As part of my last days in DNSEE and first days in Rocket I’m involved in two recruitment processes and after the huge amount of CVs we got for DNSEE after the Codemotion I thought it would be good to share some thoughts about my recruiting habits.
European format
First of all, forget about the european CV format: it works when you want to work in a body rental Java company and want to be identified with a mere number (and if you want to end up like that, stop reading this article)1.
Some months ago someone on Twitter was suggesting to move the CV on slideshare, something I really wanted to do – but I never took the time to do so: bare in mind that reading a CV can be funny at the beginning of the hiring process, but as you get tons of applies, it becomes – as everything – a repetitive, thus annoying, activity, so putting a bit of creativity on your CV will be considered as a huge plus; the more you attract, the less you’ll be considered the average.
The european format just does not work when you need to highlight your motivation and expertise you have on interesting practices, which is what I basically look for, at least for a first glance.
It’s not where you worked unless it was The Place
It’s pretty common to see dozens of working experiences in a CV, without a deep description of the position held and a summary of your daily duties.
Do you think people care about where you worked or what you did?
Unless you have been working for some major, people won’t care about your employer because it will never add anything to your profile, it’s just a (bad) sign that you worked for N years at this place.
What I suggest is to add various aspects of your working experience, like big customers you had to deal with, good practices like TDD or – in general – automated test and what you brought inside the company, like a new approach to development or a (new) technology which was suitable for their use-case.
Ideal code VS production one
Any developer can show you diamonds, but a few are able not to deliver crap to your customers.
Let’s be honest for a moment: production code isn’t ideal code2.
Technical debt is something we are used to deal with and it’s not that big issue: I like when developers admit that under difficult circumstances, they took creepy shortcuts to overcome an issue which needed to be fixed in a relatively short amount of time.
So, given that you won’t show your next employer your production code (since it is intellectual property of your current company or customers) it would be nice if you show them the top line of your skiils, maybe via a Github profile; doing so, you give the chance to take a look at your best code.
Why don’t you share your thoughts with me?
A big plus would be reading your blog wherever – blogspot, posterous, etc – to gain confidence with your ideas and what you like to talk about when not (necessarily) coding for your current company.
Blogging, also once in a month, gives you the possibility to be evaluated without the need to do anything: reading your posts will make recruiters get in touch with you, as a person, your style, coding skills, aims and so on.
MS Excel, really?
Please stop mentioning know-how on the following subjects:
- MS Word
- MS Excel
- Photoshop
- Dreamweaver
- stuff like that
because they will make you look like a developer who doesn’t understand its precise scope.
So what?
Do I have to mention that I would like to see great people joining me and Rocket in Dubai or my former DNSEE colleagues in Rome?
I did it :)