Tips for job hunters.
Please don’t make me work any harder than I have to.
What I mean by this is: if the job posting calls for “x years’ experience in foo,“ please write on your resume “x years’ experience in foo.“ Don’t make me go through all your dates of employment (assuming they’re there), trying to infer the term “foo” in whatever you said you were doing, and then adding years together. In some cases, hiring managers have to go through a precise checklist and justify each person they bring in for an interview (because they may get sued by the ones who didn’t get in). In other cases, you have someone in HR screening the resumes ahead of time, and if you don’t put the exact term, they will 86 your application without a second thought (if they even had a first one).
Yes, OS X hacking experience counts as Unix experience in my book, but that’s just because I happened to have lived through the Mach BSD NeXT OS era. Don’t count on anyone else being that flexible.
Also, do not say you increased or improved or decreased something by X percent. I don’t know what the hell 10% means. Tell me numbers and tell me units, and let me do the math if I want to be impressed by the percentage. Increasing throughput by 10% doesn’t impress me if your previous throughput was lame to begin with. Increasing customer satisfaction by 78%? Exactly what units of satisfaction are you using? Happy faces on trouble tickets?
And finally, if you have a security-degree-in-a-box and are working as a cashier at Walmart, do us all a favor and don’t apply for a senior security position. Although it was nice to have the laugh in the middle of the paper stack.
Good night, and good luck.
