Why your tech CV sucks

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Slowhand

That's pretty funny, and a good eye-opener for a lot of people. Most of us can forget how we project ourselves to potential employers and recruiters, and it's good to see the perspective from the other side. . . especially with a frustrated, cynical overtone.

QHalo

Why did you send the file as a Word document?

My resume doesn't have spelling errors but these days it is rather difficult to have acronyms in an IT resume and it not flag as misspelled. It's funny, I've attempted to put my resume into a PDF and send it to potential jobs only to have them tell me to send it back in Word or their interface not take a PDF.

jibbajabba

QHalo wrote: »

My resume doesn't have spelling errors but these days it is rather difficult to have acronyms in an IT resume and it not flag as misspelled. It's funny, I've attempted to put my resume into a PDF and send it to potential jobs only to have them tell me to send it back in Word or their interface not take a PDF.

Plus a lot of PDF converter / printer driver ruin the formatting etc.

Daniel333

I threw out so many resumes because of these very reasons...

erpadmin

jibbajabba wrote: »

Plus a lot of PDF converter / printer driver ruin the formatting etc.

Are you not using Word 2007+?

powerfool

QHalo wrote: »

My resume doesn't have spelling errors but these days it is rather difficult to have acronyms in an IT resume and it not flag as misspelled. It's funny, I've attempted to put my resume into a PDF and send it to potential jobs only to have them tell me to send it back in Word or their interface not take a PDF.

Not to mention companies and brands that misspell their name on purpose or don't use a real word.

I have always used Word... but that is a very good point.

Everyone

Awesome. I've seen plenty of bad resumes too, and unfortunately didn't have the luxury of just tossing them. We were interviewing pretty much anyone who sent one in, due to not getting many applicants at all. The people with these awful resumes tended to be just as awful themselves.

MrRyte

Slowhand wrote: »

That's pretty funny, and a good eye-opener for a lot of people. Most of us can forget how we project ourselves to potential employers and recruiters, and it's good to see the perspective from the other side. . . especially with a frustrated, cynical overtone.

So how seriously should we take him? The title of his article gives the impression of wanting to help but it seems more about the frustrastions of an HR employee.
Perhaps HE'S the one that should be looking for another line of work.....

Devilry

I do prefer to send my resume in PDF, but rarely is that acceptable.

Article was a good read, I think when the time comes, I am going to start from scratch on it.

Akaricloud

For word resumes I've always made sure to mark mine as final before sending it. That way nothing appears with the spelling/grammar underlining. It also shows them that I know how to use word more than the average user.

Everyone

Devilry wrote: »

Article was a good read, I think when the time comes, I am going to start from scratch on it.

Best thing you could do. I had just added to mine every time every time I wanted to look for a new job. It grew into a 7 page monster and was just awful. The last go around I started from scratch, great success!

it_consultant

I don't think its a bad idea to hire professional resume service. At $400-$600 you could make that up quickly if you get a job faster. Many excellent IT guys simply don't have the skill to write a good resume.

onesaint

Everyone wrote: »

Best thing you could do. I had just added to mine every time every time I wanted to look for a new job. It grew into a 7 page monster and was just awful. The last go around I started from scratch, great success!

When you are starting from scratch, are you literally drumming up new ways of stating your responsibilities at previous companies? Or simply going for new formatting and condensing those 7 pages?

Everyone

onesaint wrote: »

When you are starting from scratch, are you literally drumming up new ways of stating your responsibilities at previous companies? Or simply going for new formatting and condensing those 7 pages?

Everything, trying to reformat and condense the original monster wasn't working. I only knocked a page or so off doing that, not enough. The 7 pager was all bullets, responsibilities mixed in with achievements. With some helpful advice from this forum, I got it down to a beautiful 2 pages.

I changed all the responsibilities from being a bullet list (many of which were rather repetitive), to simple paragraphs that outlined each position. Then under that I listed major accomplishments at each position in bullet form. My new one looks nothing like my old one.

onesaint

Everyone wrote: »

Everything, trying to reformat and condense the original monster wasn't working. I only knocked a page or so off doing that, not enough. The 7 pager was all bullets, responsibilities mixed in with achievements. With some helpful advice from this forum, I got it down to a beautiful 2 pages.

I changed all the responsibilities from being a bullet list (many of which were rather repetitive), to simple paragraphs that outlined each position. Then under that I listed major accomplishments at each position in bullet form. My new one looks nothing like my old one.

Nice work. I can't imagine how HR must have reacted to getting a 7 page resume. Interesting that you ended up with a paragraph, bullet point mix.

IT resumes are hard to get across to HR. We have to communicate our technological ability in the simplest way possible while still showing achievement. All that in as few pages as possible!

Slowhand

MrRyte wrote: »

So how seriously should we take him? The title of his article gives the impression of wanting to help but it seems more about the frustrastions of an HR employee.
Perhaps HE'S the one that should be looking for another line of work.....

For me, the whole article sounds like the same inner-monologue every IT worker has about users:

"I reboot your machine every time I'm at your desk and that fixes the problem, why can't you just try that yourself before calling me?"
"You refused to let me back up your data because 'it would take too much time', and now you're angry because I can't recover it from your dead hard drive five minutes before that big meeting?"
"Backing up your pirated copy of Bejeweled would not only be illegal, it would also be a waste of space on the backup server."

He's a recruiter that's having the same kind of frustrations about his 'users' (us) that we have about the people we work with. He's using this article to vent a little bit in a humorous way, as well as give us an insight into what drives him, and other people who look at our resumes, up the wall. If the non-IT folks I've worked with could hear some of the things I've said about them to other sysadmins behind closed doors. . . well, they probably wouldn't think it was very nice, either. Still, they could probably learn a thing or two from it just like I did from this rather cynical article.

jayc71

Wait....so black text on blue paper is bad? Well that explains so much...