Okay, as regular readers or anyone following my tweetstream might have gathered, I've been recruiting for a new storage team. It's a whilst since I did any recruitment and a long time since I did technical interviews but as we're pretty much starting afresh, I get to do all the interesting things.
First observation, although it is still very much a buyer's market; I am still seeing sloppy CVs come through. Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, poor formatting and just general not reading of the brief. People, your CV is your marketing fluff; spend time to get it right.
Secondly, if you get called to interview or even the technical screening interview; read the job description and read your CV. If the job description talks about NAS; please when I ask the question what does NAS stand for, don't let there be deafening silence. This is fundamental stuff! Of course, if you don't know; don't try to make shit up unless I ask you too!
Which brings me on to. thirdly, at times I will ask you to make shit up; I want to see how you handle not having enough information. This is the world I live in; most of the time, I'm winging it. We are doing things which people haven't tried before. Memorizing umpteen CLI options does not impress me, I've got Google for that. Talking through a problem and solving it, that's a real skill. If after a few years of experience, you've not got that; you're not for me.
Know what the company does, know what I do…before I go to an interview or meeting with a new person; I google them, see if they are in my Linked-In network etc, etc. I'll be googling you before I interview you; although I won't go near your Facebook page, I don't want to know what you look like when you're drunk!
Anyway, I have my new guys starting soon. I'm really looking forward to starting the new team and getting it all going. But I do expect to have new roles in the future.
” I am still seeing sloppy CVs come through. Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, poor formatting and just general not reading of the brief. People, your CV is your marketing fluff”
I’m assuming your agency is sending these over? Get a new agency. If you are seeing them “raw” – dude .. .you’ve got more time than most of us.
I would hope that agencies aren’t tarting up applications. I would expect that they are vetting them and weeding out the obviously poor ones.
From my experience though recruitment agencies are very poor at understanding what IT organisations are looking for in technical people. Beyond lists of skills we provide to the pimps none of them seem to have any idea how to identify worthwhile applicants.
I’ve been on both ends. I’ve had some very technical questions asked of me by an agency. As it turns out, they were fed by the company hoping to hire. Makes sense. If they can’t answer these questions, I don’t even want to see them. I’ve been on the receiving end of resumes. The agency pre-screened okay. In many cases, a well written resume but the chuckle-head couldn’t answer questions that were on his resume. I guess my point is, I wouldn’t put up with a crap resume one way or other.