Throw Out Your Resume
throw-out-your-resume.com
throw-out-your-resume.com
"If you’re not different then you’re boring." That's not true at all. If you send us a poster, a video or (god forbid) a song you wrote, we'll wonder if you can get along in a work environment. This isn't summer camp, it's a job. We want to know if you can do the work.
"dress accordingly to the company’s culture" - no, no, no. Dress like you want the job. When you work here, you can dress however you want. Most people wear jeans and t-shirts. But showing up to an interview like that looks like you don't really want the position. Put a tie on. Even better, wear a suit.
"If you can’t be genuine, real and comfortable in the conversation then forget it." If you can't be comfortable in an interview, then you're human. We recognize the inherent stress in an interview. Don't worry about appearing aloof. We'd rather you be anxious to get the job.
I disagree. The rule I've always heard is that you should be the best-dressed there, with an implied "don't over-do it". If everyone else is in jeans and you're in a suit, you don't look like you fit in. If you you're in slacks and a nice shirt, you look nice without standing out.
2 things on this: First, you don't know before the interview if everyone else will be in jeans. Second, all those in jeans are not the one that have a job interview.
This is something you ask your recruiter/HR contact.
> all those in jeans are not the one that have a job interview
That's why I advocate dressing one step above the current employees, not the same as them.
I prefer nice shirt & slacks, sometimes with a tie.
(Note: Your contact in HR at the company will know the dress code and should be able to give you advice for the expectations of dress code for candidates).
1. people who apply for jobs they see ads for, by just doing the phone screen + showing up at the interview; and
2. people who know someone who works at the company, have heard stories of how the company is, see people from the company getting lunch around town, might have even informally asked the person-qualified-to-make-hiring-decisions whether they're hiring--and then go through the interviewing process.
In the latter case, you obviously know exactly what the dress code is like before getting there.
Just ask your contact something like "Should I wear a suit and tie, or is business casual ok?"
If you can afford to say you wouldn't want to work at a place that expects a suit and tie for an interview, that's great -- but not everyone has that luxury.
Asking what to wear has generally worked just fine for me.
When I interview now I am in jeans and a nice shirt, but that doesn't differ too much from what I'd normally be wearing. If you don't like it, I don't want to work for you...
I want to know who you are, not the facade you put up in order to get the job.
It sounds like following this advice might make candidates less attractive to your company... but then, it sounds to me like your workplace culture is, at least in some sense, a more traditional one, so (no offense) the target audience of this article probably doesn't want to work there. To the extent that the job application/interview process can match the right employee up to the right company in terms of cultural fit, everyone benefits, and the corollary is that the process should facilitate not matching employees and companies up whose ideal office cultures align poorly.
For my part, having done a bit of interviewing and resume-reviewing, a memorable application is extremely important, and while I would probably be a little weirded out by someone submitting a song they wrote, resumes and cover letters that just list fraternity leadership positions and the like are unlikely to make the cut. Likewise, if you're a suit person, I have no objection to you wearing a suit to an interview, but lots of programmers are not suit people, and showing up to an interview dressed in a way that obviously makes you uncomfortable does nobody any favors.
This is going to get a lot of mixed response, in part because it's so contextual. On the east coast, for instance, it's not uncommon to dress up for interviews (even for some dev positions, but not all).
However, in the Bay Area it would be completely unheard of for an engineer to show up to an interview wearing a suit. Honestly, it would look absurd.
..except when applying at a financial services firm.
But that company had a strong developer culture.
Incidentally, I refer to my suit as my 'job interviews and funeral clothes'.
This statement is completely true, if you aren't doing something to set yourself apart from the other 50 applicants for the job, then you are pretty much leaving yourself up to luck whether or not you get picked.
I do however disagree with their suggestions for the vast majority of jobs out there. I would only send a poster/video if I knew the person that is probably going to look at it will respond positively to it. This could be effective for a marketing or graphic designer type of position. I would never do something like that for an engineering position.
You must market yourself effectively to get interest. Applying for a job is just selling a product (you) to a company and unless you stand out they aren't going to have any interest in you.
I also don't want to see a poster/song/video unless its (1) academic poster or (2) they demonstrate something about your engineering prowess. E.g., I would be interested in a Youtube video demonstrating their sweet graphics/video game they wrote. In my opinion, it's all about relevance.
Do you have empirical evidence that applicants who don't wear a suit to the job interview perform worse at their job? Or is this like the supposed British way of "screening" applicants: if they make random mistakes with etiquette they're pretty much disqualified over people who follow "proper etiquette".
As a personal note I actually like formal/classical clothing, but I wonder what kind of evidence hiring managers have to correlate clothing with job performance.
The best engineers rarely give a shit about how they show up at an interview, and I don't really care if they wear a tie or a tshirt, as long as they are comfortable.
Corporations have the resources to get things done. Its corporations that build airplanes, robots, death rays, skyscrapers, DNA sequencers, and CPUs.
Not everybody who is young and exciting dreams of helping emerging small businesses get off the ground and grow into successful companies.
Independent of the everyone who gets the latest and greatest Apple gear - including a Macbook Pro or Macbook Air and a 27" Cinema Display, Shopify will forever be a facilitator whose aim is to make an already working process more efficient. I find it comical that a company in a boring field and with boring ideas can talk trash about the people who built everything they touch.
Hell, they probably couldn't even get somebody with a good resume to work for them!
What's interesting to me is less the actual words on the page and more how you put it together. Some questions I am asking myself when going through resumes:
* Does this person know how to spell and can they use relatively proper grammar? I don't care if you're "Just" going to be a programmer, I expect a certain level of ability to document and write English. (And yes, if you're clearly not a native English speaker, that is taken into account. I still expect you to spell well -- spellcheck! -- but the rest is more fluid.)
* What is their organization style like? Did they convey the information in a straightforward, easy to parse way, or is it a complete organizational mess?
* Did they mention any open source volunteering or projects they're part of? This is a strong indicator of someone who is proactive and engaged with the world.
* Do they list code references? A Github or Sourceforge account would be ideal, but I'll take anything I can get.
* Do they tell me about their hobbies? (I generally hope not.) If they do, what do I think about them and what that means about a person? (Note: it's not fair to judge someone by the fact that they are a fly fisher, but it's damned hard not to, so please: stop putting your hobbies on your resume!)
* Do they list a bunch of accolades and Greek societies? If so, they probably value certain types of recognition more than others. (This isn't a negative, it's just interesting to note.)
* Do they hop from place to place, or are they the type who has been at Google for 8 years? These aren't necessarily pros or cons -- it all depends on why they made the decisions they did, and how open the candidate is about things.
Uhm, now I'm rambling. Anyway, hiring is hard, resumes are hard, but I still really enjoy reading them. I understand that I could get most of the same from a portfolio -- and certainly, someone's Github profile would give me most of this -- but I still like to see someone out of their element. Most of us are engineers, but sometimes we have to document or present and I really enjoy seeing how people handle those sorts of tasks.
On a related note, there is definitely a bubble in job application & interviewing posts on HN. I wonder if that indicates something going on in the start-up industry. Companies being too selective, or applicants not plentiful enough?
You're unique, just like everyone else.
Sending a resume, interview, get a job was a valid path 20 years ago. But there are no US aircrafts anymore who drop sweets, when you light a fire.
The modern way to find a good job is:
- Build a network of virtual contacts. IRC, LinkedIn, Facebook, Secondlife, ... what ever you like.
- Build a network of real life contacts, e.g. in hacker spaces, Linux user groups, Google summer of code, ...
- Keep your ears open!
- And whenever you hear about a problem, you think you can solve, apply to it.
I never got a job via the HR department. Their job is moving resumes to the trashcan. I always seen the HR department last, when giving them my tax numbers. I always talked up from techicans to the boss, who then decided that I was the one, and who had the power to overrule the HR department.
Resumes, to the extent they were required for a job application, are a very recent phenomenom.
My recent job inquiries have involved a short description of why I'm relevant to their posting along with different aspects of my life online. Sure, they may see me flirting with someone on twitter, but that's the world we live in. You don't want to work for a company that won't stalk you online first anyway. Make it easy for them.
Example of an online relevant context dump:
"Here are some supplemental contexts of me online:
• https://github.com/mattsta (point out which projects are relevant)
• http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=seiji (point them to my ancient HN profile)
• old stuff at http://matt.io/ (ancient personal minutia with a prominent post or two)
• life/tech/gripes at https://twitter.com/mattsta (life; uncensored)
• current slowly up-and-coming project: https://ldf.io/ (a point of information about something made from scratch)"
Actually, I would just want to work somewhere. It's pretty hard to get a job without work experience as a IT student. I only have my portfolio ( http://panuhorsmalahti.fi/portfolio?l=eng ) to go with.
http://petdance.com/2011/08/your-github-account-is-not-your-...
It shows 3 things:
- Knowledge of version control. Which is good to demonstrate.
- Knowledge of the de facto standard SCM hosts.
- Knowledge of current trends in tech; i.e., social awareness.
So tie those 3 things together and that presents a better candidate than someone who only has a resume. To be precise, it would vault you over the bog-standard candidates without a doubt. This is even more true for new graduates.
[1] Any sort of profile/portfolio site is a bonus for me. It doesn't have to be github. But I give bonuses for github or other SCM hosting sites. Note that I can go look at your interactions with other people there, which is a big deal.
As a professional, I understand that lots of code is written to get the job done, and shouldn't be polished until it gleams, the ROI on that isn't really there. As much as I like seeing code that's been turned almost into a piece of engineering art, I don't think its worth it for most professional work and even for personal projects... those lovingly crafted comments go out of date, that tight & elegant functionality has to get chopped up for the new feature's logic flow.
But I guarantee you that everyone is idiosyncratic about what they do for hiring. I think between the 3 guys who do most of the hiring on my team, we have between 3 and 6 opinions. :)
Github can be used for more than just developers. I worked with a sales guy who made great github issues. I'm talking the type of "issues" that make reproducing the bug, and understanding context very easy. If he showed that to someone who understands the value in that, than he has demonstrated a great communication skill without every writing code.
I'm a mechanical engineer, I know all my possible employers would love to see what I have on Github... yes that's absurd. Sometimes I fear these people live in a bubble all their own and have idea there are other professions our there that people might want to work in.
Ultimately I'd love to have multiple options for that section. One for design, support, finance, whatever. Time constraints mean that developers are the center of attention for now.
[0]: http://openemu.org/
The 'bag' logo goes to the homepage, but the text underneath it ("we're hiring") goes to the careers page.
I realize after reading your comment that it doesn't make sense to send people to our homepage at all, so I'm going to change it so that clicking the bag sends you to the careers page too.
Thanks!
Please report any typos or other errors so that I can fix them up. Thanks! :)
The first sentence is repeated twice in that paragraph. :)
I recently got an awesome job at a small company as a developer by doing the opposite of most of this stuff. Resume with no attached art project, suit and tie, no github profile, etc.