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Job hunting 101 for developers (Part 1 - CV)

It is old news that we at hedgehog lab are on the lookout for great developers to support the growth we are experiencing. It is also old news that recruitment is probably the toughest challenge facing any company.

This series of posts is intended to be an insight into our recruitment process (specifically the pains) and some tips to developers who want to make their prospective employers go “wow”!

Part 1 (this post) covers the humble CV and the common mistakes that we find developers make in writing and sending them out.

• Sending your CV in Word or PDF format when our ads specifically mention the format of CV we would like (plain text, hResume or LinkedIn profile).
  This is a classic case of the “serial applicant” who has not made the effort to read the job ad and decided to apply when they saw the word “developer” in the ad.
• Having a one line or no covering note. Just because you are sending your CV in e-mail does not mean that you do not need to write a covering letter (or note).
  Where there is a covering note, “Please find my CV attached” just does not cut it. Show some enthusiasm for the role and take the effort to summarise your CV for the particular job. If not, at least have a generic covering note which will seem a lot better than a blank email.
• Having a covering letter which targets a role that has nothing to do with the job advertised.
  This sounds ridiculous but we actually received 3 applications from people who were looking for a tech support role, 1 from a sales manager and 1 from a real-time embedded systems developer. All this when they clearly responded to a job that said “web developer”. Even when the application is speculative, it indicates that you have not done your research on our company and you do not have a clue what we do.

How about the CVs that we did read but decided to not take it further?

• Having a generic CV with a lot of noise irrelevant to the role.
  This is the biggest problem with a majority of the CVs we receive (even people we decide to interview are guilty of this). Please take the time to customise your CV for every role you apply for. Not doing so will only make it easier for the employer to mark you as a “serial applicant”.
  Your CV is the best sales pitch you can make and if you cannot spend more than 5 minutes tailoring it for a role, then it is not worth wasting either of our time.
• Putting your list of hobbies/interests/fetishes on the CV (Note: This point is debatable as some employers prefer it. We do not!).
  I am sorry but we are absolutely not interested in your Karate skills or white water rafting in the weekend at this stage of your application. We expect all of our candidates to be interesting and if you really do have some unique interests, you can be sure we will talk about them in an interview.
• Listing every programming language, operating system, database and desktop tool you ever heard of.
  We are not testing your general knowledge here and are not in the least bit interested how many programming languages you can name. What we are really interested in is the actual skills you gained and used in your previous roles.
• Listing every job you have had which has no relevance to the role.
  It might be cute that you were a lifeguard at your local pool 10 years ago but trust me that it has no bearing on how good you are as a developer. Try and keep your job history relevant to the role. Where your experience is limited, try and focus on the company and year you worked there rather than the role, if the job has no relevant skills.

Although some of these might seem a bit far-fetched, these are real samples of the kind of CVs that a majority of developers write. One could argue that CVs are not really that important because the really good developers do not need a CV. Unless you happen to be in the 1% of really good developers, you have to sell yourself to prospective employers.

In the next part of this series, I will use more samples from our recruitment to talk about the Interview process and where we think developers get it wrong and finally wrap it up with a few general tips (the dos) and a healthy dose of links to essential material for any developer that is job hunting.

(Disclaimer: Please note that there will always be exceptions to every case I have presented and I completely accept there is no one right way of doing things. The methods and tips apply only to our recruitment at hedgehog lab and might not be applicable to other employers.)

posted by Sarat Pediredla on November 18, 2007 at 10:41 p.m.