What is Digg?145 Comments
- timpkmn89, on 10/12/2007, -1/+201Or you could be more honest and put Time Person of the Year
- seanmc303, on 10/12/2007, -1/+135I just tape a taco to my resume. The taco lets them know what I'm all about.
- bradford, on 10/12/2007, -8/+1411. Find a relatively flat, rigid object with good contrasting texture (a credit card or maple leaf are good examples).
2. Place this object under your resume on a hard, flat surface (tabletops work quite well).
3. Hold a standard No. 2 pencil with the graphite under your index finger.
4. Rub vigorously on your resume with the pencil in the area of your object.
5. Congratulations, you now know "How To Make An Impression w/ Your Resume in 30 Seconds."
>_> - littleidiot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+100yeah, usually places like mcdonalds only require you to fill out an application... ;)
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+70He used up his 30 seconds on me waiting for his page to load. Had that been his resume I would have moved on before I ever saw it.
- phatvolvo, on 10/12/2007, -2/+71now they have your resume AND your credit card number.
- Rikkochet, on 10/12/2007, -2/+54How's Blockbuster treating you?
- flamingmb, on 10/12/2007, -4/+53Just put the title as "I AM GOD." It could backfire though.
- LGod, on 10/12/2007, -0/+45I would say less than 30 seconds. I mean, think about how much time you actually spend looking at Digg articles that you will end up reading. There are many articles and I spend less than 10 seconds to decide if I am going to read it and if I read it, I might Digg it. And these are things many of us are actually interested it. Most of the times employers are doing to same thing, they glance over it and look for something that pops out at them.
- pbslya, on 10/12/2007, -1/+45As a hiring manager in IT, I want to stress a few things to everyone writing a resume:
1) Everything said in this article is 100% correct. Your resume may only get 30s to 1min max. I generally receive 100+ resumes for every opening, and I have no time to read them. The goal is to reduce that number from 100 to 25 on the first pass and then bring that down to 5-10 on the second pass. Several people will read your resume. All of them will be very critical of its content.
2) "Your job history, -- your professional experience -- is the heart of your resume" This cannot be stressed strongly enough. You should devote 80% of the time writing your resume to explaining your professional experience.
3) When you write your resume, you need to understand that you have two goals. First you need to get past the recruiter by meeting all standard resume guidelines while hitting the keywords they are looking for. Second, you need to stand out enough to warrant a second look from the hiring manager. If you accomplish those two things, you stand a reasonable chance at getting an interview.
4) Simple formatting and proper grammar are both very important. Keep in mind that your resume may be reformatted into plain text before it is forwarded to the hiring manager.
5) And finally...my biggest resume pet peeve would be the absence of months in job history dates. If you write that you worked at a job from 2005 to 2006, I have no way of knowing whether that was for 2 weeks or for 2 years. It is very frustrating to throw away these resumes for what seems like such a minor issue.
I could go on at length about resumes, but I think the points above cover most of it. If you are lucky enough you'll get an interview. At that point you have a completely new arena to mess up severely. :) - windhawk, on 10/12/2007, -4/+47You've got 30 seconds
A Glimpse and a Hook
The terrifying reality regarding your resume is that for all the many hours you put into fine-tuning, you've got 30 seconds to make an impression on me. Maybe less.
It's unfair, it's imprecise, and there's a good chance that I make horrible mistakes, but there's a lot more of you than me, and while hiring phenomenal teams is the most important thing I do, I'm balancing that task with the fact that I need to build product and manage the endless stream of people walking into my office.
But here's a glimpse. I'm going to walk through the exact mental process I use when I look at a resume. I don't know if this is right or efficient, but after fifteen years and staring at thousands of resumes, this is the process.
The First Pass
Your Name. It's simple. Do I know you? Whether I do or not, I'm going to immediately Google you to see if I should. Oh, you a have a weblog. Excellent.
Company Names. Do I recognize any companies that you worked at? If I do, I don't look at what you actually do, I assume that if I recognize the company, I'm in the ballpark. If I don't know the company, I scan for keywords in the description to get a rough idea. Hmmmmm... networking words. Ok, you're a networking guy.
Job Description and History. Here I'm looking for history and trajectory. How many jobs have you had and for how long? How long have you been in your current role? Where'd you come from? QA? Or have you always been an engineer? This is when I start looking for inconsistencies and warning flags.
Other Interests and Extracurriculars. Yeah, this is part of the first pass. I'm eagerly looking to find something that makes you different from the last fifty resumes I looked at. More on this in a moment.
So, we're done. It's been ten to twenty seconds and I've already formed an opinion. There's a good chance that I've already made a call whether to move forward on you. If there are other folks checking the resume out, I can certainly be convinced to take a second look, but a basic opinion has been formed.
Before we move to the second pass, let's talk about the parts of your resume I didn't look at and never will.
Professional objective. This is likely your lead paragraph and I skipped it. Career center counselors across the planet are slamming their fists on their desks as they read this because they've been telling students, "You need to write a crisp career objective. It defines your resume."
Yes, it does, but I still don't read it and it's not because there isn't good content there, it's the time issue. See, if your resume is sitting in my inbox it means someone has already mapped you to an open job in my group. Reading your objective is going to tell me something I already know. Besides, my job title and description scrub will tell me whether we're in the ballpark or not. If I've got a Jr. Engineering position open and you've got 10 years experience, I'll figure out that mismatch when I look at your history.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't include this objective in your resume. As you'll see below, there's more to the process than just me reading your resume, and different folks are looking for different content.
Skills. I skip the skills section not only because this is information I'll derive from job history, but also because this section is full of misinformation. I'm not going to say that people lie in the skills section, but I know that if a candidate has heard the word Linux in the workplace, there's a good chance they're going to put Familiarity with Linux as a skill on their resume.
Besides, again, I know you've goofed around with Linux because you said so in the description of your last job, right?
Summary of Qualifications. Similar to Skills, this is another skip section for me. Here's a good example from an imaginary resume: "Proven success in leading technical problem solving situations". This line tells me nothing. Yes, I know you're trying to tell me that you're strategic, but there is no way you're going to convince me that you're strategic in a resume. I'm going to learn that from a phone screen and from an interview.
Unlike Skills, which I find to be a total waste of time, I will go back to Summary of Qualifications if we end up talking. When you write "Established track record for delivering measurable results under tight schedules", I am going to ask you what the hell you mean on the phone and if your answer isn't instant and insightful, I'll know your qualifications are designed to be buzzword compliant and don't actually define your qualifications.
The Second Pass
If I can't decide whether to schedule a phone screen after the first pass, I go for another. The goal now is, "Ok, I saw something I liked in the first pass, is it real?" This is when I do the following:
In-depth Job History. I'm going to actually read the job history for the past couple of jobs. Not all of them, just the last two or three. What I'm doing is fleshing out my mental picture of you. I'm looking for more warning flags. Do your responsibilities match your title? How long were you at your most recent job? If it was a long time, can I get a sense of how you grew? If it was short, can I figure out why you left? Do your last two jobs build on each other? Can I get a sense of where you're headed or are you all over the place?
Your job history, -- your professional experience -- is the heart of your resume. This is where I spent my time vetting you and this is where you should spend your time making sure I'm going to get the most complete picture of who you are and what you're going to bring to my team.
School. Yeah, this is the first time I'll notice whether you went to college or not. I purposely do this because I've found over years of hiring that a name brand university biases my opinion too early. There's a lot to be said for a candidate who gets accepted to and graduates from Stanford or MIT, but I've made just as many bad hires from these colleges as great ones.
Seeing a non-Computer Science degree is not a warning flag. In fact, I'm a huge fan of hiring physics majors as engineers. For whatever reason, the curriculum for physics has a good intersection with computer science. Any technical major for me is perfectly acceptable, and even non-technical majors with a technical job history make for a resume worth thinking about.
Ok, so that second pass took another 15 to 30 seconds and we're done. You've just given me the opportunity to change your life by potentially bringing you in for an interview and that chance is over. Next!
What's unfair about what just happened is this. You spent hours working on your resume. You sent it to close friends for review and you edited it. You agonized over the different sections and you stressed about the tone, and here I am, the hiring manager, and I read 1/10th of your work in 30 seconds.
Don't despair. There are some easy things you can do to improve your chances.
Differentiate, Don't Annoy
Design your resume to downgrade. Your resume needs to withstand some formatting abuse. Go get your resume right now and convert it to plain text. Can you still see the different sections? Is your job history still cleanly formatted? Can you still see the different jobs as well as the start and stop dates? Screw around with the margins, too. Where are your line breaks? They'd better not be after every line because that means visual chaos if a well-intentioned recruiter starts messing with fonts.
Never include a cover letter. I don't read them. Recruiters don't pass them on. Make sure the key points of your cover letter are living in your career objective and your job history.
Embrace honest buzzword compliance. Remember, I'm not the only who is going to read your resume. I'm likely the most qualified to make a call whether you're a fit for my job, but before your resume gets to me, its going to be passed through a couple of different recruiters and these folks are just as busy as I am.
The lifeblood of the recruiter is the keyword. Java, C++, Objective-C. The more specific relevant keywords and buzzwords you can shove into your resume, there more likely you're going to make it past the initial cut.
As I said above, I skip the Skills section because most folks already know that recruiters are just searching for specific words when they're sourcing candidates, so they shove every possible buzzword into their resume. Know this, if you claim to Strong Java Background in your resume, I'm going to be compelled to figure out how strong your skills actually are. Don't include any keyword or buzzword that you aren't comfortable talking about at length.
Differentiate, don't annoy. You're likely going to start developing your resume from a template. Maybe you'll use a friend's resume that you like as a starting point. Excellent. How are you going to make it yours?
Remember, I've looked at thousands of resumes, which means I've seen all the standard templates. I know when you're using Microsoft Word and I know when you've developed a format of your own. Right this second, I'm flipping through a dozen college resumes and the ones I'm spending time on are the ones that grab me visually, where there is something different. On this one, the fellow put a subtle gray box around each of his section headings. On this other one, the candidate used a nice combination of serif and sans serif fonts to grab me.
A couple of subtle visual differences to your resume goes a long way toward keeping me engaged in reading it, but remember, we're engineers here and efficiency matters. Differentiating your resume to the point that I can't quickly parse it is going to frustrate me. You're not applying to be a visual designer; you're an engineer. Keep to the standard sections and don't make me work to figure out who you are.
Sound like a human. Here's a doozy, this intern says he "planned, designed, and coordinated engineers efforts for the development of a mission critical system". ZzzzzzzzzzZzz. What did this guy actually do? I honestly don't know. Let's call this type of writing style resume mumbo jumbo and let's agree that usage of this style is tantamount to saying nothing at all.
What was the mission critical system? Why was it critical? How in the world did an intern plan, design, and coordinate the engineering efforts? I'm a fan of giving interns real world work, but it'd take a world-class intern to plan, design, and manage engineers on whatever this mission critical system is.
Take time to write your resume for a human. You need to hit all the right buzzwords and keywords to get yourself past the layers of recruiters, but I'm the guy who is really going to take apart your resume, and if you're saying nothing with resume mumbo jumbo, I'm learning nothing. Give me specifics and give them to me in a familiar tone. I'm not an automaton; I honestly want to know what you do. Tell me a story.
Include seemingly irrelevant experience. This applies mostly to college types who lack experience in high technology. You're going to stress that your job history doesn't include any engineering and you're thinking your summer working at Borders bookstore is irrelevant. It's not. Any job teaches you something. Even though you weren't coding in C++, I want to know what you learned by being a bookseller. Was it your first job? What did you learn about managers? How did you grow from the beginning to the end of the summer? Explain to me how hard work is hard no matter what the job is.
A Glimpse and a Hook
A resume will never define who you are. It's not the job of your resume to give me a complete picture, and if you're struggling to include every last detail about who you are, you're wasting your time. Your resume should be designed to give me a glimpse and a hook.
The glimpse is a view into the most recent years of your professional career. It should convey your three most important accomplishments and it should give me a good idea where your technical skills lie.
The hook is more important. The hook will leave me with a question. Maybe it's something from your other interests section? How about an objective so outlandish that I can't help but set up a phone screen. I'm not suggesting that you make anything up, I'm asking you to market yourself in a way that I'm going to remember. A resume is not a statement of facts. It's a declaration of intent. - fjvwing, on 10/12/2007, -1/+42If all I have is thirty seconds, I'd better use some good hours to fine-tune. You don't get 30 seconds of impressive in just 30 seconds of work.
- micro506, on 10/12/2007, -0/+35CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL
- joeyjojo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+32And don't forget your myspace URL!
- driftwood07, on 10/12/2007, -0/+32and your maple leaf |:
- cosmicr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+27how to make an impression - one word: goatse
now it might not make a good impression, but one thing's for sure they'll be talking about you for the rest of the year... - crankycookie, on 10/12/2007, -2/+28Tacos are good, but when I really want the job, I usually take a crunchy all beef taco, smother it in nacho cheese, lettuce, tomato and a special southwestern sauce. Then I wrap that in a soft flour tortilla, wrapped in a corn tortilla, wrapped in a deep fried gordita shell, then I bake it in a corn husk, wrapped in a crepe, wrapped in a Chicago style pizza, and then I wrap all of that in a blueberry pancake.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+26that might explain why you're unemployed.
- theOster, on 10/12/2007, -0/+23lace it with porn
- xoxota, on 10/12/2007, -0/+22Yeah, don't forget your turn-ons and turn-offs.
- MrTea, on 10/12/2007, -2/+24IM IN UR DIGG LOCKING MY CAPS
- streak, on 10/12/2007, -2/+23"Oh, you have a weblog. Excellent."
Next! (Just the sort of security -- and insecurity -- risk we don't need). - jatkins679, on 10/12/2007, -1/+22Maybe a lot of what he says makes sense or is true. But his delivery, his writing style sure comes off as a know-it-all,I-look-down-at-you kind of person.
- xtmno3, on 10/12/2007, -0/+21AMAZING: Job Applicant
- joeTaco, on 10/12/2007, -1/+21@sean: I am totally stealing that.
- teknikk7, on 10/12/2007, -4/+23THIS GUYS ON A POWER TRIP.
- fowleryo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+20REALLY?
- eleventybillion, on 10/12/2007, -1/+19That don't teach that at Haaaaaaaavuhd....
- decruncher, on 10/12/2007, -0/+17"By the way, its not about schools, you might have a smart guy with no team skills. Thats a huge negative. Its all about the humanistic standpoint."
I wish you were right, but I guess you've never heard of Google's hiring methods.
College degree required... must be from one of the top 25 schools in the country and your GPA better be above 3.0 - for even non-technical positions. They prefer no previous work experience. you must be book smart, young, and impressionable, so they can mold you into their desired type of employee. - DoctorC4, on 10/12/2007, -0/+17 With the scanning and keyword filtering that goes on, you are lucky to even make it to human eyes. So if you are blessed with 30 seconds of human interaction with your resume, you should feel blessed. Make it to an interview, feel Saintly.
- joeTaco, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17seriously man, where have you been hired where you didn't need a resume?
- Empyrean, on 10/12/2007, -0/+16Yeah if you want to be rejected.
- AlanLivingston, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17I'm not sure I could resist bringing a guy in that sent me a taco on his resume. A taco, for God's sake!
I've read some resumes, got the recruiter and my manager off my back and lunch all at once!
Mmmm.... Tacos. - MrTea, on 10/12/2007, -0/+16Would it help to print the résumé on neon green paper? Do they look in a stack of resumes and go "WTF?!" and read it?
- eleventybillion, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17That sounds more like interview advice, which, while helpful, is not particularly relevant if you can't get past the resume/application process.
- mc4_a, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16If you want people to point and laugh, yes.
- drgruney, on 10/12/2007, -2/+16@GetanEducation
I hear that one/two page limit all the time. But the thing is I only hear it from people applying for jobs, not from the people who do the hiring. When I talk to hiring managers they want more. What needs to be short and sweet is the cover letter. Let your resume shine. It's your cover letter that convinces them to take time to look at you.
If your history requires more than a page then it requires more. Don't be so modest everybody. At the same time, don't fill it with *****. I have a 5 page master resume. I trim it down as the job I'm applying for requires. Sometimes it's one page, sometimes it's three. - scagnetti, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13The other day I got a resume that was literally 13 pages long. He definitely got my attention, but for nothing more than comic relief. Dude actually had an entire page of applications he was proficient in. What the hell do I care he knows how to use MS Paint?
- Agret, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11You overestimate how common "common sense" is.
- LGod, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10I disagree with that, after your first job school doesnt matter that much. If you have 5 years of experience and you are talking about school there is something wrong.
- NanoStuff, on 10/12/2007, -3/+13"seriously man, where have you been hired where you didn't need a resume?"
Web dev jobs mostly. Not contracting but temporary work. They never ask so I've stopped updating. They ask for demonstrations of abilities and such, but never a resume. Toronto BTW, maybe a different 'work culture', or maybe it's just the field, though I can't see why specifically. - ryodoan, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11But when you get the job..... Feel like a god.
- JGailor, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10As someone who regularly interviews software engineers, some of the most important things you can do to make an good impression are:
a) Know about the company
b) Show enthusiasm for the work
c) Have some questions ready for the interviewer
These things will take you a long way. - Rice, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9PROGMAN.EXE
That's what I'm good at. Hire or not? - zweben, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10@joeTaco:
It's probably all soggy by now though. - eleventybillion, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10The reason he is saying this is excellent is because it gives a deeper look into your warped programmer mind. If there's one thing programmers like more than "knowing everything" (or thinking they do) it's telling the whole goddamned world how smart they are with an endless compendium of "here's how to do what's already been documented" style blogs.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9Actually when I was a kid, everyone used neon papers for their resume and nobody used white paper. I know this sounds like a joke, but it's actually true. Go ask your mom.
But for these days, the way to difference your paper from others is to use a slightly stained and textured paper. Everyone uses pure white, so your stained yellow will stand out. And the stained color looks professional. - resten, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9I think it would have been better if the author posted this impressible resume
- hudef, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7SUPERTROUT: "Try to use the word "cockthirsty" 3 times throughout your resume."
OK, but how to differentiate yourself from all the other applicants? - icexe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7this girl i worked with hired that way. she printed her resume on bright orange paper, it stood out from the stack of hundreds of white ones. her approach fit right in with the "think outside the box" buzzword that was so popular back in the 90's. it wasn't long before that trick caught on though, several months later, the resume pile looked more and more like a rainbow flag.
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