The Person ... Part 1

One thing about being a hiring manager that is different and exciting is the fact that you get to give someone a Job. On the other hand it is not that fun having to go through 100s of resumes looking for the right person. It means putting forth an effort to find someone that you believe will do the best job, complete the work assigned and not be a pain in the butt. How do you make this determination? Well first off almost every time I have the NEED. NEED is what is supposed to be accomplished. I NEED 1 person to do X. If I have the need I can make a pretty good determination on the skills required and then I can match up the person to the need, when I say match up the person, I mean the whole person. What is "the person" well in my experience it is a combination of two major items. First I will cover RESUME and then I will cover Interview and attitude, all in all they make up a whole. So to get started lets go with Resume. RESUME this is a document that tells your job history story. It tracks each job and the efforts (work) that you have done. Typically they are chronological and they encompass your entire work history from the time of your professional life forward, depending on where you are in your job/career lifespan it will include things from your professional career forward, SO if you had a High School job working at a Grocery Store as a check out clerk and you are 42 years old and have held multiple positions in Information Technology fields, you may not want to include this as it does not pertain to what you may want to portray as professional experience. You would however want to have jobs that relate to whatever job you are potentially applying for and so you would want anything that had a technical or IT related description or job responsibilities. When thinking of the sections of your resume you should have jobs in chronological order with the most recent job listed first. You want a Job Title, Company you worked for and date time span year to year. Hopefully without any breaks in employment. If you do have breaks in employment be prepared to answer questions about them and describe the why, the what you did, and your thoughts on breaks in employment. Another thing is if you are a job hopper, someone who has 6 month jobs then move to another and another. This would generate a question. Also the title and job listing should match. If your title is Software Engineer then you should have a lot of statements about Writing Code, Gathering Requirements and troubleshooting issues, your job write-up should match the position title. You also don't need a long drawn out job write-up but one that describes your major responsibilities. Be prepared to talk about each position with an example of something that you specifically did during each job time period. Next you should have Education. This should list your highest education accomplishment first. Whatever Degree you have with the School name, and Dates. This should list only accomplished and finished degrees, listing what you are working on should be left for conversation during the interview. If all you have is a High School diploma or GED you can skip the education section if you want and not have an education section, but again this depends on the type of resume and job you are applying for. If it is for a technical position a degree will help. The last item that you would want to include is certifications, this will help to identify the items that you have actually studied for and tested to assess aptitude in a particular specialized area. I used to think that certifications were just a good list of things that someone knew. Then the more I reviewed resumes it seemed I focused on those who had certifications more than others that were in the pile. This then led me to believe that even though the certs in my mind had marginal value they did make people rise to the top in getting more views. If you are following what I am saying is regardless of what your personal opinions are on certifications if you have them list them if they get you more views then so be it. In the next section I will post more about the interview and attitude. Bottom line getting hired is a lot about what you know and your experience but its not the only factor going into getting you that job you know you deserve. Remember your resume is the story of you and it may be the only thing a recruiter sees that they can use to make a determination if they want to talk to you more or not.