51–60 of 83 posts
During hiring, I have looked through dozens, if not hundreds of resumes over the years, mostly for Unix systems administrator positions. You can tell a lot about what someone knows just by how they put together their resume, over and above the work experience. A question I used to ask on interviews was, "Have you ever worked with Gnu programs, like gcc, Gnu make etc.?" Hiring Unix admins in 1998, when you couldn't ge…
I mostly - for seniors - look in the experience and what projects the person did. I don't believe any skills in a skill section. This is the first screening, followed by a programming task during the the telephone interview, interview with me, interviews with developers, followed by practical programming work. So yes it is important to get through the CV screen (have experience), but it's only the first step. Side no…
Surprisingly, I have the opposite trouble: how do I stop recruiters trying to recruit me? I have about 15-20 recruiters contacting me per week however what I put it down to is: 1. Location. Since I moved to SF the job offers have increased substantially . 2. Skill set. Fortunately I'm skilled in some "popular" languages. 3. Years of experience. I'm in the "hot spot" - not too old, and not too young (sorry - it does s…
My solution to your initial problem is to have a "note to recruiters" linked prominently at the top of my resume (and linkedin). It covers what kind of places I'd be a good fit for and vice versa. Things like I am not going to update the recruiter's database, tell me company names, small companies/startups etc. It becomes very apparent very quickly which recruiters have made any effort to read it and if they can't do…
Now I have LinkedIn for that.
Maybe because who is hiring is supposed to be better than the others? There are far too many terrible companies, especially the big ones, and honestly I would never stay in a company just for the sake of it.
If recruiters think that this is a problem, it means that who is hiring is not confident enough or worse, the company IS really terrible like the others.
IMHO, nobody leaves a company if he feels good, stimulated and paid enough.
Wow, if you are skilled technically and aren't annoyed by constant recruiter outreach, you are doing something majorly wrong. I'd also say technical recruiters are also doing something majorly wrong if your resume reflects your abilities. If you've coded anything that does something interesting, you should have no problem finding interviews, and frankly offers. If you haven't coded anything interesting, then why woul…
I lost a job in 2008 over the financial crisis (LIFO employee retention policy), had 2 short contracts (which really shouldn't count as job hopping!) a research position where I suffered a burnout and now recruiters don't answer my calls and I have to jump on any opportunity that comes around. I'm looking for both accounting and software development roles (obviously slightly different CV for accounting roles - in fact I generally tweak it for each application).
My (dev) CV is at (https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8PrUXneejNRdThYRWFHZUk5aHM/...) and I welcome and solicit any feedback to relfect on. Its hard to wrap a cohesive career trajectory around it when its really just me taking the best of the opportunities that I find.
I admit my github is embarrassingly bad, and I've been focusing more on my Coursera courses at the moment. I've had 1 interview in 2 months of looking for entry level/junior positions.
/rant
Articles like this tell me there is a strong need for improvement in tech recruiting. If a candidate truly is "a great coder, easy to work with, and knows data structures and algorithms backwards and forwards" then he/she should have no problem landing a job regardless of his/her background. I only hope there are firms that see through this elitism and realize that there are undervalued tech wizards out there waiting…
one would think that great coders grow on trees or something, heh?
While I've never been a recruiter, I've been a hiring manager at some mid-sized companies and worked closely with their recruiters. Side projects or attempted startups are great, but I've seen countless resumes where they get completely overlooked because of how they appeared on the resume. Ultimately whether I saw a resume was dependent on some sort of subjective pattern matching done by the recruiter. This pattern…
I've seen good resumes and had my boss say "but he only went to .." And I didn't even read the college section So education can matter until it gets to the right people. It's an easy filter, sort of, since rankings are pretty bogus anyway.
For me I found that the best way to stand out when looking for a new position was to work on a side project. Sneakily my side project was a resume building app. Which meant I got a nice new resume out of the deal too. It definitely got me noticed and people came to me rather than me having to apply for jobs. I even got some telephone interviews for startups in the Bay despite being located in the UK.
Overall I think if you build out some form of beta app and execute to a minimum viable product level of service then that's going to be a good thing for your chances of employment.
So now for my shameless plug. I'm continuing to slowly bootstrap MightyCV - my resume creation app with hacker leanings. It has integrations with HN, github and StackOverflow along with some other cool features. You can see an example of what one looks like here:
http://robeastham.mightycv.com
If you like the look of it you can sign up for a beta invite at:
I'm hoping to redo the management interface over the next month or two and push out a largish update to the service along with some bug fixes.
Surprisingly, I have the opposite trouble: how do I stop recruiters trying to recruit me? I have about 15-20 recruiters contacting me per week however what I put it down to is: 1. Location. Since I moved to SF the job offers have increased substantially . 2. Skill set. Fortunately I'm skilled in some "popular" languages. 3. Years of experience. I'm in the "hot spot" - not too old, and not too young (sorry - it does s…
I've actually had a similar struggle with the incessant but spammy recruitment emails, that I was able to fix almost perfectly. In the "Summary" section of my LinkedIn[1], I have a sentence that says this: "If you wish to contact me, please put the word 'Waffles' in your message. It sounds silly, but it lets me know that you have taken a little time to asses my profile, rather than mass messaging people based on a ke…
Sorry for wandering off topic. I have used a method similar to your "waffles" technique when hiring for positions. It reduces the 100's of applicants for a job down to a few, simply because most people won't read your postings clearly. It has saved me hundreds of hours in the recruitment process.
We are looking for some sort of external validation: A really popular module on CPAN? Graduated with a 4.0? Graduated from Stanford? Hired full time by Google? That is all external validation, and it is something that shows me that other people / organizations think you are good. I really need just one piece of solid validation for me to speak with a candidate and this can take on a lot of forms. In lieu of this, we can administer a coding test if someone is on the cusp.
The second thing I look for is passion: Is this person a 9 to 5 code monkey in it for the solid and consistent paycheck? Or do they love the work they do and constantly push themselves to further their craft? You can almost always get to the bottom of this question on the phone. Journeymen programmers are fine for a lot of jobs, but not for the jobs we are talking about here.
If both of those line up then the candidate is good, and we will represent them. We can't promise a placement, but I would be surprised if someone with both of those boxes checked didn't get at least one offer. They are really hard to find.