Having said only the other week that there is no correct answer to the question of what should go in your résumé, Steve Yegge has chimed in with his article ten tips for a (slightly )less awful resume.

Steve starts out, much like I did by pointing out that what he says only relates to recruiting people for the kinds of places he works, and may not apply outside of the recruitment of technical people for companies that produce their own software, and even within that niche, may not apply to everyone:

I’m just talking about software engineer resumes today, and specifically just the subset intended for applying to companies that build their own software. I have no idea how much (if at all) this stuff applies to resumes for other kinds of positions, or companies. Maybe not much. Sorry!

It seems the companies he’s worked for take a different approach to reviewing CVs to any company I’ve ever worked for. It seems they have a large CV screening panel, phone screens (possibly multiples) and multiple panel interview sessions. We do it differently.

Steve’s first point is right, in bullet form, no-one cares about you yet, but he also suggest stripping out anything with personality in it. Which I disagree with strongly. I do want to know what you’re like other than as a professional software engineer. I recently came across a candidate who was a Reiki healer and psychic reader. Who offered his services for £25 an hour over MSN or email. This information was gleaned from “personal interests” on his CV and listing his personal webpage address. Valuable information saving me from interviewing a total fruit-cake.

Steve’s point 2 asks for unformatted ASCII CVs. This is because where he works they pump them through automated manglers. That is not true anywhere I’ve applied for a job or worked in my life. It’s true that Pimps screw them up, something I was planning on writing about soon, but, in general I’d prefer to see a nicely formatted word doc, that has had some care and attention lavished on it than a nasty plain .txt file.

Points 3, 4 and 5 have merit. Don’t set off my bullshit detector with too much weasel and wank talk. Make sure it’s spelling and grammar checked, if it’s a word doc, and a UK install f Word has put a red squiggle under anything other than an obscure techie term, you’re a moron. But, don’t rely on the spell checked, I’ve seen far too many CVs with spell-checking mistakes.

However, my biggest contention is point 6, certified looser. If you are a contractor, get certifications, do them in your own time, it shows your skill, gives me more confidence you have at least a basic level of understanding of the subject and technology. A safety net. it’s also quite common for UK companies to put people through certification courses to ensure their staff have that rounded skillset, that they know the right way of doing things, and to give the employee something back to move their career on. Certification is great.

But, just a few things there, the certifications, the format of the cv, the lack of personal information. Submit a “perfect for Steve” CV to me and I’ll reject you. Submit a perfect for CV to Steve and he’ll reject you. It’s impossible to get this right. The single best tip in Steve’s article?

You can apply for 18 jobs, but you should send 18 different resumes, each targeted at that job, and you shouldn’t send them all at once.

Tailor it for the job. It’s web development? Emphasis your experience in that area, and trim down the references to the Linux Device Driver work you’ve done. And try and get a feel for the company you’re applying for. If it’s a Big One, like IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Google etc, there is plenty you can find out about what the recruiters are looking for. Talk to the Pimp, ask them what kind of CV the recruiting managers like to see.

Do your research first, it really helps.

Popularity: 57% [?]

This is version 1 of this entry and was posted 1 year, 1 month ago on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 6:12 pm and is filed under Career, Opinion. It's popularity ranking is Popularity: 57% [?]. It has been tagged with Career, cv, jobs, recruitment, resume. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. This is the first version of this post.