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 Hi Guys,

I've listed to most of your podcasts and I really appreciate all your work as it helps me improve a lot of my skills. 

I have a question about technical resume's. I 've been listening to the resume podcasts and bought the workbook and yet very confused on the technical part of the resume.  If you are a QA engineer or a Software Engineer you will have a lot of different skills, technologies that recruiters are specifically search for. How can you create your resume using your model when most of it is Responsibilities, then accomplishments? 

 

It would be awesome to see an example of a technical resume using your model (QA or Developer)

SamBeroz's picture

The skills can be included as part of either:

Responsible for developing requirements and maintainingthe tracablilty via DOORS.

Reduced static analysis warnings by 13% by introducing FindBugs to development team.

Increased click through rate by 50% by converting legacy flash application to HTML5.

The keywords will still be picked up in a search. Hope that helps - Sam

mattpalmer's picture

This has been covered a bit recently, specifically in these forum topics:

http://manager-tools.com/forums-7591

http://manager-tools.com/forums-7522

There are some examples in there of how you can structure your resume to include some keywordiness, without needing to go all out and turn it into a "skillsfest" and obscure the important parts of your resume -- which are what you've done, and how well you've done it.

lonchik's picture

 Hi Matt,

Thanks for the reference. I agree that skills section might not tell the whole story however I ran a little test. I made my resume close to the career tools model where I listed all my achievements. One resume I added the skills and summary section and other I did not. I send it off to 5 recruiters that I used to work with and asked for their feedback. 3out 5 liked the resume with summary and technical skills since it gives a nice overview and one recruiter noted that with my experience it does not make sense to squeeze everything in one page.  Go figure.

 

I wish I could A/B 1000 of recruiters to see which resume will truly win. :)

mattpalmer's picture

Recruiters, on the whole, aren't the ones who are going to be hiring you, and therefore aren't the people your resume really needs to speak to (although they are sometimes -- though by no means always -- the gatekeepers to the hiring manager, I will concede).  Recruiters aren't a homogeneous bunch, though, and opinions will differ.

Even amongst hiring managers, of course, opinions will differ, also.  I do know of one manager who clearly has too much time on their hands, who *likes* longer resumes -- the longer and more detailed the better.  The only question of interest is: which resume is going to get you the most *actual* interviews for the position you really want?  I recall one forum thread recently where someone tracked their "interview offer rate" and it jumped dramatically when they started sending out an MT one-page resume.  The current CT cast starts with a story about a contract graphic designer whose resume was dissected in a previous "What your resume says", and after he changed to a more MT-style resume his response rate jumped from 1% to 50% -- to the point where he now has more contract work than he needs.

 

lonchik's picture

That totally makes sense but would you agree that the point of the resume is get that initial screening call so you can talk to the recruiter and move forward in the hiring process. In most cases recruiters are the ones doing the screening and filtering out resumes.  I just feel that this works for every profession except technical jobs. Why then there are technical recruiters? It seems like it's a whole different game.  I will give it a try though just for comparison. 

donm's picture
Training Badge

As a manager who hires technical people fairly often, I see many CV's from folks just out of college that are four pages long. I have 30 years of experience, and my CV is one page long with lots of white space.

I see the CV as a way to put forth your accomplishments in a concise and bulleted list. If you need four pages, I'm hoping to see publications, nobel prizes, and patents. If you have a paragraph about how you like to read and listen to music, I'm not going to be impressed. How exactly is the music in particular going to help me get the job done?

Lastly, a long list of 40 programming languages from someone who is 25 isn't impressive, either. I know the applicant might have dabbled in those, but there is no way he is proficient in more than three computer languages. Often, I get folks who've "walked past" a book on the subject, so they list it as an ability. I'm not impressed.

Concentrate on your strengths and actual abilities. Telling someone you program in C# when your real talent is MySQL isn't going to get you hired, and if it does, it isn't going to make you look good. Even worse, it's going to make the boss look bad when you can't do what you said you could, and he believed you.