Recently, Peg Bogema and I gave a presentation to the Ann Arbor Association of Women in Computing. The topic: Insider Tips on Resume Writing, Interviewing and More. The bad news is that we told attendees that our presentation would only last an hour at most. The good news is that most everyone was still there, taking notes, after more than 2 hours of stimulating discussion.

Feedback from the presentation has been very good, and we’ve had the opportunity to help several candidates implement some of the resume ideas that were discussed. Because of the positive response, we will likely be repeating this event. Stay tuned for where and when!

Brian Skory (Technical Staffing Specialist) and I (VP Operations) bump into the same issues over and over again when we are working with candidates for job and contract openings.

They fall into the following classes:

Class #1: Resume needs work. It’s too long, too short, not organized well, lacking in details, etc.

Class #2: Candidates want to pump us for ideas about how to find opportunities.

Class #3: Candidates make blunders in interviews because they aren’t well prepared, which probably comes from a lack of familiarity with current interviewing styles and conventions.

In truth, Brian and I answer the same questions, give the same advice, pull our hair out over the same issues pretty regularly.

So we decided to create a presentation that addresses a lot of the most common issues and questions.

Now what, you would rightly ask, are our bona fides?

Brian has been working directly with our clients and our candidates for several years. He gets feedback about why clients don’t like candidate resumes. He gets feedback about why clients are passing on candidates. And he fields a lot of candidate questions. He is a wealth of practical knowledge that comes from a wide variety of managers.

I have an interesting mix of experience. I am often a hiring manager myself, because I am read resumes and interview candidates for the software development projects that we are awarded as outsourced contracts. In addition, I still process the enormous influx of resumes we receive in response to job and contract postings when our regular recruiter, Ursula Kellman, is on vacation. Like I’m doing this week. When you read 50 resumes in a day, day in and day out, you start to develop a very good sense of what communicates and what does not.

So Brian and I have a nice mix of experience to give some very practical advice. But only for the high-tech workers (Web, Software, Embedded Systems, Network Engineers, Technical Managers, etc.). Accountants and teachers are not going to find our advice very useful. By the same token, listening to generalists is not very helpful to high-tech workers!

The presentation will be held on March 24th from 6:00 to 9:00 PM at Ann Arbor Spark. The registration page can be found on the Ann Arbor Chapter of the Association for Women in Computing’s Event Calendar.

The publication is called Getting Hired: Insider Secrets from the Trenches and with over a year’s worth of issues, there is a lot of content that many job seekers would find useful. So, I’ve taken his work and implemented it on its own page at http://stoutsystems.com/getting-hired/.

Now these posts will show up in our blog’s RSS Feed and have their very own place on stoutsystems.com. And we’re still sending Getting Hired as an eNewsletter. You can subscribe by sending us an email.

While the running-around-tearing-my-hair-out experience is still fresh, I thought I would jot down a few things that any job seeker should know about handling business references.

Protect your Business References

I’ve talked with many job seekers who refuse to give out any information about their business references until the very late stages of interviewing. They cite experiences with unscrupulous head hunters who contacted their business references to try to entice them away from their current jobs. Not nice.

When dealing directly with a prospective employer, you can feel comfortable giving out your business reference information. They aren’t head hunters, so you can be 99% certain that they won’t abuse them.

When dealing with recruiters and agencies, you are entitled to understand their policy on business references. Ours is simple: we don’t contact anyone’s business references without express permission. Period.

Your business references will be grateful (and much more willing) if they are not bombarded with phone calls that start out, “YOUR NAME HERE gave me your name and phone number.”

Keep tabs on your Business References

I find it incredibly frustrating when a job seeker gives me a business reference with bad contact info. People change their jobs, their cell phone numbers and their email addresses like I change my haircut.

What I find even more frustrating is when I tell a job seeker that the phone number or email address they gave me is bad, and the response is, “Here, try this one.” What? No, no, no, no, no. YOU try that one!

When you are going through the interviewing process, you can do double duty by (a) calling or emailing your business references and warning them that they are likely to hear from prospective employers, (b) asking your business references to confirm that the phone number and email address you have for them are still the best ones to use.

This one should be obvious…

Should you include this manager or that manager on your business reference list? What are the criteria? This one should be obvious.

First, can the person speak freely? Some companies have a policy against providing business references. If a business reference is only capable of giving employment verification, it’s not much of a business reference at all.

Second, will the person give you a positive reference? You should ask this before you include anyone on your business reference list.

I know, I know… You think this is obvious. But I myself have been used as a business reference by people who I haven’t worked with for ten years or more. Worse yet, I’ve been used as a business reference by people who I cannot recommend. I will candidly tell anyone who asks whether or not I’ll give them a good reference. I think all job seekers should be smart enough to ask!

Let me be clear about this, in case there is any doubt – the initial recruitment process does NOT require social security numbers, bank account information, personal taxes, or anything else out of the ordinary. Even when setting up an online profile with a recruitment firm or a corporate job board, the most you will be asked for at that stage of the process is exactly what is on your resume but in an expanded form (contact info, skills, accomplishments, work history, references, and such). Yes, at some point in the hiring process you will need to provide someone with information of a more personal nature, but at that point there will be no doubt as to the identity of the person with whom you are dealing (more than likely this will be HR or the hiring manager at the job site).

Here are a couple of safeguards to prevent identity theft (or worse) when responding to a recruiter or a job posting.

1. As stated above, be suspicious if you are asked for a social security number, bank information or tax information – for any reason.

2. When approached by a recruiter with whom you’re not familiar, ask the recruiter for detailed contact info. Then do an Internet search to establish whether or not the recruiter can be verified. Make sure everything looks good, and then call back the main business number and ask for that individual.

3. Con artists of this type more than likely are not going to spend the dollars it costs to post on a DICE, Monster, or CareerBuilder type site – they will tend to post mostly on the free boards.

There are plenty of good recruiters, job boards and posting sites out there, and armed with a grain of common sense and an awareness of the information above, there is no reason why a job seeker shouldn’t have a successful job search experience when utilizing these useful tools.

A list of some reported scams can be found at consumerfraudreporting.com.

“I have put about 20 resumes out there in the last month, and not one company has expressed a flicker of interest. It’s hard to get across how shocked I am by this; I’m awfully good at what I do and I have never spent so long in a job search. Usually it takes about six weeks–this time it’s been six months, with only one onsite interview. I suppose that if I count them all up, I’ve sent out close to 100 copies of my resume since January. Usually I send…10?”

Boy, does this candidate speak for a lot of people!

In talking and emailing with candidates, we are often asked what to do to penetrate the gate keepers. Here are a few tips:

1. If you’re applying for a position that’s not in your geographic area, you are going to make a strong case for yourself if you say that you don’t need relocation assistance. You also make a strong case for yourself if you say that you’re trying to relocate to the area for a specific reason (like family, good schools, four seasons, no snow, whatever)

2. If you match a position well, call that out in your cover. If you are deficient in a particular skill, call that out, too, but say why you think it’s offset by your other strengths.

3. Network like crazy. Right now we’re inundated with resumes. I say “no” to many, many candidates. And this pains me [OUCH!] because most of them are quite skilled. With the number of applicants, only the exact match people are getting through the gate. THAT HAVING BEEN SAID, if I get a personal referral from someone we know, I pay a lot more attention to the resume. THIS IS VITALLY IMPORTANT to anyone who is becoming frustrated in his or her job search. Reaching out to everyone you’ve ever worked with and getting them to make introductions, walk your resume in to HR, etc. is the key thing to do. Use Linked In to find your former colleagues. Remember that most companies pay their employees a referral fee if they recommend someone who gets hired; so you might even be helping your friends even as they help you.

Go low tech. In today’s job market, you’ll find that the personal touch is the thing that will help the most.

Good luck if you’re job hunting. It is tough right now, but we have tiny signs of improving conditions.

FYI: I’m reading resumes this week, a job that my colleague Ursula Kellman normally does. She’s taking a well-deserved vacation, so I’m holding down the fort in her absence.

“Say A Few Words” (SAFW)

S:  Make an opening Statement

A:  Amplify that statement

F:  Provide a Few examples

W:  Wrap it up

You can bet that interviewers will place just as much importance on how a candidate answers a question as they will on how correct the answer is – and in some cases, even more. In fact, just a few weeks back, I had two technically competent candidates rejected, in part because they violated some of the key points of this SAFW formula. So let’s briefly take a look at each of these.

First, keep in mind the sentence as a whole: Say a few words! Both of these candidates lost out on a good opportunity because they were FAR too verbose in their answers. Candidate who don’t know how to be brief and succinct in their answers are a huge red flag to hiring managers.

Some examples.

INTERVIEW QUESTION: Have you ever created a chocolate chip cookie recipe?

Opening Statement: Yes, I have.

Amplify that statement: From 2005-2008, that was my primary responsibility and I learned quite a bit during that time period about making chocolate chip cookies.

Provide a Few examples: I created a Choco-Chocolate chip cookie recipe for Gourmet Markets Baked Delights.  That one went on to become one of their best selling cookies. Prior to that, I designed a Macadamia White Chocolate Chip Cookie, for the One Horn Steak House chain, which actually won the prestigious Platinum Cookie Recipe award.

Wrap it Up: As a result of these experiences, I feel well qualified to create cookie recipes.

And then—very important—keep quiet and wait for the next question.

Aside from keeping it brief, probably the next most important aspect to this formula is providing a few examples.  It’s one thing to say you did something, but an entirely different one to provide the demonstrated proof behind your claim. It’s the difference between a mediocre connection and the solid whack of your driver against the ball letting you know before it’s even in the air that you’re landing on the green. Make your claim, but be prepared to back it up with some specifics.

Come up with some practice questions of your own, and practice applying SAFW. I guarantee that your interviews will be stronger as a result.

I’ve never been a fan of unconventional resumes – they always tended to bump up against my conservative nature. Recently, however, I’ve been seeing them pop up here and there. And you know what? They get my attention. Yes, some of them are way over the top and wouldn’t be looked at twice unless they were being submitted for a creative advertising position. But I’m starting to think that in there somewhere is that sweet spot, the resume that visually stands out without offending but begs some further inspection.

Yes, if it gets that far, you still need to be able to deliver the goods, but I’m really beginning to consider the potential of these “alternative resumes”. More examples of these as well as the one shown here can be found in this Smashing Magazine article.

I would love to see any comments from any of you who have gotten a bit unconventional with your resumes.

I have to confess, I find it interesting when I reach out like this.

It’s a sign of the times when I send out notes and hear back from a small fraction of the candidates. When that’s happening, it signifies that candidates have already found work and couldn’t be bothered to reply. That’s NOT what happened this time.

I heard back from about 70% of the people I emailed. Many of them responded to me within 24 hours.

Of those who replied, the vast majority confirmed that they are still looking for work. A lot of them are employed in unsatisfactory situations—either dead end jobs or unstable companies or contracts that are coming to an end soon. And a lot of them are unemployed, in some cases unemployed for a long time.

A few people told us that they found work in Michigan. And more told us that they found work outside of Michigan and, regrettably, had to take it.

I assume that those who didn’t reply at all are working again. At least I hope that’s the case.

We are seeing improvements. More projects finally coming on line. Many are small, but they are coming in. This is what we expect to see as things loosen up. It seems consistent with what our candidates are seeing, too.

Let’s hope that this is the upswing we’re all looking for!

By the way, we don’t lose interest in candidates. We just don’t have reason to call them unless/until a position comes in that looks like a match.

Stout Systems recently landed a project doing substantial ASP.NET development. Given the complex nature of the project, we knew we needed to add a very skilled developer to our team.

We interviewed a number of people and put them through our standard screening process. As part of our routine procedure, we asked candidates for a code sample.

And this is where the story gets interesting…

We asked one promising developer for a code sample. After two days the code sample hit our inbox right on schedule. That afternoon, our technical architect for the project phoned me, “Uh…I don’t know how to say this, but this developer plagiarized the code sample.”

WHAT!?!

How we caught the cheat:

1. The first clue the sample was plagiarized was that the developer told us he didn’t have permission to share any of his commercial work and would have to custom-code something for us. Fair enough. So he sent us a massive and complex Web site (that no mere mortal would be able to write that quickly) and claimed to have prepared the entire thing over the weekend. Hmm…

2. With that clue, our technical architect got suspicious, pasted a code snippet into Google and ran a search. He got a direct and immediate hit. So he downloaded the code and compared it with the developer’s submission. It was a 100% match except where the author’s name was changed.  Even then, the original author’s name was left intact in a few places in the plagiarized version.

Unbelievable.

Needless to say, the embarrassed developer did not get the job.

I could tell more stories like this where people blew it by lying or faking. It is tempting, especially when you are competing for work in a tight job market. But in our experience, you’re better off laying your cards on the table and dealing with whatever the prospective employer throws at you.

Just a few weeks ago, a developer we know told us that he was certain he’d scared off a prospective employer by giving them his real salary history (which was much higher than the salary they were offering). After a delay of several weeks, the employer came back saying they had the green light to hire and presented him the offer. Now there is a great example of an honest success.