broadcasting, which was her stated career goal, but there was no indication that she even understood what sort of job she was actually applying for.

The other was a theater major who wrote a very good cover letter explaining how his experiences in the theater had helped him to develop skills that would be useful to us, such as good communication, poise under pressure, and the ability to work as part of a team. He’d also had a summer job that was at least vaguely related to our field. But when I saw his actual resume I actually laughed out loud, then immediately felt sorry for him. It was an actor’s resume, with his height, race, eye color, etc., and a list of his acting roles. The summer job he’d mentioned in his cover letter wasn’t even included.