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Admin
Sorry, I don't get it. I read it twice, but really i can't get the point of the story.
It was just a "strange" interview, nothing more, or wasn't it?
Admin
Well, the interviewer hadn't read the CV before walking into the interview room, but so what else is new?
It's hardly rare to be given a CV completely out of the blue and be told "you're interviewing this guy now, he's waiting for you in such-and-such a room".
Admin
He didn't realise there was a second side to the CV which is why he was asking about all the meaningless jobs which were presumably at the beginning of Steve's career.
Admin
This is why people tell you to fit your CV onto a single side of paper...
Admin
This is why you should aim to keep CV on a single page and list only the relevant experience to the job you're applying.
Admin
What kind of person puts "inventorying network switches" on a CV for a software company?
Admin
Badly written anecdote is badly written.
Admin
Soooooooooooo... the MD had never heard of double-sided printouts before that day? THAT'S the point?
Wow.
Admin
That's probably why Linked in starts with your current job, not the one summer tomato picking you did.
No we picked them by hand. No we walked with a cart to the isle to manually dump them in a bigger cart. ... ... No i'm sure there was no computer in the sorting machine [turns page] Yes i was chief architect at [redacted company]
Admin
In the UK we're told our CV should be approximately two sides - the one sided resumé is an American thing.
Admin
Where's pt. 2?
Admin
Admin
I'm thinking there must be more to this story but the back side of my monitor is blank...
Admin
From my observations one or two pages does not matter. What does matter is that you put the most important stuff first and work your way to the least important. If the least imporant goes onto a second page that is fine. The interviewer will stop reading the resume once they lose interest.
I was under the impression from the story that the guy put his degree information on the second page (I put my degree information on the second page since I view it as less important). And the MD had some prejudice against people without degrees, but in this case only to realize the guy actually did have a degree.
Admin
I had problems in April 2010 when I had just had 3 WTF jobs in a row pretty much within a year, and wanted to shift the focus to the 3.5 years or so before but every interviewer seemed determined to talk about my most recent jobs.
I failed to get any of the jobs at that time which was a very trying time for me.
Steve handled his interview well, attributing the positive to every job. I learnt to do that. I did highlight the 3rd of the WTF jobs on the work I had done on switching the Windows build from static to using DLLs which essentially cut down the link time enormously so you didn't have to wait 30-45 minutes every time you made a 1-line change. This had an impact on improving the "performance" of every developer in the team who was otherwise wasting time waiting for changes to build.
It may have been a tiresome task to do, and maybe not exactly what I wanted to be working on doing there, but it was 1. An idea I had come up with myself (pro-active) and 2. Had a very positive impact.
Subsequent to changing my own personal attitude towards this job, my success rate went up enormously.
It is very important to have a good attitude towards doing work which is good for the business but not what you particulary enjoy doing. You are there for the benefit of the business, not to seek your own interests.
The MD would have known that and may well have been asking these questions for exactly these reasons.
Admin
höhö,... that's why you have to put "inventorying network switches" on your CV's in Britain? - what a N(ice)RWTF!
Admin
My CV is 3 to 4 pages (as time goes on, it grows).
The first page contains a summary of pertinent information. The bottom of it through the third page is a detail of each related job I have had (I leave off less relevant tasks), what I did there, what my responsibilities were and what I achieved.
Then, the final page contains "ancillary" information. Such as professional groups I belong to open source projects I participate in, certs, talks that I've done, etc. Stuff that's icing on the cake, but isn't the meat of what I'm trying to get across...
Admin
It seems to me that the MD had spent the first half of the interview looking at the back-side of the resume, where Steven had rightly listed all the crap jobs he'd had in order to fill it out to the full two pages. He then flipped it over and saw all the things Steven had listed first.
Admin
It was later that he found out that "MD" actually stood for "Manic Depressive".
The end.
Admin
Admin
The real WTF is that without the comments most people (myself included) don't get the story.
Admin
So the twf is that the interviewer wanted to see how he would deal with an angry person?
Admin
I've done the whole "list only relevant jobs" thing, only to be asked if I was in jail/psychiatric treatment/unemployed in those "missing years". Now it lists every single meaningless job, simply as employer/function/period one-liners.
Admin
TRWTF is not knowing the difference between "led" and "lead"?
But what we all want to know is, is it really bigger on the inside?
Admin
Yes, be a good working slave and do whatever is best for your company. Oh. My. God. With too many people with that attitude, we will soon all get minimum wages
What nonsense! You can pretend stuff like that, to crawl up the bosses a**es, but when I work for a company, I have a look at what I can gain of it. Do I learn something new? Can I improve my skills/knowledge in an area? Is it probably just incredible fun to work with the people? Is the payment good for the kind of work I do?
Obviously, when doing the actual work, one should focus on doing what is objectively the best thing to do, not on what is most fun to do. But that's a matter of professionalism. If you do what you are paid for as good as you can, then that is all a company can ever expect from you. Anything more you should do out of interest/fun or with a certain (monetary?) goal in mind.
Do not sell yourself under value, if you don't absolutely need THAT job to survive.
Admin
I'm struggling to keep my CV down to two pages. The early jobs are now just Company/Job Title/Dates. The more recent a job is, the more detail it gets. Most recent comes first on Page 1. Page 2 becomes dusty history.
I was once shown a 10-page CV. Page one proudly listed his mobile number (when mobiles were rare) and his BMW 320i. On about page 7 we discovered that he was married with two children. How we laughed!
Admin
"Yes, all of that in the exact order!"
Admin
I'm in the Netherlands.
Generally I think it's good to have a CV that's not too long - recruiters aren't going to wade through a 10-page long CV.
The CV that I usually use is 3 pages; it contains my profile, a list of skills and descriptions of projects I've worked on in the past 5 years. But a while ago a recruiter commented that he thought my CV was too short.
Admin
I've seen lots of 5-8 page resumes, pretty much always from relatives of "Nagesh" if you get my meaning. Very rarely do I encounter a proper 1 page resume, though when I do it's never from a "Nagesh".
The 1 page resume candidates perform a few orders of magnitude better at their interview than the 5-8 page candidates.
Admin
Yes - please, more people take note of this. Wading through 11 pages of CV detailing every single piece of software that you have ever seen does not make me want to interview you - if you are an expert in 15 different DBMS, 13 programming languages, and 257 different applications, then you are applying for the wrong job...
And no pictures. Thanks.
Admin
Sounds like steve might want to put his most relevant work experience near the top of his resume so interviewers see that first instead of having to turn to the second page.
Admin
The Real WTF is not putting your work history in reverse chronological order so that the most recent / most relevant stuff is at the top, where the interviewer will see it immediately.
Admin
What's a "CV"? I've heard of a resume, but not a "CV". Is that a British thing?
Admin
And you don't need THAT job. There's another one out there. It's not worth going to a place you hate every day.
Admin
You know, if some of your past jobs have no relevance to the kind of work youre looking for, you CAN leave them off your resume. My resume mentions nothing about my first job at Wendy's, or various construction labor gigs, or even five years of delivering pizza.
Admin
In the US, we just call it a resume. They don't ge to 2 pages unless you have soemthing like 10+ years of experience. At that point it starts to be come more expected.
Truth is, resumes are not that valuable. Talking to someone is.
Admin
Exactly. Resumes have one goal: Get you in to speak with someone. Writing a resume to try and portray the unique snowflake that is "you" with each of your prized bowel movements is a complete waste of time for everyone.
Admin
Curriculum Vitae. Latin.
Admin
I've recently had to start looking for a job, something I haven't done in 7 years (I've been working in software development for something like 35 years). I truncated my resume at 2 pages and 3 jobs/17 years back. I could have gone on but I don't see than my experience on old iron and obsolete operating systems would apply - unless they were asking about that explicitly. At that point I'd deny any knowledge of those old POS systems.
Admin
there's a bad VB joke in there somewhere..
Error on resume? Next!
Admin
Admin
Admin
Last I was out looking I was told that for technical positions, especially in fields where consulting is the norm, they're looking for a small novel, otherwise they don't think you've got range of experience.
I'd been working at the same place for god-knows-how-many-years so I was at a distinct disadvantage until I stumbled on a position doing exactly what I'd been doing before.
Admin
I don't get it, what was on the back of the resume to make him change his attitude?
Admin
Admin
Hahaha, thanks Arkady for helping me make sense of this story.
Admin
I was told that multipage resume's get pitched when I was in college. Of course back then I had no experience and had to stretch it to fill a page.
I rarely ever see a resume that is less than 2 full pages when interviewing people with at least a few years of experience. I think people do not want to remove irrelevant entries since it looks like they have a huge gap in their work experience if they skip over stuff.
However you don't need to go into exhaustive detail about a job you only worked a few months at, or did nothing related to the position you are trying to take.
Admin
Admin
Yes, I was in jail and now I have good "connections" so if I am not offered the role, you may wake up with a severed horse's head in your bed.
Admin
I would never print a resume double-sided for exactly this reason. Single sided, with a staple (or not, depending on any specific instructions provided by the employer).