The Fishbowl

On Resume, Error.

Jeffrey Walker wrote an article on what he looks for in a résumé. I was going to write a long “me too”, but it seems more efficient just to list the links I was going to use as source material:

• Rands in Repose: A Glimpse and a Hook” — this article comes pretty close to describing how I read résumés
• Mike Cannon-Brookes: Applying for a Java job - HOWTO — some hard-earned wisdom from Mike recruiting for Atlassian
• John Rotenstein: How to get a job at Altassian — John managed to compress all the most important information in his résumé down to a single diagram

I think what many people forget is that a résumé is an exercise in marketing. You’re trying to sell yourself to a prospective employer, but so often I get little more from a résumé than a dry list of technologies, and some useless self-assessments of the applicant’s ability.

For the kind of developer who considers him or herself above marketing, it might be something of an alien landscape.

What surprises me most as one of the pool of Atlassian developers who reads incoming résumés, is not that we get so many bad résumés, but that so many of them come through recruiters. Don’t recruiters have some kind of incentive to make sure a candidate makes the best possible first impression?