From: | Barry C. |
Sent on: | Monday, September 23, 2013, 6:49 AM |
BarryAs per Joseph's three cents, folks are producing CVs to get a job. Any kind of qualifying statement regards their skill level, point in practise will be subject to the same vagaries and variances it is now and I'm struggling to see it ever not being both subjective and a sales tools.References to someone's GitHub or StackOverflow profile is a less subjective mechanism to actually assessing their ability to solve problems and communicate those solutions than anything on a resume (though subject to other biases, obviously). If nothing else the Law of Many Eyes provides some quality measure.Answering your specific point on describing one's experience with a language or tool, for hands-on roles I filter quite strongly on:
- Descriptions of what a candidate has personally done (as opposed to what was done on their team's project)
- Details of what they did in their last role or tool. Sadly I regularly see, "Fixed some bugs and programmed some small changes" or list of artefacts they wrote with minimal reference to actually being involved in cutting code
- Evidence of learning or contributing outside their stated role
- Evidence of the ability to learn OR a focus on mastery
- Attention to detail (spelling, grammar, etc)
RegardsJamesOn 18 September[masked]:58, Barry Cranford <[address removed]> wrote:
Thanks for all the responses guys, I really appreciate it.@James - I totally agree that hand reviewing CVs is the only way to go, I think your comments are exactly the problem and this is what I often read when people complain about CVs... but I am interested to know if there is a way that we could remove the subjectivity behind self ratings (thanks Tomasz). My gut feeling is that there could be a better system for visualising someones technical portfolio....perhaps this is more of a 'Developer Sessions' conversation than a mailing list conversation, but I'd be interested to hear how you would describe the process of mastering a new technology, from start to finish? I guess you would start with reading about a new technology, then experimenting, using in production, fixing bugs, extending existing code, using from scratch, re-factored, improved performance etcWould it be useful if you could see technologies broken down in this way on a CV? Surely if you could understand whether someone has experimented with a technology vs written new code from scratch it would be useful in an interview?I'm sure this is far from perfect and just an idea to explain what I mean, I'm interested to get your thoughts on whether we could start thinking about terms like this to describe what someone has done as part of a skills list?Thanks,BarryOn 18 Sep 2013, at 12:48, James wrote:BarryThrowing in my two cents, I find the skill lists problematic.Often we see candidates listing skills of technologies they have used in passing (at best) or that have been used on a project they worked on but not used themselves. It becomes especially compounded when they self-rate (expert in everything, seriously) or rate by experience (seven years of Java is not the same as first used seven years ago). In our experience of interviewing candidates, a big list of skill has often coincided with a lack of skill in any particular one of them. But then, we hand-review CVs rather than run them through a keyword machine(As an aside, we care about degree - course, grade and university - but not much earlier than that. Our HR department may however)All opinions my own, not necessarily that of my employer, etcRegardsJamesOn 18 September[masked]:48, Barry Cranford <[address removed]> wrote:
This is exactly my point.The truth is that the best role in London, for you, may be sitting behind one of the most inept recruiters. 98% of decision makers in hiring positions may not care about education, but if only 2% do then one of them may be the key to your dream job.@Fox - I support the #NoCV concept. I have, since my early years in recruitment found CVs ineffective at displaying a candidates true self, I also dislike the fact that so many decisions are made on them. The problem is that in London the CV is still the most common way to introduce a candidate by far. I read from Bob Marshall that "More and more organisations are coming to see the CV as an unnecessary evil" we are certainly not seeing this in London and we work with many of the more interesting Java employers. Sure there are the odd few who are happy if a candidate doesn't have a CV, but the bulk of our clients, especially those with internal recruiters, still insist on a CV, rightly or wrongly. Personally I don't think a CV is completely redundant, I feel a well written CV gives a great indicator of someone (especially when viewed in combination to code). I'm interested on your thoughts on whether we could, as a community, come up with a new standard for writing CVs, or at least parts of them.Perhaps the most common complaint I hear is regarding the list of keywords that appear on top of many CVs, the 'skills matrix'. I don't think that it is a bad thing to have these on your CV, but I do think that they need greater context to be useful. I believe we need to find a way to display which technologies you have used and to what degree you have used them, but the question is how can we display this simply? I have never been a fan of self-ratings because one person's expert level is another person's beginner. I have seen graduates call themselves expert Java Developers yet lacking knowledge of fundamental concepts. I also recognise that time is not always the greatest indicator of capability.Any ideas? Has anyone come across a good way of representing skills/tech capabilities within a simple table or using another method?Cheers,BarryOn 17 Sep 2013, at 11:41, robert annett wrote:We should remember that Barry often speaks to non-technical people when he is talking to employers. Very often there is an HR or even a specialised recruitment department between the recruiter/candidate and the technical interviewer.We (I'm assuming most of us are from technical backgrounds) may not be interested in the distant academic qualifications of the candidates but HR departments will often filter on this before technical interviewers get to see them. Large and popular organisations can receive hundreds of CVs for each role and HR departments have to initially filter on something...Before you all jump on me, I'm not defending this - simply agreeing with Barry that you might miss out on an opportunity if you don't list them. Of course, you might view being ignored by these companies as a benefit ;-) or have different CVs for different jobs.
On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 10:59 AM, @sleepyfox <[address removed]> wrote:
I don't usually disagree with Barry, but in my 25 years in the industry I've never had anyone interested in my A level results, let alone my O levels, even in my first jobs. As an interviewer for more than 15 years, I've found that CVs very rarely tell me anything that I need to know other than the candidates name and contact details, either because they have no context, or because they're simple technology word-search games.
YMMV
Fox
#NoCVOn 16 Sep[masked]:50, "Barry Cranford" <[address removed]> wrote:In my opinion......from a candidates perspective:If you have high A-levels (or GCSEs) I'd recommend putting them on your CV.Infact I'm surprised not to have seen anyone else saying this. We certainly have some clients that take your GCSE and A-level results very seriously, even with a lot of commercial experience. You must remember with a CV that opinions on them are highly subjective, if you leave your results off, some people 'may' believe it is because they are bad and reject the CV, rightly or wrongly, you don't ever want one person's subjective view to be the reason you weren't offered an interview.I like Stephen Masters solution of having one line dedicated to GCSEs and one to A-levels. If you have good results I would always include them....from an employers perspective:I have seen many candidates with first class degrees, but often they are not combined with high A-level grades. We all know you can get a first class degree in CS without actually being able to program. A candidate with good GCSEs and A-levels, especially in scientific/mathematical subjects alongside a degree show's a strong pattern of high academic achievement.There is no way from reading a CV that we can guarantee whether someone is a good or bad programmer, hence recruitment is all about spotting patterns and making assumptions, the longer you recruit the more you recognise the importance of these patterns. Academic results, (even having a degree) may not make a candidate a 'better' programmer, nor does it make them suitable for every employer, but small bits of information like early academic results can help you build a more accurate view of a candidate, especially when combined with all the other information contained within a CV.Cheers,Barry@bcrecworks
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