IT Resumes: Think Twice About the Advice You’ve Been Given
A recruiting manager with an IT staffing firm warns IT professionals to use the resume advice they get from the local employment office, outplacement firms and professional resume writers at their own risk.
CIO — Recruiters, professional resume writers and other career experts give out tons of advice on how best to write a resume that will stand out from the competition. Their intentions are noble—they want to help people land jobs—but the problem with their advice is that it doesn’t always apply to IT professionals and the nature of the work they do, says Shana Westerman, a recruiting manager with IT staffing firm Sapphire Technologies.
“People go to the unemployment office or they go to outplacement resume writers who don’t give advice that is applicable to the IT field,” she says.
Westerman notes that IT resumes are different from resumes for professionals in other fields because IT workers have to capture a range of skills—both technical and functional—on their resumes. Because technology changes so rapidly and because so much IT work is project-based and involves “so many moving parts,” generic resume writing advice can do a great disservice to IT professionals, says Westerman.
Westerman sees first-hand how generic resume writing tips play out on IT professionals’ resumes. She screens, on average, 300 resumes per day searching for IT workers to place with her clients, who are IT line managers and executives at large and midsize companies looking for contract and permanent employees. Westerman says many of the IT resumes she gets from job seekers are too short on specifics for her and her clients’ needs. When she finds a candidate whom she thinks would be a good match for a client, she says she often has to ask the candidate to beef up his resume with more information about his skills and experience.
“You’re not going to meet with a [hiring] manager if your resume doesn’t get you the meeting. Your resume is the one and only tool that gets you an interview,” says Westerman.
She adds that even when she advocates for a particular candidate, the client still wants to see on the candidate’s resume all of the capabilities she’s mentioned. “If they don’t see what I say on the candidate’s resume, their interest will wane,” Westerman notes.
Here, she shares the generic resume advice IT professionals should run from.
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Job Tips – Social Networking Ever More Critical to Job Search Success
Job seekers with robust LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter profiles have better access to job opportunities at growing companies than candidates whose job searches don’t include active social networking profiles, according to the results of a new survey.
CIO — Jobvite, a maker of recruiting software, released the results of its third-annual social recruiting survey this morning, and the findings underscore the many reasons job seekers need to incorporate online social networking into their job searches.
Jobvite asked 825 HR and recruiting professionals about the extent to which they use social networking websites in their recruiting process to find and vet candidates for jobs. Their answers indicate that they view social networks as a viable channel for sourcing high-quality candidates and that they plan to increase their use of social networking websites in their recruiting efforts this year. (Only about 3 percent of survey respondents were Jobvite customers.)
At some companies, in fact, social recruiting is beginning to eclipse traditional channels for sourcing candidates, such as job boards and third-party recruiters and search firms.
If you’re looking for a job and not active on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter (the three social networking websites most popular with employers, according to the survey), here are four reasons to join these sites and actively manage your profiles.
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Regards,
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IT Job News – Top 5 Information Technology Careers
Often, when one thinks of an IT professional, the stereotype that comes to mind is that of the IT support person. While many IT professionals work in this capacity, the field is much more diverse than providing user-level support. Here, for instance, are the top 10 IT professions, along with a brief description of the main roles of each.
Lead Application Developer
Applications Architect
Messaging Administrators
Data Modeler
Network Manager
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Category: IT jobs
7 Tips for Creating a Training Program for an IT Project
Planning and executing a scalable end-user training strategy is a key element to software deployment planning and, ultimately, to the success of an IT project. Without an effective training plan, the end-users will most likely need to rely heavily on the project support team. This can be costly to your project with increase in the need for support resources, as well as a possible decrease in actual support for your project delivery.
Here are some tips to consider when developing a training strategy:
1. Don’t Make Assumptions about the technical skill level of the software end-users, especially when you’re rolling out software to an entire organization. Remember the adage, “When you assume, you make an ass out of you and me.” Since the technical skill level of the end-users can vary greatly, it is important that the training instructions are useful for technical novices, as well as experts. Create the instructions for the lowest technical-level end-user first and then you can create a summary set of instructions for the more advanced users. I find it helpful to think of my parents as the end-users when I write training instructions for the basic level. This helps me to remember to be extremely specific in my instructions. For example, when I help my mother navigate a website that is new to her, I coach her through every click of the mouse.
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My EVO is Corrupting My Outlook Data on my PC
I bought my EVO June 4 and synced it with my Outlook and it appeared to work just fine. However, after a week or two (not sure at this point) the phone started overwriting my PC Outlook contacts with truncated data. The EVO then began to NOT recognized the sync software on my PC and asked me to install it. I uninstalled then reinstalled the sync software. My phone still did not recognize the software on my PC. Took it to the Sprint repair store and they did not have a clue what to do. I came home and plugged the EVO in to charge and behold it started syncing. It started adding duplicates to my Outlook contacts, 896 of them!!! I stopped the sync once I noticed and was able to delete the duplicates using advanced find to search on the "modified" date.
I had to take the EVO back to Sprint for a hard reset to get rid of all the duplicate contacts and start over. The EVO is syncing now, however, it is truncating all the notes data in the contacts. Was on the phone with HTC for one hour and they have no clue what to do and said maybe a fix would be out soon.
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Soft Skills for IT Managers
Many people believe their value is based on what they know—and they don’t want to give that up.
Most of us have, at one time or another, worked with a colleague who hoarded information as if it were gold. And let’s not forget the manager who passed on company information only on a need-to-know basis (kind of like working for the CIA).
This approach to information is frustrating and counterproductive, but understandable. Many people believe their value to the company is based on what they know—and they don’t want to give up that perceived edge. Their theory is that if they share that knowledge with their co-workers, that will increase the co-workers’ value and diminish their own.
This is a battle that business has been fighting for decades, but it’s heated up during the past few years of ongoing layoffs, when employees are more interested in surviving than collaborating. Ironically, this is happening at a time when knowledge management and collaboration technologies are getting a lot of attention from business leaders, who understand how these technologies can benefit their organizations.
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