Today, I was asked by a consultancy agency to provide a resume (or Curriculum Vitae or CV) with “some more meat on it” than one I had sent earlier which was very basic and with simple bullet points. I have always felt that resumes are bullshit and I have always wanted to blog about it so this was my cue to finally write down my thoughts on the subject. Here are a few reasons why resumes are bullshit:<\/p>\n
Resumes might be good for initial weeding out in applications but unfortunately this will often mean that inexperienced programmers do not stand a chance in the job race and I think that is a shame. I myself am a good example of a person with a thin CV<\/a> when it comes to IT-related experience which is mainly due to the fact that I have spent most of my time at the university being a teaching assistant instead of having a job at an IT-company. But does this mean that my problem solving skills are worse than a person having worked for twenty years doing the same thing over and over? I think not.<\/p>\n I do not deny that experience is important and Peter Norvig’s essay Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years<\/a> is a good reminder that programming is a skill that is only acquired with hard work over an extended period of time but putting so much emphasis on a piece of paper is sad. Is there no better general alternative?<\/p>\n So after having dutifully updated my CV, I wrote this comment to the consulting agent (translated from Danish):<\/p>\n \nIn a time where one can buy diplomas online, improve on reality in one’s CV and in many ways get by in life by cheating, I think it is very unlucky that choosing employees is still based on something as untrustworthy as a piece of paper with a Latin title and some dates and job titles. I can find out more about a person’s personality in a 10-minute conversation than I can reading a personal description and I can learn more about a person’s competencies by posing a simple IT-related problem and have them solve it than I can by going through every former position the person has had.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And here is his response (translated from Danish):<\/p>\n \nI see what you’re saying about CVs but actually, I do not entirely agree with you.<\/p>\n CVs are extremely important in our sales process because they decide whether we get the opportunity to come in and further discuss a job with the customer (they often have a number of CVs from different consultants to choose from). I get an enormous amount of bad CVs sent to me and my prejudice from seeing the CV is rarely different from when I actually meet the person later.<\/p>\n Remember that CVs are not about improving on reality but presenting the material in a professional manner and with focus on the essentials…. This is something that is valid for sales in general.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So the jury is up on the question but the title of this blog post remains the same. Meanwhile, I hope I didn’t scare him away :-)<\/p>\n Update: Since writing this article, my views have been challenged from a lot of different people which is a good thing. However, there are plenty of articles to support my point. Here is a few:<\/em> Today, I was asked by a consultancy agency to provide a resume (or Curriculum Vitae or CV) with “some more meat on it” than one I had sent earlier which was very basic and with simple bullet points. I have always felt that resumes are bullshit and I have always wanted to blog about it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[58,57,56],"class_list":["post-192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-industry","tag-bullshit","tag-cv","tag-resume"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nForbes on resume lies<\/a>
\nYahoo Finance on resume lies<\/a>
\nJob Bank USA on resume lies<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"