Jeremy's Blog

This is an interesting position for me. Before recently, Omega Vortex has just been a small group of close individuals who all knew each other and have worked together before. Now that we’re expanding and I’m having to actually interview and hire people, I’ve been able to experience what it’s like to be on the opposite side of the process. I’m used to being the interviewee or the person applying and sending in a resume, not the guy interviewing or receiving the resume. I don’t claim to be an expert on interviewing people or sifting resumes, but here’s my list of things that’ll immediately get your resume tossed out of the pile.

Not Including Basic Information

Like, for one, your name. I had a resume show up in my inbox the other day that didn’t have a name to go with it. So, I figured I could get the name out of the resume itself in order to respond. I couldn’t find the person’s name to save my life. It’s really not smart to send in a resume without basic contact details so I can get in touch with you. If you don’t include something as basic as your name, I’m going to feel dumb trying to contact you without knowing it. The likelihood of me contacting you if I feel dumb about it? Pretty low. To the tune of 0%.

Not Knowing the Basics (Or Lying)

I got a “spectacular” resume from someone who had (claimed to have) been working in this industry for 10+ years. Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from a very prestigious college and a laundry list of work experience that went on for a few pages …

First of all, I don’t need a seven page resume. That sets off some alarms in my head when I open up a huge document that’s supposed to be a resume. You’re either full of yourself or lying. I don’t need to know where you were working in 1991 if it isn’t one of your three or four most recent jobs. For this particular person, I’m inclined to say that they were lying. Against my better judgement, I decided to interview.

As part of my interview process, I like to ask some really basic questions. I do this for two reasons. One, it relieves tension. People like to get things right. As they get more things right, they become more comfortable and we can move on to more complicated concepts. For two, I know to stop the interview immediately if the person misses any of these questions … This particular person happened to miss all but two of my questions. These questions are some that my younger programming buddies who are still in High School would laugh at this person for not being able to answer. How can you have 10 years of experience and not know dead-simple concepts?

Massive Font to Extend an Otherwise Short Resume

Please, please don’t try to hide the fact that in Arial 12pt your resume is only 1 page. I just finished looking through a resume whose font was literally set to 23pt. That’s huge! And quite unnecessary. I’m not measuring to see who has the longest, but if your font is so big that I can only fit less than 1/8 of what would be the first page on my screen, I’m probably just going to delete it.

Not Knowing English

First off, don’t take this the wrong way. I’m a fan of equal opportunity, but you’ve got to meet our requirements. One of our requirements is “an excellent command of written and spoken English”. I’d just as quickly trash a resume from an white American man as I would from anyone else for not meeting that requirement.

Telling Me Too Much

Piggy backing somewhat on one of the other points, don’t tell me too much. If I’m looking for a PHP/MySQL developer, I want to know how much experience you have in those two things and maybe some other closely-related technologies. I don’t want to know or care to know about how much experience you have in Adobe Photoshop, MS Access, ILE RPG, CL400/CLLE, etc. Yes, all of those were from an actual resume. I don’t care. Don’t tell me all that crap, it’s not related to the position you’re applying for.

Lying by Omission

Or, concealing the fact that you don’t have a college degree by using phrases like “Attended X university”. Again, I don’t care, but don’t try to make me believe something by covering it up. People drop out of college all the time for various different reasons. Just couldn’t cut it? Ran out of money? Decide college wasn’t for you? That’s your business. I’m still in college. I haven’t finished my Bachelor’s, yet. I’m really not going to hold that against you. Some of the best programmers I know don’t have college degrees. Some of the worst programmers I know do. Interesting demographic. I’m more of a believer in cold, hard experience.

Telling Me Sensitive Information

If I’m not allowed to ask, I don’t want to know at least until I give you a yay or a nay. Don’t tell me your gender (if it’s obvious, I’ll figure it out), don’t tell me your sexual orientation, don’t tell me your age, etc. If you put that kind of crap on your resume, that puts employers in a bad position, because we’re not allowed to make decisions based on that information. That requires us to consciously ignore it. If it’s there, I’m not even going to bother. It’s not because you’re white, black, asian, mexican, 85, 13, gay, bi, married, divorce, have 37 kids, a woman, or a paraplegic. It’s because I don’t want to touch something that could put me in a bad position, because you gave me information that I’m not allowed to judge you on. So, I’m just not going to judge you at all and act like I never saw your resume.

Not Attaching your Resume

This is a good one. I’ve excused it a couple times and contacted people to have them send it to me, but I’m slowly starting to not give it a second thought. Make sure you’re thorough enough to remember to actually attach your resume to an e-mail when you send it off.

That’s just a few things. As I come across more, I’ll probably post a part two. You never know what people are going to do, after all …