Hands-down, the most fascinating post I read about HR this month wasn’t from an HR blog at all — it was from a blog for Java developers. It serves up some extremely valuable information about the relationship between programmers and tech recruiters. The title of this must-read is “How to Make HR Dump a Programmer’s Resume,” and it was written by Esther Schindler of JavaWorld. The post made a huge splash on the Net… it’s been reposted in countless forums because it’s just so on-the-nose. Schindler followed up a few days later with the other side of the coin: “What HR Professionals Look For in a Programmer's Resume.” The two pieces together create a whole, and are not-to-be-missed. In the first article, “How to Make HR Dump a Programmer’s Resume,” Schindler discusses the difference in audience between an HR professional and a technical manager. Most people are capable of slanting the document to cater to one or the other, but oftentimes, applicants don’t know who is reading the resume first. It's a real problem for techies, whose resumes are often markedly different from those of other types of applicants. Some other topics covered to make sure programmers don't get their resumes dumped are:

• Having the right buzzwords, optimized for “literal” screening software
• Using business language instead of technical jargon
• Knowing when to leave out irrelevant or obsolete skills
• Using the “in vogue” term for a particular job
• Showing discipline in editing the resume for length (IT people are notorious for having loooooong resumes)

After the popularity of the first post, Schindler was determined to show her programming colleagues the DOs as well as the DO NOT DOs, so she penned “What HR Professionals Look For in a Programmer's Resume.” The HR people she talked to said that the three things most often overlooked by programmers in their self-marketing are 1) specific achievements, 2) metrics, and 3) an introductory summary. This introductory summary idea is important: a lot of software people jump straight into a list of technologies or achievements without giving the reader a context of what kind of person they’re dealing with. Also covered:

• Don’t describe the organization; describe what you did there
• Include a self-rating of Beginner, Intermediate, and Expert for each technology
• Making the world a better place: covering work on open-source endeavors
• The worth of technology certifications to HR

I recommend you read these articles yourself if you are at all involved in recruiting tech personnel. All of this reminds me of a brilliant cartoon (pictured, in part, at the top of this post) by Steve Hanov, a software developer who also creates tech-related cartoons. It’s a little harsh on HR — so you’ve been warned going in — but it’s quite funny in its description of how an HR professional and a programmer will read the same resume completely differently. Instead of taking the digs in the cartoon badly, I choose to take them as a sincere comment from a techie as to what is really important to them — which is truly worth knowing. I remain confident that organizations with open communication and a commitment to great technical recruiting can value the input of both programmers and HR when it comes to building the software team. What is key for you in noticing a programmer resume?