Resumes are so much fun, aren’t they? Resumes are fun for job seekers to create and they are loads of fun for employers to review. There is something truly invigorating about boiling a life down to a series of dates, buzz words and career highlights. Who am I? Well, just look at these 2 pages of aesthetically pleasing indented bullet points and you will know exactly who I am.
Of course, in reality it is very difficult to both present yourself through your resume to others as well as understand someone else through their resume. There is often a common mistake made as to how technologies are written and interpreted on a resume. The title of this article says ‘.NET or Java’, but I could have substituted PHP, Ruby, C++, JavaScript, or any other technology as well. Basically, the there are 3 fundamental flaws with technologies in general on resumes.
1. People Lie
I am not talking about ‘exaggerating’. I am talking about flat-out lies. You may think that most people wouldn’t flat-out lie because someone will eventually figure it out and then they will immediately get a door shut in their face. You would be wrong. Who knows the types of justifications people have in their heads, but it doesn’t matter.
If you are an employer, you need to make sure that candidates get grilled technically before they step foot in the door. I don’t care if someone is supposedly an ‘Enterprise Architect’ and they feel it is beneath them to explain how .NET garbage collection works. Every area of technical experience should be thoroughly vetted.
If you are a job seeker, it is quite simple. Don’t lie! Seriously. It is not going to help you. Think about it this way: either you get caught in which case you are going to get thrown out on your ass or perhaps you don’t get caught and if you are really lucky to have some incompetent employer who takes you on board to do what you said you could do but really you have no idea. If you get the job, you now have to continue pretending to know what you don’t know and hope to hell that someone doesn’t figure out you really don’t have a clue. Wow, that sounds awesome. Have fun with that.
2. Search Engines Before Google Sucked
There are many reasons why Google was such a huge success, but read pretty much any of the books about Google such as The Search by John Battelle and you will find one prevalent theme. The internet was being overrun by spammers that used SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques to trick the existing search engines into believing that when you entered the words ‘best baby stroller’, you should be directed to the Debbie Double D’s exotic website. One of the most common techniques used to do this was keyword stuffing. Those early search engines thought that if a keyword appeared a lot on a page, then that alone was enough to warrant a high search ranking. This was a mistake because once people realized what they were doing, it was very easy to game the system by simply writing ‘best baby stroller’ 500 times on a page. Google stopped all that nonsense by instead relying more on off-page factors (i.e. such as the number of links to a page from other websites).
How is this relevant to technologies listed on resumes? Well, unfortunately there still way too many employers that rely way too much on resume keyword filtering in order to find qualified candidates. Just like SEO experts in the ’90s, candidates have responded in a predictable fashion by putting as many keywords on their resume as possible so that they can be picked up by the employer keyword searches. So, even if a bullet point saying ‘Worked with .NET LINQ for SQL’ may not be a blatant lie, there is absolutely no way to know to what degree a candidate actually understands ‘LINQ for SQL’. In other words, doing a resume keyword search implies that you think when a resume has those keywords, the candidate knows and understands that technology. The reality, however, is that he or she may just know the technology at a very high level and is listing it there just so they don’t get filtered out.
Now, am I saying that you should not put any techie keywords in a resume? No, not at all. The point is more that candidates are better served focusing more conveying how they solved complex business problems and overcame tough technical challenges. Sure, list all the technical keywords at the bottom of the page or at the bottom of each work experience, but please stop filling up 6 pages with things like ‘Used .NET DataReader to save data to the database’.
Employers for their part can stop the madness by immediately tossing in the trash any resume that is all keyword stuffing and no substance. If someone wants to list out every J2EE API class (seriously, I have seen this more than a handful of times) then thank them and wish them well.
3. Not All Code is Equal
Let’s say there is an open position for a team that works on a .NET-based application which utilizes the WF Rules Engine. There are two candidates for this position:
A) Candidate A knows .NET and the WF Rules Engine, but is generally difficult to work with and writes cryptic code that is often buggy and misunderstood by other team members. It takes this candidate some time to adjust to new technologies and circumstances that he or she is not used to.
B) Candidate B doesn’t know any .NET but is a solid Java developer that takes great care to ensure his or her code can be easily maintained by other team members in the future. He or she is easy to get along with and has demonstrated an ability to pick up new concepts quickly.
Employers that rely too heavily on specific technical experience may not even give Candidate B a chance, but in all likelihood Candidate B is better choice. The thing to realize here is that regardless of what technical experience someone has coming into a job, they will almost certainly never know everything. Whenever someone starts a new job, they need days to weeks to even months to get up to speed on how things work and what they need to do in order to be productive. So…why why why why why does any employer value experience in a particular technology over base technical skills, the ability to learn and the ability to work with others? Employers should be more technology agnostic and just focus on finding the smartest, hardest working candidates regardless of whether they know .NET or Java or PHP.
Job seekers need to learn to be more technology agnostic as well. I always find it interesting to see at the top of a resume something along the lines of ‘Seeking senior .NET development position’. That one line tells me that the person has no clue. Over time technologies change and those people who can’t adapt to use whatever technology is needed will eventually be overrun and outdated. The goal should never be to use technology x, y or z but rather work on exciting, challenging business problems.
Conclusion
The value of knowing any particular technology will always be overshadowed by several general skills that allow a person to adapt and change to any given situation. They key for the employer is to figure out a way of effectively finding those general skills rather using resume keyword filtering and other old school techniques. Similarly, job seekers need to improve their ability to learn and look for positions that will help them to grow.
What are the general skills that employers should be looking for? How can they find candidates that have them? How can job seekers acquire those skills? Check out The 4 Characteristics of Highly Effective Developers.
