OK, here's my second entry so it's time to get to the meat of this blog... finding great jobs for geeks. There are three topics I've been noodling about lately and I'll address these in different entries, Salary Discrimination, Writing a Good Geek Resume, Moving to Where the Work Is.

Let's start with the resume.


Don't listen to any resume "expert" who tells you that you must limit your resume to one page. That's rediculous!


As a tech recruiter, I want to pull a few things from your resume and I want them fast. Make it hard and I'll just move on. Think of it like web pages. If it's a pain to get the information, what do you do? You move on to another site. That takes you about 10 seconds to decide right? Well, it's the same for us.,


The first thing I want to know is your current location. No reason to talk to you if you live a million miles away from the job (unless we can relo and that's harder to justify with the lousy job market). Put this right on the top and not in a stupid Word header or footer!


Two, I want to see what you've been doing with yourself for last 4-5 jobs. I want to see exactly what you've been doing with yourself. Make it easy on me OK? Don't give me a bunch of nebulous, wishy-washy statements about how you contributed to saving your company from impending doom. It might be true, and if it is, tell me how you did it. I want depth, a three dimensional resume. Reread your own resume and ask yourself the depth questions (e.g., How many? How long? What did you use to do this wonderful thing you did?).


A good example is when a sysadmin lists "Architected large-scale web solution." What does that mean? First of all clearly and concisely define "Architected" for me. What factors did you take into account in your design? What type of services were your servers supporting? What kind of security, load, etc. support did you incorporate into your design? Then tell me how large is "large." How many servers? Break the servers down by service (i.e., web servers, database servers, load balancers, clusters, number of datacenters, etc.) In other words, your "large-scale" solution may be an pimple compared to ours. It's also possible that your solution dwarfs ours. If that's true, cool! Impress me.


One more thing. Don't hold back! If you're holding back the details because your think you'll look better, don't. A good technical recruiter is going to slice-and-dice your entire background and history anyway so don't make this a hide-and-seek game. Again, make it easy for us to get a realistic impression of you and your skills. Trust me, we'll love your for it.


Also, clearly indicate for every job how long you were there and if you were a perm or contractor, contract-to-hire, temp-to-perm, etc. It gives us me a better of your work history. Knowing if you did long-term contracts vs. short-term contracts is important. Sometimes I want to know if you have the "stick with it" attitude and can follow up on your work. Yes, that does mean maintenance and sometimes even support! Don't get me wrong, there are perfectly good reasons for bringing someone with highly unique experience to do a shot-gun job. You're worth your weight in gold in those instances. Sometimes, that's just not what the team needs and I want to know that early.


Whew! This was supposed to be my first, short entry. I'll elaborate on a few more resume hints in the next installment.