Resumes 1.0

Warning! If your IT resume has not had a total overhaul in the past five years you are potentially being rejected outright for assignments for which you are totally qualified – simply because you appear dated. Dated as in old, out-of-style, old-fashioned, passé. Think dinosaur. Imagine, if you can, your resume clearly stating in black and white Times New Roman ‘c#.net frameworks’ or ‘business process engineering’ and the hiring manager reading ‘COBOL’ or ‘data processing’. Cut - Delete - Purge.

While a rose is a rose is a rose, it cannot be said that a resume is a resume is a resume. An Information Technology resume is a different breed of resume, and probably qualifies as a totally different species of deliverable than your average civilian resume. My personal (as a consultant) and professional (as a recruiter) experience has shown me that the rules of most resumes simply do not apply to today’s IT resumes.

Beginning with the length – the IT resume should be long enough to clearly state actions, responsibilities and experiences that qualify you for the assignment for which you’re applying. Unequivocal language is tres important in a resume, because in today’s world of non-technical Vendor Management analysts making the supreme determination on whether a candidate is qualified to be considered for an assignment, there should be no question that you meet the requirements. Do not assume that these analysts know that MOSS and SharePoint are basically the same thing -- you make this assumption at your own doom.

Once your resume makes it through the Vendor Management Maze of Doom, it has to actually pique the interest of the over-worked, under-staffed hiring manager – the same hiring manager who is really hoping that if she keeps accepting more and more resumes she’ll finally get that one candidate who meets all the requirements to a T. Bad news for her, good news for you, is that this will never happen. So you want to grab her attention on the first page and force her to read to the end.

In my office we have a loose standard of how we like to see a resume laid out, a format we believe best serves both our candidates and the hiring managers.

1. Professional Summary
2. Technical Summary
3. Professional Experience
4. Education and Certifications

I’ll break these sections down in my next posting.