ranty rant
I've had the opportunity to interview a number of people (I'm not a manager, but I'm part of the "people you'll be working with" crowd). It astonishes me how horrible resumes are these days. Way back when I first learned about resumes, it was one page, no exceptions. If you had a lot of experience, edit it down to what's most relevant for the job.
I will accept that the "one page" rule seems to have gone out the window. Still, I have this platonic ideal of two pages, publications on a separate page if necessary. Most resumes seem to be four to seven pages long. I've seen five pages for five year's experience. Dude, be concise!
Then there's spelling, grammar, and formatting - for something as important as a resume, polish it up. Even if you don't speak English well, or have dyslexia, I daresay that you have a friend who can help proofread. Or a friend of a friend. Or hire someone. Sheesh, even auto-correct will catch most of the errors i see.
Also, if you're going to be wacky, at least be consistent. If you choose to capitalize "database", do it everywhere. My eyes bleed when people pretend English is German and capitalize every noun, but they bleed more when capitalization is completely haphazard.
I've recently been wondering if I'm too harsh, especially if the job is not customer-facing. Then, today, I was trying to troubleshoot a strange error. Output values were 1/100th of 1% different than what was expected. It turned out that an extra space at the end of a line was the culprit. And, that may sound like a tiny bit, but if it's a product which may be used for diagnostics? Sheesh. And then you present me with a resume with haphazard spacing, and ask if I'd want that person to write software. Crikey, no, I don't even need to interview them to find out that they're bad.
I feel like I've got a holy grail of a resume if it has both parallelism and consistent use or disuse of the Oxford comma. Seriously, that rule of thumb finds the best people. I find it a bit scary that I can totally ignore content and filter people based on resume format. *sigh*
I will accept that the "one page" rule seems to have gone out the window. Still, I have this platonic ideal of two pages, publications on a separate page if necessary. Most resumes seem to be four to seven pages long. I've seen five pages for five year's experience. Dude, be concise!
Then there's spelling, grammar, and formatting - for something as important as a resume, polish it up. Even if you don't speak English well, or have dyslexia, I daresay that you have a friend who can help proofread. Or a friend of a friend. Or hire someone. Sheesh, even auto-correct will catch most of the errors i see.
Also, if you're going to be wacky, at least be consistent. If you choose to capitalize "database", do it everywhere. My eyes bleed when people pretend English is German and capitalize every noun, but they bleed more when capitalization is completely haphazard.
I've recently been wondering if I'm too harsh, especially if the job is not customer-facing. Then, today, I was trying to troubleshoot a strange error. Output values were 1/100th of 1% different than what was expected. It turned out that an extra space at the end of a line was the culprit. And, that may sound like a tiny bit, but if it's a product which may be used for diagnostics? Sheesh. And then you present me with a resume with haphazard spacing, and ask if I'd want that person to write software. Crikey, no, I don't even need to interview them to find out that they're bad.
I feel like I've got a holy grail of a resume if it has both parallelism and consistent use or disuse of the Oxford comma. Seriously, that rule of thumb finds the best people. I find it a bit scary that I can totally ignore content and filter people based on resume format. *sigh*