Why your tech CV sucks No, really. Your CV really, really stinks. I read these things for a living and the quality varies a lot more than it should considering what you are selling. Over the next few years you are asking to be paid more than the cost of a Ferrari and the desk space, computer kit and coffee you use over that time means you cost at …
... if you're a 'headhunter', why do you need my CV? You already know where I work and what I can do. That's why you're headhunting me.
Similarly, if you're a headhunter, why are you giving people recommendations regarding hiring managers and HR departments? You know, just like I do, that the only way to get the job you want is to bypass those very people. That's why you're headhunting me.
Ah, I get it. You're not really a headhunter at all. You're just a recruitment agent.
Bouncers take a few milliseconds to asses you. You might make Madonna & J-Lo look like a slouch on the dance floor and be able to teach Casanova a thing or two about making women happy. But if you wear scuffed shoes & out of fashion jeans and you don't get in to prove it.
They may be poorly paid, unable to hold a candle to you when it comes an outer join or unable to hold a conversation about anything other than 'strategising' or development opportunities. But they are on the door so you need to be nice to them.
The CV is the only thing they see and it will be one of many, make it count is the lesson.
Agree word is the standard, wish it wasn't. I have walked in given the interviewer a copy of my CV and they have flicked through it and they say 'So you haven't got 50 years of Server 2003 experience? That is what the Agency's copy says?'.
But then Betamax had better picture quality - get over it. (oops just proved I'm over 40).
The recruitment agents that phone for leads or try to give you a salary drop are very annoying, but just think most of these aren't shaving yet and earn less than a cleaner, that thought normally makes me smile. Find a few decent ones, the rest of them can ring your silent phone.
Most phones nowadays can have various ring tones for recognised numbers and some even let some numbers bypass silent mode.
Dominic, was your primary goal with this article to deter people from seeking jobs through you or others in your field? It certainly seems that way.
Yes, crap CVs are annoying. If you're such an awesome headhunter, though, you should be waaaaaaay past the point where you're talking to the kind of people who submit shit CVs, or trying to fill the kind of job that might even conceivably be within reach of someone who submits a shit CV.
Of course, bullshit articles with damn near fuck-all in the way of useful advice passing themselves off as advice on how to improve your CV for technical job applications are *also* annoying.
What a well written article - I recently helped a friend of mine put together his first CV. So we had something to work on, I asked him to come up with something first.
University educated, 1st from and oldie but a goodie place, and this guy fell into all the traps you describe above.
Why do people persist in making life hard by doing things so absurdly badly like their CV ?
CVs are boring, horrible and painful no matter if you are the recruiter or recruitee...why not make it easier for the recruiter - that way you might get a job in a decent company.
For IT jobs - who cares that you can use MS Office - like an admin girl(okay or boy...but hey theres not many of them!) - if you work in this line - then its taken forgranted you can use an application to write documents, make spreadsheets and read emails.
What I do care about though is what the job you are applying for is looking for and how you can do the job I am advertising.....SELL ME YOU - WHY DO I WANT TO PAY YOU LOADSA DOSH instead of getting me 3 or 4 cuties to make my business look good (and yes, I include cute guys - if there is such a thing!).
I know COBOL, JCL and am not 65 years old which means I'll be around for quite a while. Let's face it, you still use COBOL and training people is expensive. The old COBOL engineers are dying and there is not a lot of young-blood around, is there?
Send me your company's annual statements for the past decade and I'll see if you are good enough to employ me.
I could put any number of other TLAs and buzzword into my CV and pass quite a few other check-lists. And you know what? It's pointless. Totally and utterly pointless.
For a tech company (e.g. a software house) it's worthwhile, but a bank? Get real. Most actual dev work will be off-shored/outsourced to an actual tech company, your tech work will be applications or infrastructure support. Any decent dev can learn any high-level language well enough to do applications support. The big trick is is finding one who can learn the problem domain, work with others, think fast, follow procedures, define procedures, unit test, document, mentor, train and do all those other things that do not have buzzwords and do not feature in your pathetic little check list.
Also, when I say I do not what a job in region X or I only want a job in region Y; I really do mean I DO NOT what a job in region X or ONLY a job in region Y so stop fucking calling me about shit that is in X or not in Y!!!
I would have 7 years missing from my CV (a block of three years and then a block of four years) where it has to remain blank, I cannot say where I was working, for who or what I was doing (not even able to list the technologies involved). According to Mr Connor this must mean I have spent time in prison.
Just as well that I have NEVER been asked for a CV (or submitted one) in almost 20 years
"I get it. You're not really a headhunter at all. You're just a recruitment agent."
Exactly.
But for some reason he's got delusions of grandeur. And for some different reason I could neither upvote nor reply directly to AC 14:48.
Still, by the look of things it's doing OK for El Reg's page views. Do they still matter?
Why write an article that infuriates a fair chunk of the readership--most of them presumably employed in IT, many likely with valuable skills? To make us feel the way a multi-hued misspelled 24-point CV makes the author feel? An interesting strategy if so, with the irony perhaps a bit too subtle.
And I got downvoted, thereby proving my point for me.
Y'all are _not_ as leet as you think you are. if you want the job you _must_ first get by the gatekeepers... and that's HR. And they _will_ judge your CV just the way that he said they would. And if you don't submit CVs that fulfill _their_ requirements, you will not get the interview.
You no like? Me no care. And neither does HR. Facts remain facts no matter how special you might think you are.
Article like these do make some sense, despite the article writer's apparent ignorance of the difference between a CV (your life's story) and a résumé (a summary of your life's story):
1. It helps to illustrate why so many employees at larger companies are of such mediocre quality.
2. It proves the suspicion many of us have that out-sourcing your recruitment and HR to people with little or no understanding of basic industry knowledge is a bloody stupid idea.
3. It is clearly best suited to people who have decent social skills, plenty of self-confidence, and an ability to communicate well. Unfortunately, the IT industry has a higher than average incidence of autism; almost by definition, the best are unlikely to be good at blowing their own trumpet, so the present recruitment system is quite, quite broken.
Here's a summary of the IT industry's recruitment problems that's very heavy on metaphor:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGvlLPGB2VM
Relying on such an archaic and anachronistic manual system for finding suitable employees—despite this being, you know, the fucking *IT* industry, which is all about those "computer" thingies—is a staggeringly moronic idea.
There is a wide open market just gagging for an ISO-approved standard for a "CV Exchange" data format. One that can be used by *every* job-search engine, and which can go beyond the traditional flat, linear, CV or résumé.
The CV and résumé must die. And we have the power to do it.
There are two kinds of people:
1. You're a poor to moderate candidate. In this case, you need to do everything in this article, and more, to make sure that you get considered. A side effect is that recruiters CUNTS will phone you up at inconvenient times and tell you about opportunities. And they'll email you vague information about those opportunities that is full of all the same problems of presentation that this article talks about. (Hint to companies using agencies: you should be putting as much care into the blurbs for your jobs as you expect applicants to put into their CVs.) You will soon tire of these phone calls and emails, but you have to put up with them and feign interest with "Hi, this is Zoe from Scumtwats, how are you?", else you will end up unemployed.
2. You're *really smart*. In this case, you probably hardly need to write a CV at all; the companies who are looking to hire you HATE recruiters too, and have probably heard of you, or you've heard of them (or your friend has). You'll get to find each other without an intermediary. You probably should write a really short CV with just facts that you can pass on to their HR people, if they ask for it.
It is quite easy to lie about experience or knowledge on your CV but much harder to carry that off when asked direct questions about it.
In addition if you were to put enough detail about that particular point in your CV it would balloon to the dreaded 27 pager that would have been binned long before you got to the interview.
I have encountered individuals who have stated excellent skills at coding and gui design only to discover in interview that they meant being able to define foreground and background colours in html (hilariously though not using CSS) when we were looking for c++ programmers to design complex graphing applications for engineering data visualisation.
MORE RIGHT-WING PROPAGANDA. We're human "RESOURCES", not staff anymore, let alone human beings. We're a "RESOURCE", and we get treated like one.
How about an article about bad companies, bad corporations, firms that expect it ALL FOR FREE. How about companies making an effort to train their staff, giving people a chance, how about if they stop demanding this degree, that qualification, such that people are FORCED to run up HUGE STUDENT LOANS and sacrifice their lives merely to help other corporations make money - the BANKS!
HOW ABOUT SOME DAMN DECENCY FOR A CHANGE. Next article, no doubt, will be a long whinge about high corporate taxes, hard done-by CEOs, and how we'd all be so much worse off without these money-obsessed individuals who see human beings as mere resources to exploit, who expect the rest of us to live from cradle to grave serving BUSINESS INTERESTS AND THE PROFIT MOTIVE.
That's all Britain has become - A NASTY LITTLE COUNTRY WITH THOSE AT THE SO-CALLED TOP LECTURING THE REST OF US. The only thing that matters is MONEY, and the lives of CEOs.
How about if corporations stop exploiting the poor for PROFIT, stop driving people to suicide, and stop lying, stop saying they are helping develop countries, when it's all about theft. How about some DECENCY AND POLITENESS.
"The Register" needs to stick to computer topics and get out of political commentary. If I want politics, if I want to read abusive comments about people, I'll read a lousy corporate-owned and corporate-controlled newspaper.
WHY CAN'T COMPUTER JOURNALS STICK TO DISCUSSING COMPUTERS?
Because corporations control government now and our entire lives - THAT'S WHY! Everything that's human is being destroyed, everything that gives a person the will to live is being taken away.
Having spent 10 + years in a previous life as an expert tech recruiter, i know a thing or 3 about this game. Made an awful lot of money, but i got bored and became an oxygen thief.
The reality is that a rec-con has little interest in the applicant - it's just a numbers game. 1placement=2 offers= 5 second interviews. = 10 initial interviews= ...depending how good you are at understanding the tech and cultural skews, anywhere between 10 and 100 CVs sent out. Now my numbers were much better than that, but in the end, the recruiter is looking for both the reason to say No, but is also searching for the veritable needle in a haystack.
And in these days of over abundant supply, prospective employers have a geat many choices ... Someone who is prepared to pay $250k for a genius has to many potential suitors.
I think the key point here is ... Dont be an idiot and give people a chance to say No unneccesarily.
It's business, not personal. D'Oh!
I can't recall ever getting a job through a recruiter. However, I did spend over 30 years renting nice little houses to people. Best thing that happened was being able to get quick, comprehensive credit reports.
A glance told me everything that a person left out of their written and verbal interviews, including how good they were at organizing their life, and what I might expect to see if/when something went wrong with the situation (and even how likely it was that something would go wrong).
I think that what people forget here is that this guy is an Agency Recruiter.
What does that mean? It means his job is to find jobs for other people.
What does that mean?
It means he's no different from the bloke behind the desk at the job centre, except this guy has managed to con a bit more money out of the game but is just as big a failure at life and is in all probability an ex-techie who couldn't get a proper job.
If you want a job in a certain company you make contacts and links with the company by going to shows, fairs, expos, etc or alternatively, find who runs the show in the company and call them and invite them out for a business lunch.
Have some balls about you.
Having spent 10 years of a previous life as a relatively successful rec-con in the IT industry I know a thing or 3 about this - but it was too boring and moronic so now I have a new life as an oxygen thief.
The reality is that a rec-con has little interest in the applicant - it's just a numbers game. 1placement=2 offers= 5 second interviews. = 10 initial interviews= ...depending how good you are at understanding the tech and cultural skews, anywhere between 10 and 100 CVs sent out. Now my numbers were much better than that, but in the end, the recruiter is looking for both the reason to say No, but is also searching for the veritable needle in a haystack.
And in these days of over abundant supply, prospective employers have a geat many choices ... Someone who is prepared to pay $250k for a genius has to many potential suitors.
I think the key point here is ... Dont be an idiot and give people a chance to say "No" unneccesarily
I don't support the short CV idea, I have conform to it but it's recruitment laziness being foisted upon us because we're the one's after the job where in actual fact the team on the paper sift just can't be bothered, my CV maxes two pages and it still doesn't have everything of relevance on it which I'd imagine will cost me a job or two.
But it appears that no matter how relevant the information on the CV a hirer doesn't want to (or can't be bothered to) look for anything meaningful just some "hire me" marketing fluff and then they wonder why they don't get the best talent.
The result of any job, including hiring are directly proportional to the effort you put in, even if you think you shouldn't have to.
I only give out work funded mobile number to recruiters. This mobile is turned off most of the time and I use it only to make out going calls, like conference calls or to order take out. I give out my personal number to work colleagues so they can reach me if they need to. But recruiters and alike, can call my "other" mobile and leave a message which I'll check maybe once a day.
...this article only demonstrates why i don't use recruiters.
He bangs on about all the mistakes candidates make in CVs.
And then goes and puts his foot in his mouth by admitting he knows fuck all about any of the very specific skills he's supposed to be able to find for me.
Yeah mate. I run a business and I've dealt with enough recruiters to know you're absolutely typical.
The smartest guy I know at university went on to do a masters at Oxford and PhD somewhere else rather impressive. He couldn't spell to save his life, and his presentation wasn't great, but you won't find a better guy for writing code, especially for really, really difficult engineering applications. Sure, if I am hiring a PA or a technical editor, then I'd expect the CV presentation to be top notch because it's relevant. Would Einstein have written a great CV? He couldn't even comb his hair properly.
And this twat of a recruiter would overlook him and instead get me some tosser who can spell and probably paid some arts graduate to make them up a swanky CV?
It sums up exactly why if you run a business you should be hiring people yourself, and not relying in some spiv in a suit who knows nothing about your business and is basically a double-glazing salesman.
Dominic, I don't know if you're still reading after 190 comments, but just wanted to say - spot on. Really. On every point.
And that's coming from a techie who contracted for 10 years (and ran a review site where you could slate your recruitment agent, pissing no small number off until I was done in by the libel laws) and is now the one doing the hiring.
Your CV is the way in, so you polish that fucker until it sparkles, then do it again. IT requires attention to detail - demonstrate some.
This post has been deleted by its author
2 years ago i was made redundant from the consumer finance sector and since then i have been trying to gain the skills to get an IT job, i get frequent call backs from recruitment staff, but never the interview. I was genuinly hopeful this article may help me understand why.
No, just told me what i already know,l recruitment staff are all &£$*($s. ( i knew that years ago!)
It's the ignorance of recruiters that gets me - not in a technical sense but in etiquette. I've taken the trouble to send in my CV by email, phoned up to see if they've received it (using the contact details in the advert) and then been told the recruiter is busy and will call back. 2 days later, still nothing - surely it is common courtesy to acknowledge that I've taken the trouble to apply?
And recently I've gone for a couple of interviews arranged by recruiters afterwhich I've called them up for some feedback as they suggested that I do - strangely not now returning my calls or emails... More ignorance.
And it's not just recruiters, HR departments can be just as offhand. When I've recruited people I have always tried to make sure that I let them know that I've received their CV and the action I will be taking.
"God do you think I care that you did OS/2 v1.1 in 1989?"
I work for a well known global manufacturing company and for your information, we are still using this product.
Now if there is a skill shortage, I know it's your bloody fault, for telling the candidates to remove it from their CV's!!
If we ask you to complete an application form, that asks you to explain why you are the ideal candidate for the job, please take the trouble to do so - don't cut and paste your entire CV into the box (particularly including your name and other personal details when the instructions ask you to only include such details on the equal ops monitoring part of the form that only HR see). I am not going to read it all the way through to try and see whether you actually match the job description (and even if I did start to, if you're is the 97th application I'm reading I may well miss something, and you won't get an interview even though you are ideally suited)
If we ask for specific skills, please make a point of mentioning that you do actually have them. I have to score your application against those criteria: if you don't actually mention them HR won't let me give you full credit for them ... even if it's kind of implied in something else you say.
Please apply for the job we advertised, not the one you want to do.
If you are going to regurgitate the list of attributes from the person spec in a list that starts "I have the following attributes" at least copy and paste the things correctly. Particularly if we've said "Must be able to work methodically and retain a keen eye for detail" do not say "I work methodiclly and have a kean eye for deatail", 'cos that's not the impression you're giving!
On the other hand, if you actually read the instructions and the job description and person spec and write your application to make sure that you've mentioned all the things we asked about, you'll probably get an interview!
I spend hours crafting my CV, only for some HR bastard to turn around and force me to fill in a damn form, effectively breaking my CV into database fields, so they can apply meaningless word filters to the results and make their lives a tiny bit easier.
There is only one firm I've ever bothered with one of these forms for, simply because I really wanted to work for them. Any other time I come across a form, I don't even bother.
So this bloke is indirectly responsible for the economic mess we now find ourselves in because he probably recruited the articles that also had a 'lust for cash' and a turbo charged gob but wouldn't know hard work if it came up and slapped them in the face.
So you don't care I've used and supported all the versions of Windows from 95 onward, no? I think your clients might disagree as it shows that the candidate keeps up to date with changes and is versatile.
Does it not occur to you that the applicant could be dyslexic or just maybe have a visual impairment? Neither of these may detract from the skill your client is looking for so maybe you should contact them before you throw their CV in the bin.
I've processed sackloads of CVs in my time, mostly for hard-core coding positions.
If you have that responsibility you should realise that it's not your job to critique the style of the CV writer. It's your job to hire the best possible employees. If Albert Einstein applied, do you think his CV would stand on a pinnacle above the rest? I rather doubt it.
The skill you need is to be able to visualise the person behind the CV and their suitability for the job from the information you've been given. If you can't be bothered to read through the longer CVs then you're not exactly a shining example of an employee yourself - because that's what you're being paid to do!
And what if you do get a job somewhere where a CV gets just a cursory glance? Chances are your colleagues will turn out to be the type who are full of BS with no substance to back it up. Lots of jobs in IT are hard to do and demand staff with real talent. That makes recruiting them pretty demanding too. I hope there are still a few companies around who put the effort in.
While I can totally understand Mr. Connor's gripes, perhaps he'd like a bit of the view from the other end.
I'm a graphic designer by profession, but since the late '80s, as the tools of my trade moved into the digital realm, I became knowledgeable about computers and networks as part of my work and stayed ahead of the curve through continuous and judicious self-education -- cultivating friendships with programmers, CSS geeks and network engineers and, of course, my daily reading of El Reg.
As far as how my CV looks, let's just say that being a graphic designer, my CV -- along with containing pertinent info -- needs to look snappy. The CV I send out runs a grand total of a page and a half. I don't over-do on the design, keeping the page bright and white, going easy on the graphics and keeping the typography clean and tasteful. At my last "cubicle job" before I began freelancing, I was the tech coordinator (aka "house geek" in a design shop full of technophobes) as well as one of the team leaders, so I had the privilege -- or misfortune -- of reviewing the resumes of designers applying for positions in the design shop. While most of the CVs were in the form of subtly tasteful letter-size trifolds and such, I still had to evaluate designers' CVs coming in the form of little boxes, tubes and pop-up books, just to name a few. I ended up canning almost all of them because they were just too goddamn' precious for words, and told me a lot about the nature of the designers sending them out.
The general rule, as I understood it, was that nobody wants to see what I did for more than five years -- ten years, tops. Other things such as the how-to columns I did for "Step-By-Step Design" in the early '90s I place under a separate "Professional Accomplishments And Awards" heading.
Lying on CVs? As Claude Rains would've said, "I'm shocked -- SHOCKED -- to find that applicants are falsifying their CVs here!" I'm sure I'm not the first person to -- shall we say -- "gussy up" his CV, but I'm glad to say that I've never flat-out lied. Still, I can understand why many people out there do. I've been tempted to myself, in the depths of job-hunting frustration, after reading in the news lately about all the high-profile, big-dollar executive types who were found to have lied massively on their CVs and totally gotten away with it -- at least for a while. What always stops me, though, is those very same news reports stating that said CxO was, in fact, totally busted with falsified CVs and forced to resign in disgrace. Besides, I've managed to pile up enough real, actual achievements in my career that I don't need to lie about stuff -- plus having been taught by my parents about the ethics and morality of lying at a young age.
The part about inserting buzzwords that would get me an interview, though, kind of stuck in my craw. I can't begin to describe my frustration with Personnel Department boneheads who send along designers' CVs packed to the gills with empty bullshit, but trash perfectly respectable CVs due to the absence of vacuous jargon like "bring to the table", "outside the box", or my personal favorite, "team player". Imho, people who still use the phrase "outside the box" show themselves entirely incapable of actually thinking outside the proverbial box, and should be made to wear an electric sign around their necks flashing the message "I HAVEN'T HAD A SINGLE ORIGINAL THOUGHT IN MY ENTIRE GODDAMN' LIFE."
I also hate Personnel departments who insist on resumes in Word, even those from graphic design applicants. It's not so much because I can't edit and format something as basic as a resume in Word, but I guess it's because as a graphic designer, the old maxim about how your CV is an advertisement for yourself applies even more -- and when some cubicle drone in a Personnel department demands I send my CV as a Word file, it basically robs me of my chance to show off my chops just a bit -- not that I'd be one of those prima donnas who sends out his CV as a pop-up book (really, I wasn't kidding about that). (For the record, I lay out my CV in InDesign and export it to a lean'n'mean inkjet-quality pdf)
I can totally dig Connor's frustration with poorly-written CVs, though. I don't know if it's really gotten that bad or if the wide availability of the Internet just makes it seem that way, but I've lost track of how many Web sites and blogs are polluted by the writing of people who don't know the difference between "there", "their", and "they're", the difference between "its" and "it's", who write "would of" when they mean "would have"...I won't list it all here. It's as if all those boneheads from back in school who were flunking English class have all reappeared and are writing blogs whose copy is full of these mistakes and makes me want to gouge my eyes out, especially when the authors are native English speakers. Seriously, man; it's not nitpicking, it's basic communication skills in your _native_language_, f'cripesake.
I'd go Connor one better in this regard: have someone else copyproof your CV, no matter what your native language is. One thing I learned from working on newspapers in high school and college -- and, professionally, at ad agencies -- is that you can never proof your own copy; you're always going to miss errors because you know what the copy is supposed to say.
His grammar and punctuation are not good. He misuses words like "algorithm" which matters in a technical environment, but would be popular in marketing.
On the other hand, he obviously likes to tell it how it is --- or, maybe, to scream at people. That gets the attention, but it also rings alarm bells.
OK... middle of the pile.
I work in Sales and am a damn good salesman. That means better than my peers at the company I work in.
Sales people are the ones who drive the business, who get the work, which drives the profits. Recruiters can sit in their warm comfortable offices all day whilst sales are out in the field hustling and creating the wealth.
DON'T call me a bloody droid you sonofabitch - I work hard and am good at what I do.
I'm Dominic Connor, a pimp for quants. I may be found at www.wilmott.com as DCFC. People trying to sell me something use the more polite version of Headhunter in Global Financial Markets, but when I had a real job I called HH's pimps, so I see no reason to change now. Previously I ran an IT department for a fixed income brokerage in the City, have been a C++ programmer, Excel jockey, and my first real paid employment was devising the method by which you can electroplate gold to stick to Teflon. I'm a CQF alumnus, and together with Paul Wilmott am a director of the cunningly named "Paul & Dominic Ltd", and the even more cunningly named Cunning Software. Apparently that order of the P&D names was my idea, over a rather nice French meal at Le Café du Marche, witnessed by Paul's model wife and mine who's a lawyer. A good restaurant, but where it says you may have problems finding "this little gem", believe them.
Our idea is that you can do quant recruitment better if you don't think that "Mean Reversion" is a Clint Eastwood film, or that "Iterators" are the evil creatures from Stargate SG1. End of plug.
In case you care, I'm older than you, have two boys just starting at school and live in Buckhurst Hill. You don't know where BH is. No one does. Even people who've lived in London 40 years don't. We like it that way. Keeps out riff raff.
Dominic@paulDominic.com
https://plus.google.com/114662505185420090873/about
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