Category: Tech Writing

The woman looked at resumes mainly to find a person’s job history, so she wanted a “job obituary” format. For a recruiter, it is much more convenient to favor candidates with experience most resembling that of the current assignment. It is much easier to reduce a candidate to simply the sum of his/her previous jobs.

This is a good resume, but it is good in only two contexts. First, when opened as an email attachment, the resolution onscreen is almost perfect, and even the “job section” stares the reader directly in the face. Second, while this resume might not be liked by HR and recruiters, I think that techies would love it. It provides much more information than the typical resume and arranges the skills by function. For a “database admin” job, the first thing an HR person would look for is previous experience under the “Jobs” section. But the technical manager might be more interested in knowing the kinds of databases a person has worked with, and what sort of administrative tasks that the person has performed. So the tech manager would want to find experience by function rather than by job.

There are two intended types of readers for this resume, and both read the resume in almost opposing ways. The HR scans the resume; the hiring manager looks a little more closely. The question boils down to how to make a resume that satisfies both the scanner and the person willing to spend more than 10 seconds looking at it?

This is a question frequently raised in usability and discussed by Alan Cooper in his book “About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design” Different users have different goals, and it is sometimes impossible for a design to accommodate more than one persona at once. One solution might be to provide levels of customization on a website according to a user’s specific goals. Or a website could have some parts which are “high resolution” (to use Edward Tufte’s phrase) and some parts which are “low resolution.” Maybe a button can allow the user to switch between two views: general and detailed.

For the resume, one answer might be to “lighten up” the resume and include more in the cover letter. Another solution might be for the “lite resume” to include “url’s” for further information.

One problem the woman had was that my resume subverted her expectations about where information ought to be. Because the format was unconventional and she’d never encountered it before, she was momentarily flustered. On the other hand, if half of all resumes looked like this, it would probably not bother her at all. I still feel that the original resume organized job information in a superior way. But that does not change the fact that the resume scanner would have to read this one a little differently, a little more carefully.

As a website gains in functionality and content, there may be a need to redesign the GUI entirely. This may not be an easy task to do, especially if one is dealing with static pages that are not stored in a database. But there is another more subtle problem: will the user accept the change as good? Even if the redesign were better, it is not clear whether users will perceive it or so. Print media likes to redesign in one fell swoop without telling anyone. But that strategy might not work for websites. Instead, incremental changes to the GUI might allow users to continue to use their stored knowledge of how to use the website. Maybe the GUI changes can be deployed so slowly that no one ever notices the changes.

In my previous post, I discussed the excellent ideas from the world?s leading expert on interfaces and design, Edward Tufte. Tufte encourages designers to maximize the use of space as a general rule. The problem is that white space can reduce clutter and highlight certain information on the screen or page. It also can present a hierarchy in which the information exists. Sometimes there might be good reasons for limiting the view of the data (as Tufte attests in his Challenger example). Let?s use the resume as an example.

Employers usually want a one page resume for ease of scanning, but in today?s technical world, it is practically impossible to convey a person?s full technical skills without an additional page or significantly reducing the font or margins. So is two pages better? An interviewer is extremely unlikely to flip from page to page during an interview. So is smaller font better? A resume does not present simple biographical information. Instead, it presents how the job seeker organizes his career and goals. By definition, a resume is selective. It is not to the job-seeker?s advantage to present information in the typical ?job obituary? fashion. For one thing, if the employer can easily count the amount of time at a job, that gives a quantifiable basis for comparing this candidate with others. That is precisely what job seekers wish to prevent the employer from doing, especially when a job seeker?s proficiencies are gained on projects not directly related to his primary job function. On the other hand, if a resume contains chronological gaps or no dates at all, that also puts up a red flag. Therefore, the ideal resume should contain chronological information without a chronological organization.

Before, the resume writer?s trick was trying to figure out how to condense your basic information into a single page. Now, just putting a url on a resume can allow employers to view as many pages as you want (That can be a dangerous thing of course).

?Must have 5 years experience minimum.? I?ve seen such phrases on 90% of the job ads, but I?ve been unable to figure out what it means. Consider the possibilities:

5 years experience with the same job title? That is a sign the employer is not looking for competence, but stability and aversion to risk.

5 years in the same field? So does time in school count? How about times when you were unemployed and working on portfolios/personal projects?

5 years experiencing using the tool, (programming language, platform)? First, no sane individual uses a single tool for every task on the job, and an individual who does so tends to view business problems in a reductionist way. A person with 5 years experience using Robohelp tends to view every problem as a Robohelp problem. Second, anyone who uses a product for that long a time could be using an out-of-date version. Or they can be in the habit of using high-priced commercial tools instead of free open source tools.

Having the technical competence of a typical person with 5 years experience? If that?s the case, then what about the person with 6 months experience who can do pretty cool things? What about someone with 5 years experience using a different tool but minimally competent on this one? At some point you are concerned more with an individual?s potential to do good work than what he has done (and that is good, isn?t it?)

I?ve always felt that the hardest job skills could be learned by the right person in 2 years or less. So, by demanding 5 years experience, you run the risk of hiring someone purely on the basis of the historical accident of whether they’ve worked at a company using a commercial tool. Employers would like to think that skills can be assessed simply by number of years at the post. They’d like to think that most people can obtain the jobs they are suited for, and that job titles are relatively uniform across the industry. But job titles (especially in technical fields) can be misleading. Requiring “5 years experience” may simply result in weeding out the younger candidates most in touch with new ways of doing things. In the writing profession, proficiency and even ability increases with age. As a 36 year old, I?ve been writing seriously since my senior year at college (when I was 22). That?s 14 years of experience. But on a writing project, a talented writer with three years of experience could have probably done just as good a job.

What alternative do I suggest? Employers should focus on skills necessary for the job, not simply seniority. By “skills,” I mean general skills, not simply familiarity with proprietary applications. If you limit your pool of applicants only to those whose previous employer used a particular application, you are reducing your pool of applicants (and probably having to pay high prices for it too). Oracle is completely different from SQL Server, but a person who worked as a database administrator on one of them could probably pick up the other in no time at all. The same is true for programming. I won’t deny that programming is hard, and that the good programmer is ten times more productive than the mediocre programmer. But a good programmer is not necessary the one who can program in the most languages. Once you learn basic concepts very well, the choice of tool, platform or programming language is almost irrelevant. Therefore, employers should write job descriptions that allow for a diversity of backgrounds rather than insisting on a specific job title or familiarity with a specific tool. Every job description ad should include three parts: Requirements, Highly Recommended and Nice to Have. In some areas (like management), seniority does indicate a level of experience working with different types of human interactions. But in technological fields, seniority is mostly irrelevant. After all, napster was started by someone under the age of 20 and the world’s first graphical browser was written by someone still in college.

Another way to tackle the skills problem is to look at an ability to complete projects or master new challenges. Accomplishments and innovation should be more important than number of years with a job title. True, a person with 5 years experience at a job may face many challenges that make him/her a better worker. But a person without the job title may have faced similiar challenges in different professional contexts. By allowing the second kind of applicant into the job pool, you are making it easier to find the best candidate at the lowest possible price.