There has been some good advise posted here already, but I will just add that I have landed my last 2 jobs with nothing more than a LinkedIn profile. My current one was a cold submission electronic submission to a company where I knew no one. I had an offer about a week after sending the email. When the fit is right, it is right, and a good resume will get you in the door. That said, it was surely an outlier. I fully support the idea that it is usually more about finding some way to make a personal connection, especially if the fit is not glaringly obvious, but you had better have something decent to submit into their system to back up your charm.
I stopped bothering to keep a separate resume up to date many years ago. You can export LinkedIn to PDF which is what I use when asked to submit something electronically when requested. For my current job (interviewed almost 2 years ago) I don't think I even bothered to bring paper copies to the interview. When I was on the flip side of things, I always wished people would stop doing that, but I'm sure there are still stall-warts out there who will check to see if you are "prepared" by asking for a copy of your resume. Frankly, I don't want to work for those folks if I have other options. These days, I'd just bust out my android. My last job was with one of the top recruiting firms in the world. We had the leading technical offering for recruiters to find candidates. When I started there, resume-handling was mostly electronic and shifted heavily toward it over the years. Now, it is nearly all electronic. Even most small businesses do candidate sourcing on the web. For tech jobs, it is almost exclusively electronic. I only say all this because the 2 page limit is not terribly relevant in a well formatted and easily searched (visually that is) electronic document, especially for IT folks. I just keep all the work history in there. Well, everything relevant to any job I might want in the future. =) I dropped my high school jobs a while back, but I've been paid to do computer stuff since college and, for example, I think it still impresses employers to see that I worked a help desk on the largest trading floor in New England between my Freshman and Sophomore years. You have to decide for your self if each bit of work experience is necessary, but be wary of putting time holes in your work history as well. If you have more than 2 "pages" worth of work history, rely on the job title line to indicate to your potential employer if the position is relevant to them. Again, formatting is key and good luck beating the experts at LinkedIn on that. Similarly, don't bother with irrelevant padding to fill some artificial minimum of this "paper" stuff that is still around, but don't be afraid to say who you are either. The text in your resume is an example of your written communication skills, so if you are job hunting, you should review it every day looking for mistakes and improvements in getting to the point and clarity. Take this email as an excellent counter example. ;-) I think the cover letter (or submission email in modern terms) is where to do your customizing. Highlight a few keys things that are most relevant to the job in question. If they like those bits, they will likely read the rest and probably want to talk to you. _______________ Alan Johnson a...@datdec.com Date Format PSA <http://xkcd.com/1179/> On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 11:49 AM, Kenny Lussier <kluss...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi All, > > Not specifically Linux-related, but I was wondering what other people are > seeing/doing with resumes these days. I have seen everything from a 2-page > resume for someone with 20 years of experience to a 15-page resume for > someone with 2 jobs over 3 years (it looked like the output of cat > ~/.bash_history). How far back should a resume go? How long should it be > before you stop reading it? I'm seeing absolutely no consistency in > resumes, and the ones that come from recruiters seem to be the worst > formats. > > C-Ya, > Kenny > > > _______________________________________________ > gnhlug-discuss mailing list > gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org > http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ > >
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