Through the process of transitioning from a job in IT Recruiting to my current career as a SQL Programmer, I have gained an interesting perspective on the relationship between IT work and Recruiting work. Sometimes it is a harmonious relationship, and sometimes it is much more detached and meaningless. I had the fortune of working with some of the best recruiters in the business, and also getting to see some of the practices that other firms used. I then of course also got to actually go through an interview for the job I have now. Here are a few tips I have for interacting and getting the most out of your interaction and relationship with your recruiter(s).
1) Spend time on your resume!
This is by far the best thing you can do to be noticed by recruiters. Recruiters have access to tens of thousands of resumes, and can easily run across hundreds in and around the area you are working with they keywords they are looking for. This may sound like beating a dead horse, but clean up your resume before you send it out. Not just for spelling and punctuation errors, but for overall formatting. At my company we would frequently work with candidates to repair their resumes into a tried and true format.
Usually it looked like Name/Contact -> Technical Skills -> Work Experience -> Education/Certification.
USE BULLETS! Nothing is more frustrating than having to read through half of war an peace to try to find out what you have actually been up to at your last job.
LIST DATES OF EMPLOYMENT! Recruiters like to see what you have been up to recently, and specifically in the last 3-6 months. A resume without dates again causes the problem of forcing the recruiter to try to guess at what you have been doing, and that's not what you want.
2) Recruiters are NOT technical!
This ties in very closely with the last point, but recruiters don't really know anything about IT. They know a lot of acronyms, they know a lot of technologies just shy of skin deep, but if you wanted them to define what Inheritence means other than "something to do with Object Oriented programming (whatever that is)", you are SOL.
That said, help us help you. This might sound like an over-simplification, but get those acronyms they know into your resume. Some details about what the nature of the project was (i.e. website, financial reporting tool, etc.), but make sure to tie in any technologies you used, and REPEAT IT! Trust me, I know this can feel stupid when you are typing "wrote T-SQL Code in SQL Server 2008..." for the third time under one job, but it IS true, and it WILL get your resume to pop to the top of the list when a recruiter queries "SQL AND Develop*" into Dice.
3) Humor us
Again, tied into the last point, help the recruiters out once they do notice you and get you on the phone or in person. Be willing to exercise some patience, explain something to them in layman's terms, or not take it personally when you try to explain how a password hash algorithm works and you get a smile and nod back. Recruiters are really just looking for an answer to their questions that aren't simply "yes, I worked with that." A good concise answer to a question posed might not make any sense to them, but they will know that you know what you are talking about.
That said, don't ramble. It only takes about 20-30 seconds for them to believe that you know your stuff. After that, interest will quickly fall off, and can get to the point where you will be written off as a ramble who wont shut up. Clean, Concise, and Friendly.
4) Be prepared to be blown up
If you followed the above steps, you will probably be getting a LOT of phone calls and emails. Good IT people with solid resumes (especially at a more senior level) can easily get multiple contacts PER DAY, especially after you recently post your resume. A new resume on a job board will be swarmed to quickly. I know of many candidates who would set up a googleVoice account temporarily while on the job hunt, and a separate email address. Once they find a job, they can put an auto reply to the account saying something to the effect of "Thank you for your interest, but I am currently happily employed. If I am ever on the job search again, I will contact you.". Simple, separate you from all the insanity of being called all the time, and leaves a good taste in the recruiters mouth.
5) Be respectful
Above all, whatever your opinion of recruiters is (whether you find them annoying, useful, interesting,) be respectful. Recruiters have piles of resumes to get to, and it doesn't take much for them to write you off and move on, but it's not hard to stay on their good side. Show up to interviews well dressed and on time. Be prompt with email responses. Be friendly, professional, courteous, and helpful. This probably sounds like what you would expect FROM your recruiter, and indeed you should. But if you do all the things on this list, and especially are respectful to the recruiters, your name will be praised, and called for all the best positions when they open up.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Monday, March 14, 2011
Hip Hop Groups That Don't Suck
This is just a list (more for my own memory) of hip hop groups that don't suck.
- Blue Scholars
- Jurassic 5
- Ozomatli
- Binary Star
- Psychic Origami
... More to come
- Blue Scholars
- Jurassic 5
- Ozomatli
- Binary Star
- Psychic Origami
... More to come
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Passage of Time at Work
Top image is on a logarithmic scale, while the bottom image is normal scale.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Breckenfükenridge
So the snow up at Breck this weekend was indescribably awesome. Setting aside the fact that I was staying in a goddamn ski-in-ski-out mansion with a season pass to Breckenridge, I don't even know where to start. The snow on the normal human sized runs was about as epic as one could predict; there were knee deep snowdrifts, and fluffy pow pow every direction.
Now at the tippy top however, that was another story altogether. After a 30 minute wait in the Chair 6 lift line, I get to the top to enter a whiteout blizzard above treeline. If you've never experienced that before, it's like looking around and seeing nothing. Like being stuck with the wormhole aliens from DS9. Like extracting yourself from an image and filling in the background with #ffffff. Like being goddamn blind. Plus, to add insult to injury, lets add 20 MPH winds just to keep things nice and confusing. Oh, and five feet of powder.
Now don't get me wrong, I love me some goddamn powder, but when you are up to your nipples in powder and your board is covered in about 100 lbs of snow and you come to a dead halt on a 45 degree plane, fall over, and have to spend 20 minutes digging yourself out Bear Grylls style just so you can stand up, slide forward toward the next indistinguishable blur, only to fall and have to do it again, it gets a little crazy.
Either way, it was an epic weekend. Once out of the chaos of almost 13,000 feet snowboarding in a blizzard, life was pretty damn good; groomers, park, pow, trees, whatever. Everything was great.
Now at the tippy top however, that was another story altogether. After a 30 minute wait in the Chair 6 lift line, I get to the top to enter a whiteout blizzard above treeline. If you've never experienced that before, it's like looking around and seeing nothing. Like being stuck with the wormhole aliens from DS9. Like extracting yourself from an image and filling in the background with #ffffff. Like being goddamn blind. Plus, to add insult to injury, lets add 20 MPH winds just to keep things nice and confusing. Oh, and five feet of powder.
Now don't get me wrong, I love me some goddamn powder, but when you are up to your nipples in powder and your board is covered in about 100 lbs of snow and you come to a dead halt on a 45 degree plane, fall over, and have to spend 20 minutes digging yourself out Bear Grylls style just so you can stand up, slide forward toward the next indistinguishable blur, only to fall and have to do it again, it gets a little crazy.
Either way, it was an epic weekend. Once out of the chaos of almost 13,000 feet snowboarding in a blizzard, life was pretty damn good; groomers, park, pow, trees, whatever. Everything was great.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Active Listening
So whether it is a blessing or a curse at this point, I'm not sure yet, but I would like to share a lesson that has stuck with me especially so from my time in College. In one of my Senior seminars, we were discussing the topic of active listening. For those of you unfamiliar with the nomenclature, it basically means REALLY listening to someone, making sure you understood them, and providing the feedback that is useful to the conversation. Easy in practice, suprisingly more difficult in implementation (without practice).
The thing that stuck with me, as is often the case with any topic, was a simple gem of an exercise that has colored almost every social interaction I have had since then. The exercise was given as simply this: Have a five minute conversation with another person, and don't use the words "I", "we", "me", or another version of the same pronoun.
Give it a shot if you think it will be easy; it really isn't. The obvious point of this exercise is that in some sense, we are all very egotistical (don't read too much into that word, I'm not using it derogatoraly, just in the sense that when you think about it, ultimately we are concerned with out own state of being).
The double edged sword that is this revelation is that I now am very aware of both my own use of personal pronouns, but also that of other peoples. It's certainly a great thing to be aware of, but it can be somewhat frustrating realizing how much people want to talk about themselves, but don't want to talk about anything else, or even care about what another person says. How often have you heard someone tell a story and the person they are telling it to response "Oh, I know. Here is my spinoff of that".
Obviously at some points, it is necessary, unavoidable and useful to use those words, but thats not the point. Just try to be aware of how much you talk about yourselves, and you will really become aware of so much more content of conversations (plus you will come off a lot less self-centered).
The thing that stuck with me, as is often the case with any topic, was a simple gem of an exercise that has colored almost every social interaction I have had since then. The exercise was given as simply this: Have a five minute conversation with another person, and don't use the words "I", "we", "me", or another version of the same pronoun.
Give it a shot if you think it will be easy; it really isn't. The obvious point of this exercise is that in some sense, we are all very egotistical (don't read too much into that word, I'm not using it derogatoraly, just in the sense that when you think about it, ultimately we are concerned with out own state of being).
The double edged sword that is this revelation is that I now am very aware of both my own use of personal pronouns, but also that of other peoples. It's certainly a great thing to be aware of, but it can be somewhat frustrating realizing how much people want to talk about themselves, but don't want to talk about anything else, or even care about what another person says. How often have you heard someone tell a story and the person they are telling it to response "Oh, I know. Here is my spinoff of that".
Obviously at some points, it is necessary, unavoidable and useful to use those words, but thats not the point. Just try to be aware of how much you talk about yourselves, and you will really become aware of so much more content of conversations (plus you will come off a lot less self-centered).
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Unity: Epic As Predicted
So nearly a decade after the purchase of my 2001 Burton Dragon snowboard, bent edges, huge gouges out of my re-surfaced base, I decided it was time to get a new board. The two brands I considered were Never Summer and Unity. If you don't know, both are Colorado snowboard companies. After a lot of frustrated thinking, comparing, review-searching and a little bit of dumb luck over Craigslist, I finally settled on a 2009/2010 Unity Origin.
The Origin is a true twin, traditional camber park/pipe board. I have heard a lot of hype about reverse camber, rocker boards, v-wing, etc., and I'm sure they are pretty damn nice, but to be honest, I find nothing wrong with a good old fashioned camber board. I can still tail press fine, it's poppy as hell, and stable too.
As far as the features of the board, it is super flexible, light-weight and dare I say looks epic. The only downside is that I think the edges are de-tuned because it is not quite as responsive as I would hope, and handles a little poorly one ice conditions. This is not a problem because I have been riding long enough I can compensate for any difference, but it may not be the best choice for beginners to the sport.
Maybe I am just comparing to a Burton model from a long time ago, but this board lived up to my expectations and then some. Colorado home grown snowboarding ftw!
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