Note: This file has moved to notablog.

On resumes:

> 2) I've been out of college for 11 years and I can still fit my
> resume on one page.  Is that a bad thing?

     Not necessarily.  In fact, unless you are just so incredibly
studly, you should do everything possible to fit your resume onto one
page.  Bring extra pages of information to the interview (in fact,
bring extra copies of your resume, samples of your work, and have your
list of references available as well), but in point of fact, the
1-page rule is almost a law of nature, mostly because of sheer
numbers.

     As Gary points out below, the hiring process from the other side
consists first of much winnowing of resumes (at one point a department
I worked for attempted to hire somebody and got 2000 resumes in
response).  At this point you want to account for human nature and
structure your resume to make human nature work to your advantage,
instead of against.  Make it easier for them to see how you fit the
job requirements and you'll more likely get the interview than the
next resume, which didn't.

     A resume's job is to convey, at a glance, a correct impression of
the applicant's skills, talents and experience, and then on closer
reading to reveal nuances that will demonstrate that the applicant is
worth talking to.  Anything beyond that is superfluous.

     Oh, and to quote one quite experienced and seasoned professional
who gave me my first advice on my second job hunt, "Objectives are
college kid stuff."  Leave off the objective.

     Also, if you're in a particularly technical field, you may want
to put a "nut graph" (to borrow a term from journalism) of acronyms,
buzzwords, skills, certifications, etc, near the top of your resume.
This is helpful because often in the hiring process you get people
playing "buzzword bingo" - often the first pass (or couple of passes)
on the stack of resumes will be done by people who have no clue about
the job or experience in the field, they just have a list of criteria,
key words to look for, etc.  Often the first thing that will happen to
your resume is that it will be scanned in and have keywords entered
for it.  By putting all the keywords in one place, you make it easier
for them to find you :-).

My personal resume consists of:

1) Identification & Contact Information (bold, centered, etc)
2) Summary of Experience (a paragraph or two of very abbreviated,
   noun-and-adjective-heavy text)
3) Skills summary (in my case brokend own into three sections:
   Operating Systems, Languages, Development Environments).
4) Employment History
5) Education (just degree, university, date
6) Accomplishments (stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else, like
   papers I've presented or articles I've written, etc).  Come to
   think of it, I left this off my latest revision.

     I also think highly of using indentation and bold text to
highlight critical details.  My employment history, for example,
has the job title first, on the first line, with the rest of the
information indented.  Typically:

Job Title (maybe some key words in parens), Employer, Location, Dates.
     Job description here.
Next Job Title,  etc.
     Next job description here.

     This approach lets the hiring manager quickly glance down the
left margin of the resume and get a sense of your experience.

Gary responds:
>> OK, you asked for opinions.  I am an employer and have hired and
>> fired.  I would count a stable job history as a good thing when
>> reviewing resumes.  I would worry about someone who can't keep a job
>> and bounces in and out of work every six months.  

     This can be an issue, but it depends on the industry and the
field.  I'd probably freak you out, because I've been a contractor
since mid-95.  Tons of six month and 12-month contracts.  However,
look more closely and you'll see that I did four different contracts
for one of the top 100 banks in the US.  In some fields, looking at a
young professional who's spent too long at one job will bring to mind
the question "what's he/she afraid of?  Why aren't they getting more
exposure to the field?"  So stability is relative.

>> So I wouldn't necessarily think a one-page resume is a bad thing.
>> In fact, even if your job history goes too long for one-page, a
>> single-page /summary/ in front of a fuller resume might also be a
>> good thing. When you're reviewing a stack of resumes, it's
>> refreshing to find one that can tell you what you want to know
>> concisely.

     Amen brother.


Specific Resume Advice

Somebody privately mailed me about my post and mentioned that they
keep several different versions of their resume.  I didn't want to get
too side-tracked in that post, but I do reccommend keeping a very long
"story of my life" resume and cover letter.  Start from that, and cut
material and move things around to suit the particular situation, to
emphasize your experience that is more directly applicable to the job
at hand.

Building your resume can be very difficult, due to a combination of
personal blind spots and natural reluctance to recognize and promote
your own qualities and strengths.  It's usually very helpful to talk
to other people about your resume.  Show your resume to them.  Talk
about your particular jobs and what you did there and see if they find
that accurately reflected in your description.  Make sure you talk to
people both inside your industry and career field and outside (the
insiders to get a sense of nuances that aren't obvious to an outsider,
the outsiders to challenge your preconceptions).

A general piece of advice I usually tell people is, when you're
starting out, sit down and list all of your life experiences - mostly
jobs, but other things can qualify if you're short of job experiences.
For each experience, list the different qualities that it taught you
about, or that it gave you an opportunity to display.  In general,
you can categorize these qualities by:

Career - the qualities specific to your job type, i.e. specifically
being a programmer, or writer, or artist, or engineer.  Include all
the career-specific buzzwords (e.g. for a programmer, programming
languages, methodologies, tools, specific hot fields (example
"e-commerce"), etc).

Industry - the specific industry that the job duties involved.  I
wanted to label this one "problem domain" but I decided that was a bit
too high-falutin' a term.  For example, if you did a lot of
programming in the financial industry, or working with specific
financial packages in the retail industry, those details would go in
this category.

Professional - the hard-to-quantify issues like responsibility,
planning, leadership, etc.  Basically all the management feelgood
words, that will illustrate your growth as a professional.  

This last can be particularly hard to self-assess, and it helps if you
have somebody experienced to talk to about it.  The first step is,
come up with the simplest, most minimal job description.  This is what
you'll be tempted to put in, and this is what people will assume about
a job - unless you take care to tell them otherwise.  

Look at your minimalist job description and compare it to what you
really did.  Consider how closely you were supervised. Whether you
were closely supervised or not, consider how much you contributed to
the company above and beyond the minimalist job description.  Look at
aspects of what you did that required more than rote mechanical
order-following.  Look at when you were expected to exercise judgement
and perception.  Look at what aspects of the job were left to you to
determine.  Look at what you were expected to do without being told
about.

     Word choices - the precise word you use to describe something can
have a major effect. Write with an eye towards active voice instead of
passive voice, and choose words appropriate to your field.

     For example, for a software developer, say "developed",
"implemented", "engineered" or "programmed" instead of "created" or
"maintained".  Instead of saying "Created script files to gather
statistics" say "implemented network usage statistical tracking and
analysis of network security risks."  Rewrite "Web page design and
implementation" to say "designed and implemented web pages and CGI
scripts in Perl, Python and C."

     Many buzzword acronyms are so well known, you don't have to spell
them out (e.g. SQL stands for Structured Query Language - or was that
Standard Query Language? - but nobody knows or cares).  Always include
the acronym, though, even if you spell them out.  Standard publishing
practice is to use the acronym and include the full name in
parentheses after the first use, but I reversed it above.  No real big
deal, just felt better that way.  Including both is important, though,
because you don't know whether the HR person wrote down "Microsoft
Foundation Classes" or "MFC" after talking to the programmer.

     Product/Domain is related to either specific products or specific
businesses or industries.  Some cases, like Oracle RDBMS, are fuzzy,
or maybe they're both a domain and a technology.  In general, you
probably want to emphasize the technology aspect over the domain
aspect, so you don't lock himself into a domain.  But you should
include the domain aspect in the job description in case it wins you
any points.  If you have a chance to customize the resume for
submission for a job that involves a domain you specifically has
experience in, like for example financial products, you want to
emphasize that domain.


Okay, so once you've assembled this categorized set of descriptions,
you need to boil it all down.  For each job you should develop a set
of three (or more) descriptions, oriented towards each of the three
categories.  Build a resume for a specific position based on what's
more relevant.  If your industry-specific experience for a particular
job is relevant, use the industry-emphasizing description.  If the job
involves a lot of responsibility, professional level work, etc, use
the professional-emphasizing description.  If the job is a very
specific, technically-targeted job, use the career-emphasizing
description.

A quick word on "why you left/are leaving your previous/current
position."  Almost everybody today will accept that you are simply
looking for a new job.  If you're currently employed, people will
not have a problem with you simply saying you're looking for 
more money, or looking for a new challenge, or looking to expand
your career, etc.  They will also not have a problem with keeping
the fact that you're job-hunting confidential.  

If word does get back to your boss, you may not be comfortable telling
them you're hunting.  It is not unethical to job hunt and it's also
not unethical to not tell them - if their behavior is such that you're
uncomfortable telling them you're hunting, that's a pretty good
indicator of something...  Tell them some recruiter got an old copy of
your resume from a web database, or somebody snagged it of a web page.
I've had my resume on a web page since the web existed (and I had it
in my .plan file before then :-).  If somebody tries to give you some
nonsense about having an up-to-date resume on your private web site,
just treat it like the nonsense it is, i.e. shrug and say in a
bewildered tone, "what's the problem?".


If you were fired (aka "asked to leave"), avoid any acrimony or any
sort of negative comments about the job or employer.  To quote _Pulp
Fiction_:

"That's pride talking.  FUCK pride.  It never helps, it only hurts."  

If you were fired for a specific cause, the best way to handle it that
I know of is simply to say "the company/job/I changed and I was no
longer happy there, and it started to show in my work."  This covers
pretty much every kind of bad situation, it doesn't lie, it doesn't
sound self-serving, and it doesn't dwell on any negative issues about
you.  Of course, you shouldn't bring it up unless they specifically
ask you - and most places probably won't even ask, these days.