Higher, higher, HIRE!

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Firstly a disclaimer. This text might give the impression that I feel some kind of sympathy for Recruitment Consultants/Agencies. I don't. Not at all. In my eyes (which is therefore obviously fact) they rate alongside estate agents and insurance salesmen. And the director of my local railway company.

Now that's out of that way, I can safely talk about the process of hiring someone, and the role of CVs.

The company where I work is currently looking to hire a person or two. A business analyst and a developer, or ideally someone who can wear both hats. This means we've been sent loads of CVs from our chosen recruitment agency. After initial filtering by the boss, the team gets to look at one that he thinks are worthy of further investigation. (I think we're somewhat different to most organisations in that the decision to hire or not is largely a team one)

The upshot of this is that we've all been looking at CVs at work, and I've some thoughts on the matter....

I'm not sure how much the recruitment bods interfere with them, but some CVs are pretty rubbish. Whilst the great unwashed and a fair few student types will bemoan the fact that we take grammar, spelling and punctuation seriously, it's fair to say that we wouldn't want to hire a programmer who's not that great at stringing a bunch of sentences together.

Secondly, it becomes obvious that once you've added the pre-requisite bunch of acronyms and standard "quick learner, work well with others, customer focused.." bits, there's often very little to distinguish one person's CV from another. Again, this may be down to filtering by the recruitment bods, but in our case the person underneath the technology is actually more important and it's very hard to gauge that from a bland-o-vision CV.

I think I'd like to see a CV that says something along the lines of...

"I'm more than capable in a couple of development languages, switched on enough to pick up what I don't know, write decent code comments, and manage to be geeky enough to write code in my spare time without being a social outcast."

So if you are looking for work as a developer or business analyst in a small London based software company, get in touch. (And, a word to the wise; make sure your Facebook page doesn't have anything on it you wouldn't want us lot looking at before deciding if you warrant an interview or not!)

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