The developer resume is broken. It's dense. It's long. It's static.
If I had only 3 minutes to scan a developer's resume before giving an interview (which is almost always the case, sadly!), I probably wouldn't come away with a very accurate picture of who that person was or what he knows. I'd think "Spring...hmmm, I wonder if he's used Spring before?"...and then I'd skim all 6 pages looking for the word "Spring" like I'm in grade school doing a word search, and then I'd get the end, not see it, and my 3 minutes would be up. Time to interview!
If I had to look through a stack of 10 resumes and pick 3 to interview, forget about it! I'd have no idea if I found the best.
We're developers, we can do better. What I want from a resume is the same thing I want from a good dashboard:
- Different views of key information.
- The ability to see things at a high-level and drill in on things I'm interested in.
- Search!
Or more specifically, I want to quickly answer these questions:
- What does their timeline look like? Where have they been and for how long?
- What skills do they have? Have they used Hibernate on 1 project, or 10?
- What do they do outside of work? Do they have side projects? Do they ever contribute to open source? Do they seem like they enjoy what they do?
And the same goes for when I'm the one looking for a job. I want my resume to convey my skills and experience quickly, concisely, efficiently. I don't want to be just one of the masses - I want to stand out.
So this is what I set out to build: a better CV for developers. You can give it a try for free. It's out there at codersCV. It's not Monster, just a way to publish and manage your portfolio online. Plain and simple. Throw a link to it from your personal web site or LinkedIn. That's the idea at least.
Anyway, this is just one solution. I'd love to know what you think. Do you think the developer resume is broken? What do you see the problems are? How would you fix it?
