Welcome, have a seat…
Welcome, O’Reilly readers. I’ve gotten several great comments and helpful emails from many of you today, and I’ve enjoyed reading them all. As always, you can leave comments on entries, or reach me privately at tiffany -!at!- magicpotofjobs.com. It’s clear from some of the emails I’ve got that there’s a lot of frustration out there with the job search process in general and with recruiters in particular. My friends, you are preaching to the choir- believe me when I say that I hate bad recruiters as much as you do, because I have to work that much harder to earn the trust of both the candidates and the clients.
It’s late, but just a couple of spare thoughts on the original article that brought you here:
There are essentially two kinds of HR gatekeepers: the ones who are just trying to separate the crap resumes from the ones with potential, and the ones who seriously think they’re in a position to evaluate an IT resume.
When dealing with the first type, your best bet is to mirror the language of the job description or posting as much as is reasonable in your resume. Just try to spell out as plainly as possible exactly how your experience relates to the job, using their own words if necessary, in order to help a non-technical HR person see that your resume is worth passing on to the hiring manager. Ultimately, though, this type of HR person understands that his or her job is really just to weed out the obviously unqualified/illiterate/unsuitable candidates and let the hiring manager decide which of the rest look worth the time to interview.
When dealing with the second type… well, good luck. The above technique will help to an extent, but there will always be HR people who think it’s their job to insert themselves into the process between applicants and the hiring manager. If you’re lucky enough to have a good third-party recruiter who specializes in IT working with you, your recruiter may be able to push through that obstacle for you, by convincing the HR person to rely on the recruiter’s IT expertise. My personal favorite TPR trick is to start asking the HR person lots of technical questions about the job over the phone. I can actually hear their eyes glaze over. If all else fails, you still have to ask yourself if you really want to work for a company that lets HR decide who IT should hire, no?
And above all, have reasonable expectations. In any given company, the HR department has to recruit administrative staff, technical staff, executives, marketing, etc. They can’t possibly specialize in every area, and especially not in IT. It’s an unfortunate fact, but there aren’t that many good ways around it. Does it excuse bad hiring practices? Of course not. But there are certainly plenty of the first type of HR people who are doing the best they can with what they’ve got. So be nice.
Anyway, thanks for coming by. I hope you stick around.
March 9th, 2006 at 11:51 pm
Ha, firstly, thanks for stopping by, I read the O’Reilly post then stopped back by over here, and I have to say. I am always looking for a good recruiter, one that I can recommend, but I’ve had nothing but poor luck.
I get non technical IT recruiters that ask a set of questions or recruiters that, for lack of a good way to say it, just can’t communicate. I mean, I am on the phone with these guys and can’t understand them, then they pass me off to another guy who I can’t understand. They then proceed to say your hired for X dollars, then 1 day before start say, whoops we mean your going to make -X dollars. Then they call me unprofessional when I get rather upset about the astounding miss calculation and “missunderstanding”.
Wow, see, job seekers get very frustrated!
Anyway, keep up the good posts and I will keep reading them.