Reasons You're Not Getting Interviews; Plus Some Crazy Real Resume Mistakes 246
Yvonne Lee, Community Manager at Dice.com writes,
"Not using standard job titles, not tying your work to real business results and not using the right keywords can mean never getting called for an interview, even if you have the right skills to do the job. I once heard advice to use the exact wording found in the ad when placing your keywords. I think you're even more unlikely to get a job if you do some of the things on this list."
Sadly Enough (Score:5, Interesting)
From experience I know that one of the largest employers in the USA actually gives you a much better shot at a job if you do include the same key phrases in your resume. The mass crush of resumes that come in for any job opening requires that the HR drones put everything through an automated filter or three. If your resume doesn't pass those filters nothing else matters because no one is going to read it.
Re:LMFTFY (Score:5, Interesting)
"Standard Job Title"? (Score:5, Interesting)
What the heck is a "standard job title" anyway? I've worked at 12 different companies in my nearly 30 years in software development, and never have I had the same "job title." I'm pretty sure my current job title is meaningless to anyone else looking to hire me, as would the dozen other job titles I've had be.
Get back to me when the "industry" publishes a list of "standard job titles" and makes every company comply with it.
Read an interesting tip... (Score:5, Interesting)
...on another forum:
Copy and paste the entire job description into a 1 pixel by 1 pixel box on your resume. Invisible to the naked eye, but parsers easily pick it up.
Just make sure to watch the sites that parse and reformat for you (Monster, eg) when uploading.
Re:HWGA (Score:5, Interesting)
See ya, Slashdot. (Score:5, Interesting)
We're getting this every day? And Dice is apparently deleting comments [slashdot.org]? Fuck that. Slashdot is done. Nice work, Dice.
PS: I'm on my way over to delete my Dice profile too, since the company is clearly incompetent and unethical.
Re:in summary... (Score:2, Interesting)
It's a bit worse than that, really. It's more like:
HR people are not intelligent enough to parse your resume. Try to guess the wrong way they'll use to parse it and modify your resume accordingly.
This effectively selects for candidates who are able to think like an idiot: a critical skill for dealing with customers and management after landing the job!
lax hiring standards (Score:2, Interesting)
My issue with finding employment mostly has to do with who I am competing with in my field. Computer science has become a field like doctors and lawyers where people get involved with it for the high salaries. People who are motivated by monetary gain for employment are more willing to make concessions just to have the job that pays $200,000.
In order to get that salary they will embellish their work experience, their skills or whatever it takes to get that position. Once employed, they generally don't mind 'doing it all', resulting in one employee handling the network, databases and systems administration, for one salary. This is appealing to businesses, because it means they have to hire fewer people, but it leads to mediocrity.
The crux of the problem seems to me to be that there are just too many unskilled people applying for skilled work. If 100 skilled employees apply to Google, there are probably 10,000 unskilled idiots sending in resumes, for the same position. The signal to noise ratio for HR and recruiting is ridiculous, and they have to resort to automating the filtering process down to some reasonable level. This means a LOT of good candidates get pushed into the trash. It's similar to the problem of spam; most people get lots of spam, occasionally an email gets mis-identified as spam, and you never see it.
I don't know what it is like in other regions and other fields, but Silicon Valley's hiring practices need a serious overhaul. I've long thought that a 'guild' type system for technical employees would be useful, where there is a clear path from apprentice to master, and people's professional reputations are paid closer attention to. Industry accepted certifications could also help, but that doesn't prevent 'paper tigers.' Having a guild or even an agent, like talent in Hollywood, would help a skilled employee break out from the background noise that all the unskilled idiots are making.
Finding work, networking with people and schmoozing requires social ability, and technical people are often not that social. Having an agent make connections for you, and get you in front of the right people would be incredibly beneficial, and smooth the hiring process for employers and candidates. That only works, however, if the people doing the networking are 'good' and they are representing their clients properly. Recruitment is a booming field full of talentless jerks that are only interested in making their commission and don't seem to care about their reputations.
Sites like LinkedIn are handy for connecting people, but I don't know about everyone else, but none of the recruiters that contact me seem to read ANYTHING in my profile. They just blast out email to whoever has particular keywords in their profile, and hope to hear back from a small percentage of them. Sounds kind of like spam, no? There's no investment from the recruiter and they're more than likely working under quotas, where they need to contact/call at least 20 people a day, or some bullshit like that. The recruiter doesn't care if you get the job, because they'll get someone the job, and make their money, regardless of the candidate's talent.
Job titles are also problematic. People don't understand what 'senior' means, especially in many small/new companies. Someone fresh out of college is NOT a Senior Linux Administrator, regardless of what theory you may know. Even after 5 years of solid work, I would disagree with someone being considered 'senior', but that isn't how job titles work here. There isn't some agreed upon or 'industry standard' for junior, mid-level, senior, etc.
Then you have the creative 'impressive' job titles, like Server Operations Engineer (Linux Admin), Site Reliability Engineer (Linux Admin), etc. I realize there are different skills needed for various areas of a company, and it is tempting to distinguish employees by title, rather than skillset, but that's what departments are for. You have Linux Admins working in the Site Reliability Department, or whatever.
slashdot as dice.com shill site? (Score:5, Interesting)
WWCTD
What
Would
Commander
Taco
Do?
Wonder how he feels about this. I mean, he got his pile of $$ and "is out" but still, I bet he cares.