A killer tech CV that no company can refuse
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Our last blog post about cool beginner web projects was a super hit! Over a single day we had dozens of email asking for more ideas, some suggesting even cooler projects and others saying we should put up example codes. Thanks everyone for their suggestions, ideas and critique. Staying on the high note, I decided I should describe an ideal resume concept for software developers: A CV which is itself a show of skill, which is a CV - I’m calling it the:
“The Recursive CV”
The idea is pretty simple, and I’m surprised that I’ve not seen anything like this yet. Let me explain what I mean by a recursive CV and why it’s great. But before I do, let me also go over a big problem with the concept of CVs that currently exist.
Problem: CVs are not proof of skills
All CVs look the same!
It’s true. On an average we receive at least a hundred CV a month, and if there are job adverts out that number reaches a thousand easily. On a surface level most CVs look different, they have different formatting, their content is different (obviously!) and structurally they are similar, as they should be to some extent. They have the usual contact detail, experience, skills, references, etc. But the way they are all the same is that there is almost impossible to differentiate one candidate from another based on the content of their CV. They all tend to have similar skills, more or less similar experience blocks, almost the same number of references. So when we are looking for a particular experience set (e.g. C# web development) and a particular experience (say 3 years) we end up with literally hundreds of CVs that are equally a good fit. It’s impossible to go over all. So we take shortcuts, every employer does. Each of us have some tricks, secret hacks that are essentially heuristics. For example I check if there are any misspelling of technology names (e.g. .net instead of .NET) - very superficial, I know, but we have to find some rationale for not doing hundreds of hours of interviews :)
The big question we always have for tech CV is:
Does this person really have the skills he/she is claiming to have?
And I’ve rarely found a CV that answers that question by itself. There are exceptions, I remember a horribly formatted CV with several misspelling of technology names that I was going to delete right away - but I happen to see the last line of the CV that said: “I implemented a .net based JVM, here’s the link…”. Thankfully, I noticed it. The guy turned out to be a freaking genius named Maruf Maniruzzaman, who as it turns out doesn’t need to write his CV well. He ended up being directly hired from us by Microsoft, and now does rocket science level robotics programming at Amazon. Btw, he is coming to our deshi tech adda next Saturday (see the poster here for more details).
OK, I’m digressing. Back to the original problem: it’s not easy to find proof of skills in the typical CVs.
Solution: Make your CV a proof of your skills
If you could come up with a CV that was by itself a proof of your skills that would make things so simple for everyone. But how? Well, this is what you’ve got to come up with ideas. But here’s an example of such a “recursive CV”:
You write a little Javascript app that shows your CV as an interact-able web page. You could have the timeline of your experience, have fancy fold outs and fold ins that show information but also shows your CSS and JS skills. Maybe a search that shows how good you are with suggestions. A skills tag cloud that can lead to GraphML based viewer to show off your project experience? The options are limitless. What would be great is if you could show how you are doing each piece of the CV, some code snippets, etc.
The CV itself is a show of your skills.
If you want a hint or some starter code to move in this direction here are two great example codes:
Building a Vertical Timeline With CSS and a Touch of JavaScript
OK, that’s it for now, hope this post will help you to think something new about your CV. If you make something make sure you send us your “CV” to hr@kaz.com.bd we are always on the lookout for people who are different and exceptional.
