A new approach to the resume skills section | Hacker News Reader

A new approach to the resume skills section

salexander.posterous.com

18 pointsdekayed19 comments

Stop. You're overthinking this. The purpose of a resume isn't to sell you as an employee; it's to sell you as an interview candidate. Two very different things.

Keep your resume concise, send it as a PDF (if you're working with a system that doesn't allow PDFs, chances are you're targeting the wrong system at your prospective employer), make sure it gracefully includes the right keywords, groom your work history so that it sells your suitability for the role instead of trying to tell your life's story, and put the balance of your energy into a cover letter.

Then tear the cover letter off, turn that into an email, send it to the guy who's actually going to manage the role they're hiring for, and attach your simple PDF resume to it.

Done, move on to getting ready for the interview.

So this isn't satire?

I don't know, but whether he's making a statement about how hard it is to write an effective resume or how hard it is to glean useful information out of a resume, either way, he's using them the wrong way.

It's not beneficial to the applicant to be very specific about skills -- the applicant would much rather you were in the dark about it, and had to interview him to get a specific idea of his skillsets.

In other words, the incentives just don't line up, so this will never happen.

You could FORCE applicants to fill something out, but people would still game the system just by marking everything 777 or marking everything to a pattern determined by the job posting etc.

In terms of someone gaming the system, this was sort of said in a previous comment, but having a value associated with a skill sets a level of expectation. If you say you're at 777 for a skill, then it would be valid for an interviewer to ask you a very tough question on it. It doesn't resolve the fact that you shouldn't have gotten to the interview stage, but you can be thrown out earlier in the process, like during a phone screen instead of an in-person interview.

the applicant would much rather you were in the dark about it

This is most certainly not true in all cases. I don't pile my resume full of buzzwords just for the heck of it. There are only two reasons my "skills" section is not carefully organized to give an accurate impression of my level of expertise in each area.

First-- sometimes it's hard to know how good at something you really are.

Second-- I don't have room on the resume to differentiate between "I use django all the time and love it more than life itself and read books about it for fun on the weekends" and "I did one deep technical dive on django for 2 months, 2 years ago" and "I use django daily but mostly just make simple content and minor feature changes". You are probably already bored and I'm only on the first skill.

The reality is that I have a lot of experience and have used a lot of different technologies at varying levels of skill, any of which might be relevant to an employer, but I don't have time to write a novel about my last 10 years of work experience describing every skill in the proper context. Hopefully, the summarized experience history and accomplishments will give the employer a reasonable idea about how the skillset maps to expertise and if they have any further questions, they'll make the time for an interview, phone call, or email exchange.

You need to display your skills, period. I have hired over 20 developers in the last 6 months and received over 30 resume for every 1 good resume. I did not have time to read everyone's work experience explanation either on the first run. I could only spend less than a minute on a resume. So we rely a lot of the Skills section.

- Put it on a table. Include how many years you have been working on a specific skill. It will be helpful to list when was the last time you used that skill. So that is the first cut.

- After going through the skills section, we look at the Employment history and what you actually did with those skills that you listed. Then you get a telephone interview and possibly invitation to an in-person interview.

You are not going to get into the interview list if the HR person does not know what you are skilled at. Trust me, they are not going to use the interview as a discovery session. They don't have time for that, especially when there are other candidates who were clear in displaying their skill sets.

You rely a lot on the skills section, and you have an HR person doing the initial filter.

Your process is exactly what causes people to fill resumes with buzzwords. "I touched a prior version of fizzbuzz, once, at 3am" is still going to put fizzbuzz on the resume, so your HR person doesn't chuck it in the circular file.

This is the kind of process that guarantees a lack of clarity on the part of the applicant.

I usually just put dates next to skills (2005-present, etc) which gives some indication. Unix file permissions are a good idiot filter, but unfortunately most recruitment agents are completely clueless and wouldn't understand it.

That still requires people to make self accessment of their skills. There's isn't much incentive to be completely honest on their resume, if they put it on their resume they should be able to 777 all those skills but that rarely happens.

There's some incentive to be honest. If they catch you cheating in one place, you will lose credibility on all aspects. (Also resume fraud is a crime in some places, isn't it?)

There are many job postings which say that knowing language X is a big plus. If I had non-expert familiarity with language X, I may not apply to a job where it is the primary requirement, but I would definitely put it down on my resume with the permission assignment corresponding to what I felt my level was. This would let me say, hey I sort of know it and also give the interviewer a chance to figure out if I knew it well enough for their needs.

If you claim to be an expert, it's reasonable for the interviewer to pass on you if he doesn't think you are an expert. This is a great way of saying you have some familiarity without the interviewer ever interpreting it as you think you're an expert. It could provide a lot of value in that way -- if someone only claims to have a '4' for Python, I probably won't expect them to know that you shouldn't put [] as a default value for a kwarg.

The skills section of a resume serves two masters, the HR Dept/Recruiters, and hiring managers. You need to list out every keyword ever to get through the first, yet somehow signal to the second which skills are more prominent than others.

A pie chart, tag cloud, or some other visualization would probably go a long way - just don't get too obfuscated, or HR will just get confused & move on to the next guy.

This is where the work history and various other sections of the resume come in. Explain some of the most significant projects you've worked on and describe the nature of your contributions. If you describe 10 years of experience in web development environments using PHP, when you put C in your skills section it will be clear that C is not one of your core skills. You're probably trying to make the point that you can read and understand C if you have to, and if that's important to the employer they should follow up.

I like it. Another benefit is it could help you filter out prospective employers. Most people wouldn't get it, but the ones that did would be promising.

The skills section of a resume tells about what "self-assessed skills" a candidate have. It's never meant to tell how good a candidate is.

The efficiency, mastery and attitude of a candidate will be determined in the technical exam and personal interview not by a detailed resume or the "unix permissions" metaphor.

That is exactly why we have a "hiring process" in the first place.

Sometimes I think that programmers should keep two versions of their resume, one for recruiters and one for other developers. But that's a totally different topic all together. http://blog.rishavrastogi.com/?q=node/2

Have people classify their relative skill distribution using a pie chart. Test them on a slice or two to calibrate. Dumb idea?

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