Building a better resume on the web
Krzysztof Kowalczyk: Blog your resume
This is how a typical resume looks like. My opinion is that it's impossible to tell anything from a typical resume. So a guy says he knows PHP. Does it mean that he's a PHP guru who has written 100k lines of PHP code or that he's just finished "Learn PHP in 15 minutes"? No way to tell. My idea: blog your resume. In addition to a standard resume keep a log of all the stuff you're learning and doing. E.g. if today you wrote a 5k lines perl script that spiders the web and extracts interesting info, you would to your log a dated entry:
Finished 5k line Perl script to spider the web. Used LWP::Simple module...
etc. Maintain focus and balance. We assume that this information will be read at some point in the future by someone who'll want to hire you. Don't put irrelevant information like what you've eaten for breakfast (maintain focus). Also don't post trivia like wrote 5 lines of Perl code to display "Hello world" (maintain balance). It's a win-win situation. Potential employer has a much better chance to assess your skills and experience. You'll have a better chance to showcase your skills and you'll have an edge over resumes that only say "Programming skills: C/C++, PHP". Of course you should start now, the day you're out of work is probably a few years late. Blogs are a good way to maintain this "extended resume". You might use categories (a feature of many blogging systems, e.g. Radio) to integrate this into your blogging flow.
IMO, it's impossible to tell anything from a typical job posting, and resumes are responses to job postings, so the whole system is fundamentally flawed... But that's not the point I wanted to raise just now.
I've spent a great deal of time thinking about how to better present myself to recruiters and hiring managers using the web. The traditional resume format is extremely limiting. It needs to be no more than two pages. It needs to be understandable by someone lacking domain knowledge in specific fields and technical areas. It needs to enable the reader to form a mental image of what the writer knows, how that knowledge has been applied, and what has been accomplished using that knowledge.
Did I mention that it has to be no more than two printed pages?
The requirements for a traditional resume are seriously conflicted. They suck by design.
I've been working on a new web site to be used as a resume supplement. The home page is something like a cover letter:
- It provides a brief summary of my most recent work experience.
- There are pointers to some of my web sites, with descriptions of their content.
- It contains a list of my software projects, with short descriptions and links.
As a whole the page is meant to demonstrate broad knowledge and interests, while each section encourages the reader to follow the links for more detailed information.
The work experience part naturally links to a resume page. I'm still hashing this out, but the basic concept is to offer my stock resume in the usual formats for download and printing, and provide an expanded HTML version for online consumption. The HTML version will:
- Include items that were removed from my stock resume due to space constraints.
- Provide more detail with each item, using a collapsed outline format so that the reader isn't overwhelmed by pages of text.
- Link technical terms to a glossary page with brief definitions and links to more information.
- Have an appendix that inventories my skills and technical knowledge, and provides specific examples of how I've applied them in the workplace (linking back to the resume as appropriate).
The goal is to give recruiters a better understanding of my skills and accomplishments, and how they can be applied to other areas. A significant problem for me has been that the bulk of my technical experience is specific to large-scale web hosting and other Internet endeavors. I've iterated over my resume many times, but I still find that recruiters can't figure out how my knowledge of "large-scale web hosting deployments" can be applied to large-scale Windows deployments or individual high-volume e-commerce websites.
I'm also trying to highlight more of my non-technical skills, but that's another matter entirely.
Now, how might a weblog help me in this endeavor? I think that a weblog could serve as an excellent reference in creating the "appendix" of my resume website, and I'll probably start searching for forgotten accomplishments in my old weblog tomorrow. A problem with using the weblog directly is navigation. If a recruiter is interested in hiring me for ASP work, my posts about managing key accounts probably won't impress them. liveTopics could be used to achieve the same ends, but I don't believe that it presently allows for separate topic catalogs (work topics would be mixed with personal ones).
No solution is perfect. I'm going to finish the site that I've outlined here, link to it from my resume and any e-mails that I send, and see what happens...
