IT Resumes

Clean Up Your IT Resume ASAP!

If you’re trying to attract IT recruiting firms and IT staffing agencies with your resume, you’re probably busy trying to stuff it with your experience, technical skills, and achievements.  These are definitely important—if you can’t show the right array of skills, IT recruiters and IT staffing companies won’t even give you a cursory phone call.  However, you could be shooting yourself in the foot if your resume layout is messy and inconsistent.

Why do IT recruiting companies and IT staffing firms care if your resume is formatted nicely? While managers want to see that you have the relevant skills and experience to do IT jobs they’re hiring for, it also needs to be obvious.  If your resume is confusing or difficult to read, technical recruiters and IT recruiting agencies won’t want to give it to a busy hiring manager.  Instead, they’ll pick a resume that’s much easier to read.  This is because the manager will find it easier to picture hiring this person!  So don’t let your resume’s format be what holds you back—clean it up today!

Are You Wasting Space on Your IT Resume?

Does your IT resume say that you’re a fast learner, a great team player, or that you have an exemplary work ethic?  You may think you’re attracting IT recruiters and IT staffing firms, but you’re really just wasting space on your resume. Why?

Particularly when it comes to attracting IT recruiting agencies and IT staffing companies, you want to make sure everything you list on your resume is strong evidence of your value as an employee.  When you list soft skills or call yourself something subjective like “creative” or a “perfectionist”, you’re not giving concrete evidence of your candidacy.  You’re just listing how you perceive yourself, which is pretty irrelevant to hiring managers and technical recruiters trying to fill IT jobs. Focus on listing your technical skills and your accomplishments.  These are what IT recruiting firms and IT staffing agencies love to see.  You can elaborate on more subjective traits once you get your new IT recruiting companies on the phone!

 

How To List Gaps for Personal Reasons on Your IT Resumes

If the resume you give to IT staffing firms and IT recruiters has gaps between IT jobs for time you’ve taken with your family, you need to be careful how you document it.  Some IT professionals are given poor advice on how to list gaps in time and they wind up with resumes that technical recruiters and IT recruiting companies are not interested in.  How can you avoid turning off hiring managers and IT recruiting firms? Try to list this gap as briefly and professionally as possible.  Hiring managers and IT staffing agencies don’t want to see personal details. The best way to describe a gap is with brief, standardized professional phrasing.  For instance, giving the dates of your absence and calling it a ‘leave of absence’ is professional but still makes it clear you were not unemployed and unable to find work during a gap in time.  Some people will go overboard and try to list skills or responsibilities they took on during this time.  Don’t do this—you didn’t have a boss that you were accountable to, so these things can’t really be measured.  It also can come across as desperate to potential employers. If you’ve tried listing the gap a few ways, but are still unsatisfied with your ideas, ask the IT staffing companies you’re working with and trust to help you do it.  They will appreciate your effort to make your resume as appealing as possible to potential employers.

Get Your IT Recruiters to Submit You for More IT Jobs

IT recruiters and IT staffing firms read a lot of resumes.  The best candidates, the ones that technical recruiters and IT recruiting companies love to submit to IT jobs, are the IT professionals with excellent skills and experience, as well as clean, thorough, polished resumes.  While some IT staffing companies will take the time to help candidates clean up their resumes, it makes you all the more attractive as a candidate if your resume is good as is.

Here’s one way to clean up your resume that will make a big difference: Go through your resume and take out superlatives that you use to talk about yourself.  Things like “hard worker,” or “fast learner” aren’t actually useful at all to your IT recruiting firms.  Now go back and change those statements into illustrations of what you’ve achieved at your previous job.  Think in verbs, not in nouns.  Phrases that start with words like “managed,” or  “launched,” are what IT staffing agencies want your resume filled with.