What to include in a resume. More specifically, what not to include!
What to include in a resume. More specifically, what not to include!
Credibility is key. Make sure your resume is a reflection of that. It is no less important than your technical skills.
In this episode, Krish discusses the challenges and ethical considerations surrounding resumes and job interviews. He emphasizes the importance of honesty in claiming skills and experiences, cautioning against embellishment or false claims. Drawing on analogies such as hiring a guitarist, Krish highlights the necessity of credibility and authenticity in the hiring process. He shares personal insights and experiences, encouraging patience and perseverance in job searches while maintaining integrity. Overall, Krish advocates for transparency and honesty to facilitate smoother and more meaningful interactions between job seekers and employers.
Summary
Introduction
Highlights the challenge of finding help in development and perusing through resumes.
Highlighting the issue of keyword searches and the inclusion of numerous technologies in resumes.
Qualifying Experience:
Discussion on whether brief exposure to a technology qualifies as experience.
Personal policy on claiming experience based on whether one has been paid for it or implemented it in a live production environment.
Addressing the importance of honesty in claiming skills and experiences.
Analogous Examples:
Discussing the changing nature of interviews and increased skepticism due to false claims of expertise.
Encouraging honesty and authenticity in interviews to make the process easier for everyone.
Personal Experience and Insights:
Sharing personal experiences with interviews and assessments.
Expressing enjoyment of analytical testing and the necessity of eliminating candidates in the hiring process.
Stressing the importance of identifying and being honest about one’s skills and contributions.
Encouraging patience and perseverance in job searches and maintaining credibility in skills and experiences.
Podcast
Transcript
0:01
Hey there, hope you’re doing well. This is Krish, and in this video, I just want to talk quickly about resumes and my experience looking through other people’s resumes. Say you’re looking to find help with whatever it is that you’re doing. In my case, some form of development, say it’s Ruby or Node or React or that doesn’t matter.
0:21
If it’s front-end, back-end, full stack, you’re trying to find some help and then you try to go to some of these sites and peruse through these resumes. A lot of them, you know, if you try to do the keyword searches, I don’t know how recruiters do this. I can see that as being quite difficult because a lot of the resumes have almost all of the technologies.
0:39
Sometimes, you know people just buy a book or spend like half a day doing something and then they actually add it to their resume. I’m just coming to please it’s slightly brighter. I don’t know if it’s it makes sense to do it right. Let’s say you want to learn something that you don’t know, say machine learning, right?
0:57
Let’s say supervised machine learning. If I grabbed a book or purchased an online book, or I spent like half a day learning about it or checking it out, I don’t know if it qualifies as experience that I could actually claim to have. I think my policy is, unless somebody paid me to do it, or if I’ve done something that’s actually live in production, like for our own product, for instance, right, Then I’m all right.
1:21
Oops, I’m hearing some song. Then I’m all right publishing as something I know a little bit of, at least, right? But not if I just spend a little bit of time. Nobody paid me. I don’t have it. I don’t have a working solution that’s out there that someone can check out.
1:36
I wouldn’t personally even call out for knowing that stuff. And I think it’s important because when you say you know a lot of stuff, it makes it harder. Harder in the sense it makes other people’s lives harder. Because I’ve realized I’ve been doing consulting for a long time now and the nature of interviews have changed quite a bit.
1:58
You know, I see a lot more skepticism. And it’s unfortunately understandable because people claim to know stuff that they really don’t or they shouldn’t be claiming to know because they have done such little of that stuff. So let’s take an example. Let’s say I don’t know about many things.
2:13
One of them is music, other than the part where I know how to appreciate music. I think, see, you’re hiring a guitarist for your band. I’m sure the process is very different from software development. But you know, ultimately you’re hiring another human to help you out with your problems, right?
2:30
And you need their help. So say you’re hiring a guitarist and you’re going to look for a guitarist. Wherever it is that you look for folks who have the talent, that skill. Is that person going to claim that they know how to play the Viola, the violin, the piano, the keyboard, drums and and sitar and and whatever else, right.
2:51
All these variety of instruments, like thousands of them or hundreds of them? I don’t think so, right. They want to say they’ve played the guitar, They’ve I’m sure if they play the guitar they probably played a few other instruments or they have some experience. I feel like if you know one, you probably know a little bit about the other or maybe quite a bit about the other so but I don’t think they’re going to say that I’ve I need every single instrument.
3:15
I’ve done everything. I doubt it. I don’t know. But I seriously doubt it. I don’t know why we as engineers feel the urge, have the urge to sometimes want to say that we’ve done everything we can solve world hunger. No, just be honest. Right. Tell them what you’ve done recently, what kind of problems you’ve run into.
3:31
Obviously you don’t want to fabricate it. You know, sometimes you get questions like, hey, what’s the most complex problem you’ve actually solved? And then come up with something creative. Just think about what? Just take a minute or so to think about what you’ve done in the recent past. It may not be the most complex, but that’s all right.
3:47
If it was complex enough for you that you spent some time doing it, you can certainly share that. I think that’s what the interviewer is looking to actually ask, I would imagine. So. I think being honest is important. Makes not just your life easier, but everyone else’s life easier. Who’s doing the same sort of thing.
4:04
So the interviews don’t have to be sometimes as hard as they end up becoming. And I took a test actually a few days ago. It was like it was like 50 questions, 50 questions more.
4:19
It was more like the GRE analytical type of questions. And you had to solve them in like 12 minutes, right? So you get about 13 to 14 seconds per question and it takes like a four or five seconds to actually read question and understand it. I mean just to read it, right? If you write two or three or three sentences and just read it, just try reading it without even making an effort to understanding, it will still take like 4-5 seconds.
4:42
That leaves you with like little under 7 seconds or so, give or take to answering the questions. And yeah, it takes an effort, right? So anyways, I love those kinds of tests. I’ve just liked them for whatever reason. There’s other things I don’t like, but that particular kind of testing doesn’t bother me.
5:00
I love the analytical testing. I mean, whether I pass or fail is a different question altogether, but I still enjoy doing them. But I can see people not liking it. So sometimes it becomes like, you know, you don’t want to judge an elephant by how fast you can climb this or any tree. But that’s a sad reality of life, right?
5:16
There’s more of us. There’s a lot of people. There’s like 7 billion people. I don’t know how many developers are there? Maybe like 25,000,000. Is that the number? I’m not sure. So people have to eliminate to get to the best candidate. So this is going to, you know, as years go by as the popular world population increases, we’re going to find ourselves in this scenario.
5:39
So I think it’s important to identify your skills, your niche, be extremely credible and honest and say what you can and cannot do and I’m sure you’ll find something that you enjoy doing. I think it’s important. It’s not just a question of finding something to do.
5:55
You want to make sure you find something that you enjoy and can contribute to in the process. So yeah, when I see these resumes that claim just about everything. And then you ask like a fundamental question, right? Not so much a technical question that you’re trying to dig into to find out if the person knows, but just a conversation.
6:14
And then you realize a few minutes, just a couple minutes into it, that they may or may not have spent enough time working on that particular activity. And when that happens, the rest of what you’ve done, even if you did know those, becomes not so important, right? Almost unimportant because you’ve lost that credibility right there.
6:32
So I think, can’t stress this enough, be honest. Never embellish what you have done, whether you’re starting your career or you’ve done this for a long time. I remember my first interview from years ago, I said what I knew, which is not a whole lot.
6:49
And you know, you’ll find that company that gives you that opportunity, right? There are a lot of beautiful companies in the world. So just be patient. I’m saying this in on video sounds like I’m telling to somebody else, but I’m actually telling this to myself too, because sometimes when you’re looking out, it takes a little bit of time.
7:09
It doesn’t matter how long you’ve done this and how much you’ve done it. People are, you know, it’s all right for folks to be skeptical because is it there’s it’s a question of can you just talk the talk or walk the walk as well, Right. But let’s all do our best so we are credible as we walk that walk.
7:26
Thanks for watching.
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