Never Lie on a Resume–Ever

Posted on May 16, 2012 by johanna

Yahoo’s CEO lied on his resume. He does not have a degree in Computer Science. Well, many senior managers of high tech organizations don’t. So, that should have been okay. There are two questions here:

  1. Why did he feel the need to lie? Did he even realize he was lying?
  2. Why did anyone feel the need for a Bachelor’s degree for the job was necessary? Especially a BS in Computer Science? For a senior manager??

This post is about lying on your resume. I’ll address the need–or not–for a degree in another post.

There is no point in lying on your resume about anything that can be fact-checked. The more influential your potential role in an organization, the more likely your background will be checked. Many organizations fact-check resumes because they can.

If you have a resume (or a LinkedIn page) that has stretched the truth, fix it now. It is not worth the aggravation of discovery. Did you graduate or just attend a particular school? If you did not graduate, make sure you fix your resume so it doesn’t show that you graduated. If you didn’t attend that school, remove it.

If you didn’t get that promotion, change the job title. If you didn’t work in that language, that operating system, that group, change it.

Be truthful on a resume. Show your value. Read Andy Lester’s Resume tactics from the grocery checkout lane or Rich Stone’s Resume and Interview Preparation Tips.

Whatever you do, don’t lie on a resume. It might get you in the door and hired. It will boot you out pretty darn fast. And then where will you be? Notorious and looking for another job. Not a happy place to be. It’s difficult to manage your job search when you are notorious.

Posted in Agile Job Search | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

A Hiring Manager’s Starting Guide to Twitter

Posted on May 10, 2012 by johanna

One of the things that’s so hard about hiring these days is that it’s so dependent on your personal network. LinkedIn is part of your network. Twitter has to be a part of your network.

As part of the updated hiring book, I have a section devoted to networking with Twitter. I thought I’d test it with you. So, here is what I’m telling hiring managers to do about Twitter. This is just a start of what you can do with Twitter, not all you can do with Twitter.

Be Professional on Twitter

Make sure you have a professional Twitter name. SusiesDad doesn’t cut it when you are looking for people. And, having a picture of an adorable child, Susie, as your Twitter picture is not appropriate either.

It’s fine if you want to be SusiesDad when you want to tweet about Susie to your friends and family. But not when you are looking for the best knowledge workers for your organization.

Along with your name, make sure you have a link to your company or your LinkedIn profile or your blog or something else that looks professional. You are representing your organization when you post jobs or links to jobs.

Post Jobs Using Your Main Attractor and Hashtags

When you post your open positions, start with your main attractor. (Don’t know what a main attractor is? You’ll have to read the book, won’t you?)

Now, add a hashtag that represents the job well. #jobopening or #joblisting says you have a job available. If you are in a specialty field such as pharmaceuticals, use #pharma. If you are in finance, use #finance. Are you in healthcare? Use #healthcare. You get the picture. The more specific you are, the more candidates can screen themselves in, if you need them to do so.

Add your city or major metropolitan area, such as #Boston or #NYC for Boston or New York, especially if you are not going to pay for relocation. Are you agile? Use #agile. Looking for developers? Use #programmer or #developer. If you are looking for a tester, use #tester. If you are looking for a mechanical engineer, try #mechanical #engineer. You will probably want to use several hashtags.

For a list of hastags, start with hashtags.org. Start with one hashtag in the search box and see what other people are doing. Now, decide how to describe your job as you compose a tweet.

Decide How Interactive You Want to Be on Twitter

Now comes the hard part. You can spend a ton of time on Twitter. You have to decide if you will post the jobs and ignore Twitter the rest of the day. You can. Or, you can let the Twitterverse peek a little into your organization and post a little every day or every other day. You can post pithy observations. You can take pictures of your organization at work. If you blog, you can let people know when you have written a new blog post.

Every so often there are chats on Twitter you might decide to monitor. If you see a hashtag you like that ends in “chat,” go to tweetchat.com and join in the chat.

One thing you cannot do is avoid Twitter. Not if you want the best technical candidates. Not if you want people who use social media. But you can keep your Twitter use to 15 minutes a day while you are sourcing candidates. That, you can do.

Follow People and Become Followed

Twitter is a social network. That means you follow people and become followed. You don’t have to build your network in the same way as you might build your LinkedIn network. But you do want to have a Twitter presence. You do want to acknowledge people.

As you tweet, people will retweet you, especially if you have interesting positions, or if you say interesting things. That’s why it’s worth your time to follow people and become followed.

Do you want to follow everyone back who follows you? That’s a great question. You will have to answer that one for yourself. I don’t know how to keep up with the people who tweet every 20 minutes. I especially don’t know how to keep up with people who tell me what they eat every day and when they leave for work and when they wake up and when they go to sleep, and when they do whatever. I tend to not follow those people.

There is More You Can Do With Twitter

As with all online tools, you can do more that what I have explained with Twitter. You can schedule and back up your tweets. There are any number of apps that work with smart phones, tablet, and desktop. You will need to decide how you want to use the application.

Start using Twitter as part of your sourcing. You cannot afford to leave Twitter out of your sourcing strategy as a hiring manager.

If you do nothing else, consider following John Sumser, @JohnSumser. He tracks the trends from the employer side and hiring strategy. I retweeted one of his tweets that someone else had retweeted this morning. There are tons of other very interesting recruiting people to follow and learn from. Gotta share that tweet love.

Posted in Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

A Jobseeker’s Starting Guide to Twitter

Posted on May 7, 2012 by johanna

If you are looking for a job, you can’t ignore Twitter. It’s a great source of job leads. You don’t need to have a Twitter id. But, you do need to know how to search Twitter.

Learn to Love Hashtags

Hashtags are your friend. Go to Twitter.com or and in the search box, enter job or jobsearch or job search. You will see the results of search with those keywords.

If you want to see a real-time stream of potential hashtags, go to monittor.com and start with job or job search. You will see what everyone is saying on Twitter. And, you will also see gems, such as when Susan Joyce, also known as @JobHuntOrg tweets about resources to help you with your job search or open jobs.

Hone Your Search Skills

When you search on hashtags, such as #programmer or #security, you might not find anything. If you remove the #, you might find something different.

Say you are a linguist looking for a job. Anywhere. You have experience in Middle Eastern and Asian languages. Here’s how I would search: jobsearch linguist.

That returned one potential job the day I looked, in Farsi. But, you don’t have experience in Farsi. So, it’s time to try another search: linguist job. That search returned 12 Tweets in the last 24 hours, and another 6 Tweets from the previous week.

Now, that’s not a lot of Tweets, but each of those is a lead. Each of those is a person or an organization you can introduce yourself to via the networking I discussed in the rest of this chapter. You look at that person’s tweets, web page, LinkedIn page. You might consider introducing yourself.

If you are looking for a finance job, you search for finance. If you are searching for a nanny job, you search nanny. But what if you have a BA in philosophy and you don’t know what you want to do? Or, what if you could do any number of things?

You have to decide on one thing at a time. You have to start a search. That’s why you have your board with your todo’s. Make your list of todo’s, one sticky for each todo. Now you have your list. Make one of your todo’s your #1 todo. Now you can start. Doesn’t that feel better?

How to Start a Search

What if you’re a new grad or you’re new to the job search market after a long time away or you’re making a big career shift? What then?

Maybe you know where you want to live. If so, find the hashtag for jobs near where you live. That will lead you to people with jobs in your area. Now you can search those jobs and see if you might like any of them.

Maybe you know the industry, such as pharma, or healthcare. You can search on those hashtags, plus your location or those hashtags, plus jobsearch.

Start somewhere and follow the links. You can’t search for a job on Twitter unless you start.

Join the Twitterverse

I did say before you don’t need a Twitter id. But, I do recommend you don’t just watch, you participate.

When you are ready to join the Twitterverse, you can build your reputation and show potential employers you are more than your resume. The Twitter Job Search Guide recommends you tweet your cover letter and/or resume. That might not fit for you. Hey, if that works for you, great! But I do think you can use Twitter to make friends and network in a way that is different from networking in person.

If you are going to search on Twitter—and you should—why not join Twitter? You don’t have to tweet much. You can read more than you write.

Think about being helpful. If you are helpful on Twitter, that might be good for building your reputation.

When you join Twitter, make sure you have professional sounding twitter id, that your profile looks professional, and that you have a picture.

Do You Have a Picture Yet?

Okay, here I go again on the picture. I nudged you about your LinkedIn picture. I’m going to nudge you about the Twitter picture.

People are more apt to follow you and link with you if they see a smiling picture of you. Why? Because this is social media.

Put up a picture and stop complaining. Do it now. Make it your #1 sticky. Stop making excuses. I bet your computer has a camera. I bet your phone has a camera. I bet someone near you has a phone with a camera. You can have a reasonable picture within 24 hours. Take a picture of your smiling face—just your face, please. Post it.

Remember, you can iterate on your picture just as you iterate on your resume. Take the picture and then I won’t nudge you anymore. Now, aren’t you happy you took your picture? I’m nudging someone else.

Follow People Who Have Useful Information and Jobs

If you do nothing else, you should follow Susan Joyce, @JobHuntOrg. Once you start searching, look for people who have jobs that appear to be similar to ones you might want. Those people might be recruiters. They might be hiring managers.

Don’t think you will find the right job your first time searching Twitter. Remember at the beginning of this chapter I talked about location? Searching for a job on Twitter is a lot like looking for an apartment or a house. Networking is putting out the feelers, time and time again. Keep looking.

Keep following the people on Twitter (and on LinkedIn) who might be the right people. You can’t tell if they are the right people unless you follow them.

Follow their tweets. Read their blogs. Look for their information. What’s the worst thing that could happen? You waste a few minutes of your time reading. A good thing that could happen is you find a lead. The best thing that could happen is you find a job.

One caveat: Twitter is changing all the time. That’s why I’ve called this a starting guide to Twitter. You, the jobseeker will have to keep your information current and keep searching.

Posted in Agile Job Search | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Please Help Me Title the Next Version of the Hiring Book

Posted on May 1, 2012 by johanna

I am working on a brand new edition of  what used to be Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People. I will be publishing this revision electronically first on leanpub.

I have streamlined the language. I have added much more cultural fit material. I have added more about auditions. I have much more about networking with LinkedIn and Twitter. I have titled the sidebars. I think I’ve made the book easier to read. I’ve improved the templates. Even with the additions I have reduced the size of the book almost 20%.

For a variety of reasons, I have to change the title. I cannot use the current title and picture currently in the blog sidebar. So I thought I would ask for help.

Here are some current candidate titles:

Hiring the Best Technical People: A Pragmatic Guide

Match Cultural Fit and Attitude: Hire the Best Technical People

It’s All About Culture: Hiring the Best Technical People

Baiting the Geek Trap: Hiring the Best Technical People

Finding and Hiring the Best Technical People: A Practical Guide

Big Geek Hunting: Hiring the Best Technical People

Hiring the Best Technical People: A Pragmatic Approach to Match Cultural Fit

Help! What do you think? Do you have better suggestions? As soon as I determine the title, my designer is ready to design a cover and I can hit publish.

If you are interested in the book, please do sign up at the book’s page on leanpub.

Posted in Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers | Tagged , | 11 Comments

The Power of a Loose Connection

Posted on April 27, 2012 by johanna

If you read this blog or my Manage Your Job Search book, you know I’m a big fan of networking with loose connections. Those referrals are more likely to land you a job or help you find a candidate than asking the same people you already know. That’s why recruiters are so successful. They keep expanding their networks, one loose connection at a time.

Here’s the story of how I landed my longest-lived internal job. I was working as a software developer. The company was a startup and was losing money. I knew I needed to find another job. I wanted to work at Symbolics, a local Boston company. I thought I would be developing artificial intelligence “stuff.” I knew it was a cool place to work.

So I asked a friend, David, to ask his friend, Michael, to help me get in the door. David was also a developer. But Michael was a sales guy. I didn’t know Michael and he didn’t know me. But David could vouch for me—and he did.

Symbolics wasn’t hiring too many people at the time. They weren’t using recruiters. And, because I didn’t know LISP, I couldn’t get a job as a developer. But they were hiring testers. So I got a job as a tester.

It was great because I fit the culture. They taught me LISP. Oh sure, my first few test programs looked like either assembly language or Fortran translated to LISP, because that’s how I thought. I got over it. I asked for feedback and received it. I didn’t write enough code to become a master LISP developer, but I could certainly read it (even now) and follow the code.

Symbolics took a chance on me because of the power of a loose connection. I was qualified to do the job. More than that, I fit the culture. That cultural fit is what sold my boss on me.

I stayed there for five years, eventually managing projects, programs, and the testers and second line support. I was a successful hire. All because of a loose connection and a referral.

If you are hiring, stop with the laundry list and over-constrained job descriptions. Cultural fit is what is key. You can train people in specific tools. (Yes, I’m working on a new version of the hiring book and I say even more there.)

If you are looking for a job, you’ll have to get the interview to convince hiring managers that you can do the job. But first, you need the referral, and that’s where your loose connection comes in. Those loose connections are key.

Posted in Agile Job Search | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Announcing a New Book: Manage Your Job Search

Posted on April 23, 2012 by johanna

I have released a beta book, Manage Your Job Search: Reduce Your Overwhelm, Focus Your Search, and Get Your Next Job!

While I was writing and updating Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, second edition, I realized that my advice wasn’t precisely opposite for people who were searching for jobs. It’s too easy to become lost in the find-your-job project.

For those of you who are kanban and agile-knowledgeable, I suggest using personal kanban and one-week iterations to manage your job search project. For those of you who didn’t understand what I said, don’t worry. I explain how to chunk your job search into bite-size chunks, so you don’t feel as if you are swinging from tree to tree, worrying where the next darn banana is.

I offer significant networking tips, job search tips and traps, specific tips for those who are new to the job market, and those who are over 50. And, a chapter of traps for all, because we all face job search traps.

You’ll notice the book does not have a nice cover. That’s because it’s a beta book. I don’t even know if I have the final title. I have not gone through copyediting. (Yikes!) There are pieces missing. It’s a beta book. That’s why you can only buy it on leanpub.

Until I know I have all the kinks out, it will only be available on leanpub, in epub, mobi, and pdf formats. So you can read it now in all electronic readers. Once I know I have the correct title, and that the contents are right, I’ll have it copyedited. I’ll release it to Amazon and the other stores, and to hardcopy.

I’m experimenting with lean publishing. It’s pushing all my perfection rules. But it’s a beta book. So I’m giving myself permission to make mistakes in order to give you value. I hope it’s worth it. Please do provide me feedback.

If you are looking for a job, please buy your own copy of Manage Your Job Search: Reduce Your Overwhelm, Focus Your Search, and Get Your Next Job! and let me know.

Posted in Agile Job Search | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Avoid Mind Reading

Posted on March 30, 2012 by johanna

Long ago, when I was single, one of my managers refused to give me new development work because I was dating a guy who lived out of the state. “You’ll go marry him and then where will I be?” he asked. “I’ll be down a developer.”

“If you don’t give me good work to do, you’ll be down a developer,” I warned him. “I’ll be looking for another job.”

“You wouldn’t do that to me,” he said, shocked.

“Sure I would. Why wouldn’t I? I’m not married to this guy. We are just dating,” I replied.

I didn’t marry that other guy. I married Mark, who was—and still is—local. I did look for a new job, because I wasn’t working on the interesting work. I was working on the old boring maintenance stuff, not the new exciting work.

You see hiring managers making decisions like this all the time. Do they try to hold testers in test jobs, especially now that agile testers have more automation capability and could become developers more easily? Or do they try to keep technical support staff in tech support when they could move into development—or the other way around?

It’s a mind reading problem. If you are a hiring manager, don’t assume you can read the mind of a candidate. You can ask behavior-description questions. You can ask elimination questions. You can even ask for a commitment time, “I need you to commit to this position for x months.” But, if you as a company can’t commit to a position for that length of time, it’s amoral to ask that of a candidate.

Especially when you hire from within, take the time to perform a job analysis on the open position. Do write a job description. Develop your behavior-description questions. Know what your elimination factors are. You might surprise yourself. What eliminates one candidate from the position might not be what you are worried about at all.

My old boss? He did replace me, but as he said, the humor quotient decreased in the department. And, so did the maintenance. The customers noticed and were unhappy. They had to hire a couple of people to replace me. I had taken years of solution-space domain expertise with me. It’s difficult to replace that with one person. With two people, they could pair and learn from each other.

Ask, don’t assume, you know what’s going on in a candidate’s mind. It’s too expensive to assume you know what the other person thinks. Just because you work with that person daily does not mean you have clairvoyance. Let’s leave the mind-reading to the professionals, ok?

Posted in hiring strategy | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Answer Questions, Yes. Housekeys? No

Posted on March 22, 2012 by johanna

There’s an article in the Huffington Post about asking candidates to turn over their Facebook login credentials, so the interviewers can see their “private” pages.

If you provide your login credentials, your private Facebook pages are no longer private, are they?

I have a difficult time understanding why an interviewer wants this information. Is the interviewer’s interviewing skills so insufficient they need to investigate you the backdoor way?

Is the interviewer looking for something nefarious? Or sophomoric?

Part of me is wondering about anyone’s expectation of privacy on the internet. If our banks can’t keep our passwords and accounts safe, why should we believe that our Facebook pages should be safe? But that’s about hacking into the banks, not handing over passwords. I don’t provide my potential employer my bank information. That’s only for actual employers

Employers, remember that an interview goes both ways. Do you realize you are saying to candidates, “Abandon all hope of privacy, ye who enter here”? What will happen after people start to work here?

I might look for cameras in the bathrooms. This feels sleazy to me. And wrong.

Employers, there is plenty of information that is not behind a locked door that you can obtain about a candidate. Ask good behavior-description questions. Learn how to create auditions and use them. Don’t be lazy just because it’s an employer’s market.

At some point, the economy will pick up. You might even be looking for a job. These people will remember you, and it won’t be fondly.

Posted in interview | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Many Bad Hiring Practices and Alternatives

Posted on March 21, 2012 by johanna

When I teach interviewing, I teach these approaches to interviewing:

  1. Let the behavior-description questions sell the candidate on the company. Don’t try to “sell” the candidate on the company or the people. It sounds like a used car salesperson or a bad blind date. It leaves a bad taste in the candidate’s mouth. (Yes, those are two different links.)
  2. Organize the interviews with a matrix, so that everyone knows who is asking which questions.
  3. Ask questions that relate to the job. Forget the riddles and puzzles that have nothing to do with the job.
  4. Do add auditions to the question mix, so you can see a candidate at work. I like 10-15 minute auditions as a first step.

A friend sent me this hysterical article yesterday, A Most Wonderful Opportunity, Multiple Frustrations, and More. I did not roll on the floor, but I did laugh out loud. I loved the Mt Fuji answer. If I could have answered that question with a straight face, that’s how I would have loved to answer it. Of course, I would have just rolled my eyes so much, I don’t think I could have.

Posted in interview | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

How to Show Agile Behaviors on a Resume, Starting with Collaboration

Posted on February 28, 2012 by johanna

Back at OOP 2012, I gave a talk called “Six Behaviors to Consider When Hiring for an Agile Team.” These are all team-based, interpersonal skills that any team needs, but are critical on an agile team: collaboration; how to stop when something is good enough–especially when the customer says so; how to ask for help, those kinds of behaviors. My good friend and colleague, Udo Pracht, asked the million dollar question, “How do we show these behaviors on a resume?”

Good question, Udo. And, too often, these behaviors can appear weak to people who don’t understand about agile teams. “Collaborated on a team” does not appear like a strength on a resume, does it? It flunks Rich’s Resume and Interview Preparation Tips.

If you transform it so it shows value to the team and the organization, now maybe you can use it. Let’s start with collaboration. Did you help the team increase it’s throughput? Can you say this? Only if you measured before and after.

Led our team to 20% increase in throughput through use of swarming around features and other high-collaboration approaches in our agile approaches.

Ok, so maybe you didn’t lead the team. I hate the word “enable” on a resume, but that’s me. Maybe you can think of a better word.

Enabled our team to increase its throughput by 20% through use of swarming around features and other high-collaboration approaches, such as pairing in our agile approaches to our projects.

This is a sentence that should leap out at anyone who reads the resume. 20% is a huge, gigantic number. You’d better be ready to defend that number. Even if it was 10%, that’s a big number.

If you have worked on an agile team, you have burnup charts or cumulative flow diagrams, or cycle time numbers, so you have the data. No problem. (See, this is why I don’t use burndown charts; burndown doesn’t provide you this kind of data.) If you kept the data on paper, you might have to go digging for it. That’s ok. If you kept the data electronically, it should be easy to find. (Those famous last words, should be.) If you have not kept the data up until now, start keeping the data. It will be interesting to see if your collaboration is working.

And, if the collaboration is not working, you can address that in a retrospective, so you can attempt to improve this job while you look for another one, right? In either case, you win.

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