December 31, 2007 at 5:42 am
How to beefup our resume ?i mean what are the things i have to say in my resume to cover the interviewer.
karthik
December 31, 2007 at 10:55 am
The resume is just a first line filter. It is there to generate interest among dozens of other resumes.
Use keywords that will get caught in search filters. Be clear and concise, do not describe everything in detail, but give an overview of your jobs and projects showing what you did. Not what a team did.
Read articles like this: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/denis_gobo/archive/2007/12/27/4199.aspx
December 31, 2007 at 1:04 pm
My experience with resumes is that when people say they want to "Beef Up" their resume, they really mean "stretch the truth" about experience and knowledge. One of my favorite true stories is about the guy I interviewed for an SQL Developer position who had a Masters in Computer Science and, supposedly, many years experience with both SQL Server and Oracle... in fact, right on his resume, he said that he was, and I quote, "a 9 out of 10 in both SQL Server and Oracle". It took me precisely one question (I actually asked two before I dismissed him from my office) to determine that he was full of hooey... the question was, believe it or not...
"How do you return the current date and time from SQLServer and Oracle."
... and he could not tell me. Shortest interview I ever conducted.
The real key is, don't lie or even stretch the truth on your resume... people like me will shred the resume in about 2 questions if you do. Also, people who don't actually care who they hire (up front) will still expect you to be able to do everything you say you can on your resume or the job will be very short lived.
Final thought... If you list yourself as being a "Senior Software Engineer" on your resume, you better be able to answer some very serious questions not only about databases, but in all manner of GUI's, Web-Servers, Windows Servers, and a host of software development tools. Even if they stick to just database and other DBA questions, you'd better be a bloody genius about it if you insist on carrying that title.
Not trying to be mean here... just telling you the facts. The terms "Senior" and "Engineer" carry some awesome implications as to your experience and knowledge... it will take mear seconds for an experienced interviewer to politely rip you to shreds and cast you as a pompous liar if you don't actually have the knowledge.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
January 1, 2008 at 3:52 am
karthikeyan (12/31/2007)
How to beefup our resume ?
Don't. A resume should be short and to the point. If I'm looking at a resume, there are three things I'm looking for.
1) Your education. Just a list of school, university and certifications. No fluff.
2) Your skills. I prefer to use a skill matrix. 8/10 on SQL Server, 9/10 on T-SQL, 6/10 on C#, 4/10 on Java (an example from mine)
3) The jobs you've held, where and for how long. Here I want a short description (3-4 lines) on what you did there. I'm looking for correlation with the skills. If none of the jobs mention C#, but you rate yourself highly on C#, then I'm starting to ask questions.
A resume should be short. 2-3 pages is good. I currently have 6 resumes to go through, if one looks like an essay, it will get tossed to one side.
Don't make any claims that you can't back up. When I interview someone, if there's anything that was on the resume that I'm unsure of, I focus on that. If you say you are a specialist in an area, make sure you can answer questions to back that up. I've lost count of the number of people I've interviewed that told me that they were experts in performance tuning, but couldn't tell me a difference between a clustered and a non-clustered index.
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
January 1, 2008 at 4:43 am
Iam going with Gail .... Keep it short, to the point and only TRUTHS in there.
"Keep Trying"
January 1, 2008 at 8:27 am
I'll say, "it depends"...
If I'm looking to hire an "entry level" developer, there may be little or no experience to go on in which case education (math background preferred) and/or military service may play heavily in my decision.
But, when it comes to hiring a senior developer, the first thing I want to know is what are your major accomplishments... at that point, I pretty much don't care what your education is. What did you do for the companies your previously worked for and did you actually think outside the box or were you just a code monkey? Yeah, yeah... the abilitity to work on/with a team is important, but what did YOU actually do to make the company/team you were working for, more successful?
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
January 1, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Steve Jones - Editor (12/31/2007)
The resume is just a first line filter. It is there to generate interest among dozens of other resumes.Use keywords that will get caught in search filters. Be clear and concise, do not describe everything in detail, but give an overview of your jobs and projects showing what you did. Not what a team did.
Read articles like this: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/denis_gobo/archive/2007/12/27/4199.aspx
Be careful to however not go to far into keyword-dropping, i.e. artificially finding some way to throw in every keyword you can think of. The big thing I've found is results, and the impact of said results. As Steve points out - YOUR results, not some 18-month thing you were involved 5 minutes on.
In the end - the best way to beef up your resume is to find and perform notable things, with measurable results, and tangible benefits. The fact that you articulate what you did AND how it affects the business will also show that you're not just a drone stamping out new widgets, but someone who understands how to bring benefit to the organization they work for (and by the way - someone who isn't so mired in their techie stuff that they can't see what the rest of the org does).
And - like Jeff says - don't add/aggrandize/improvise/steal the credit for someone else's work. Stand on your own accomplishments - stretching the truth will ALWAYS come out at some point.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
January 6, 2008 at 6:16 pm
But I agree that don't make the resume too long and put in little minor things. I had read a resume that contained 7 pages. I stopped reading it at page 4.
January 18, 2008 at 5:39 pm
You no need to tell lie or no need to hide your skills.
you can explain every thing neatly and clearly.But i wont suggest too long resume,sin,ce some managers skip some thing if its too long.
first of mention
your skills,
then educational qualifications
Additional qualifications(like MCP,MCAD etc)
Your Previous company details ,along with the projects u done(In projects u have to mention ur role in project and give some experince too.)
January 19, 2008 at 1:47 am
Make sure your resume is well written with no misspellings, nonexistent words, obscure acronyms, or chat-speak.
I consider English communication skills a must have for a DBA or developer, and I reject all badly written resumes.
I figure that if you can't be bothered to create a well written resume, that you won't bother creating well written code.
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