SPUG: Giving up on computer jobs & usefulness of placement fi rms

[Aaron Salo]

At 10:26 AM 8/13/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>- It's important to tailor your resume to the taste of your prospective 
>employer. If I am applying for a Perl job I would make sure that they 
>notice words like Perl, Unix, XML, OOP, HTML, Linux, Apache in their first 
>glance. That would ensure that after they have glanced over your second 
>page, they would come back to see what you have actually done in those 
>areas.

Most importantly in regard to this, in these days of automated HR screening
systems, electronic resume submissions, and hundreds of applicants for
every position, if you're applying for a position at a mid to large size
company you won't even get a chance to land on the first tier screener's
desk unless the HR software hits the right keywords in your resume and
scores you above the cut line. You can be the most remarkable candidate for
a position and get /dev/null'ed by the software if your resume is not
crafted to score high enough to make the first cut. And more often these
days the first hurdle is getting past the software.

When they def a job opening, AFAIK they tell the software to screen
applicants and score them based on pretty dumb algorithms that do string
matching. So if the job calls for XML and Oracle and ERP and Siebel, you
better make sure you have mention of those items in your resume if you want
to survive the software screen and have a chance for the first tier grunt
to flip your pages over and admire your external activities. 

Getting through the software screener is similar to the arcane discipline
of search engine placement. There is very little concrete info on how to
improve your scoring, but a safe bet is if the posting has specific
requirements for discipline based experience, make sure you state them all,
and exactly as set forth in the job announcement. 

FWIW, following that deductive chain, it seems logical to even mention
disciplines you don't have experience in so they'll give you a software hit
and get you under the nose of a human, i.e.,

XML - familiar with XML schema, DTD, XSLT, and other aspects although no
recent experience
MCSE - experienced in Win32 systems, networking, SQLServer administration,
and other aspects although have not yet achieved MCSE certification

and the like. 

Good luck to everyone looking for work.
~!a