Re: [tlug] [OT] Good IT Resume

["Josh Glover" <jmglov@example.com>]

On 19/07/07, Mattia Dongili <malattia@example.com> wrote:

> My job seeking experience in Japan is very recent,

Ditto, 'cept: s/very//

> my CV is available online

Ditto:

http://www.jmglov.net/professional/resume.pdf

Source:

http://www.jmglov.net/professional/resume.tex


On the other side of the divide, I have been doing a lot of
interviewing recently, and I can tell you what I look for in a CV, in
order of decreasing importance:

1. Brevity. It simply must fit on one sheet of paper, front and back.
I'm not going to read any more than that, and no-one else will,
either. Unless you are applying for a Lead Engineer / Enterprise
Architect position on a *big* project, you simply do not need more
than two sides to convince me of your qualifications.

2. Spelling / grammar / prose. Gone are the days when technical people
could say, "I'm an engineer; I write code, not English". If you cannot
communicate effectively, I'm not going to consider even having you in
for an interview; your job search ends with your poorly written CV. If
you are not a native speaker of the language in which the CV is being
prepared, have a native speaker proof-read it. In fact, have a friend
proof-read it anyway. Having a snappy, typo-free CV is like wearing a
suit to the interview; it does not really convey anything about your
*ability* to do the job, but it says plenty about your *willingness*
to do the job and your attitude if you should get it.

3. Objective / Introduction. This should be the first thing on your
CV, after your contact header (see below) and should communicate, in
one or two short sentences, who you are and what you want. This is
*hard* to get right, but spend lots of time crafting the most
effective sentence you can, because that is the hook to the whole CV.
If you bore me there, I may only skim the rest of your CV. If your
objective statement is something like, "To achieve a job with a great
company!", I'll probably drop your CV in the shredder right then and
there. Whereas if you wow me with that line, I will work hard to wring
all the juice out of your CV, and most important of all, you have won
the right to the benefit of the doubt, not just in the CV reading
portion, but also in the interview.

4. Don't lie! Anything you put on that CV is fair game for me to ask
you about, and if you cannot remember anything about the thing,
consider leaving it off your CV. SOP for phone screens at Amazon is to
see if you lied on your CV, because that is the easiest way to
eliminate someone from consideration in the first 10 minutes.

5. This is closely related to (1), but is important enough to say
again: cut out unnecessary cruft. This is the 21st century; the top of
your CV[1] should list your name and your email address (the top of my
CV is simply a RFC 2822[2] format email address). If you want to add
another piece of contact data, use your mobile phone. If you don't
have a mobile phone, buy one. I do not care about your home address,
your home phone, or the directions to your favourite coffee shop, so
leave 'em out. And again, unless you are applying for a truly 偉い
technical position, I don't care about any work experience past the
last three jobs you had. If you are a consultant, this can be tricky,
so list gigs in a very compressed format, with the name of the client
in parens if you can disclose that. Don't list education before uni
unless you do not have a university degree, and then list only high
school / college.

6. Skills. This is the buzzword-compliant section where you need to
focus on SEO for the recruiters' (both HR and external recruiters)
PageRank algorithm. ;) I will skim this section, just noting things
like C++, MySQL, etc. See (4), though; if you write it here, I may ask
you a searching question to see if "C++" means "took one semester back
in uni where we just learned about linked lists and did not use any of
the OO stuff".

7. Other interests. This is one of the most fun things to read on a
CV, and you are almost guaranteed to have my full attention here
(unless you screwed up in points 1-6), so take advantage of it. Show
me what an interesting person you are and how much fun /
intellectually stimulating it would be to have you in the next cube.
But don't be pretentious; if your passion is beer tasting[3], say so!
Who cares that it is not at all related to coding? :) Of course, if
your hobby is mud-wrestling underage girls, you might want to leave
that off... ;) Here is where my own CV[1] could use improvement; it
should be more fun, not just the work-like stuff I do in my free time.

8. Bullet lists are good. Format information for quick digestion; I
may be scanning a lot, and you want to make sure that I can easily hit
the high points. Here is a problem with my CV[1]: in the Skills
section, I should have left out that "Experienced with" stuff and just
gone with comma-separated lists as my bullet items. Less is more, 2006
Josh! ;)

Also, please read:
* http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ResumeRead.html
* http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/SortingResumes.html
* http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePhoneScreen.html
* http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html

This will prepare you to work at any company that you want to work for
(hint, if their interviewing process is not similar to this in
important ways, find another place to apply).

Cheers,
Josh

[1] http://www.jmglov.net/professional/GLOVER-Josh_CV.pdf
[2] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2822
[3] http://ratebeer.com/