How to Get the Job - Part 1

How to Get the Job - Part 1

When I was ATL’s director of engineering, I hired a lot of people. The hiring process was pretty intense. We often had as many as 25 qualified candidates for one position. During that time, I learned three things about the process of hiring people. I share them with you here, so that you can get the most out of your resumé, portfolio, and references, all of which are fundamental to the hiring process.

Here’s what I learned

1.     It is virtually impossible to learn anything useful about the candidate from a resume.

2.     Almost all the information needed to make a good hiring decision can be made by examining the content and preparation of a candidate’s design/engineering portfolio.

3.     Contacting a candidate’s references is an essential validation step for the person doing the hiring.

Let’s start with a few guiding principles about careers

  • Getting the job you want should be your goal. This is different than getting a job.

  • Your career path can be designed. You can and should control the direction it takes. You are going to dedicate the majority of your life to your career, so don’t let it simply become what it becomes. Instead guide it to become what you want it to become. If you haven’t already started, start designing your career now.

  • Developing your career is a process that will take time. Some recent graduates only want their dream job, and are reluctant to take something else right after college. They fail to see that they are most likely unqualified for that dream job right out of college. If they were qualified for the dream job at graduation, they should consider dreaming bigger.

  • Every day provides opportunities to step toward your dream job. It is helpful to ask “What have I done today, to step closer to my dream job?”. If you ask this every day, you will make amazing progress. Sure, there will be days when you don’t do anything to get closer to the dream job, but if you ask yourself the question every day, it’s unlikely that you’ll have too many of those in a row.

The resume (and why it’s not very useful)

Before we get too far in this discussion, let’s acknowledge that our workplace culture requires you to have a resume. You need to respect that and create a resume. But make your resume useful. Design your resume so that it accomplishes what it needs to, which is to help the hiring person understand more about who you are and why they should hire you. Think carefully about how to do that so that they can learn what they need to in about 2-3 minutes.

Now let’s talk about why a typical resume is not useful (and a little further below, how you can make yours useful). Imagine typical resume: It has your name and contact information. It has an objective statement, some information about your education and GPA. A few bullet points about where you have worked, with possibly some professional accomplishments (like awards). There is a section listing your skills; Solidworks, Matlab, Finite Element Analysis, Adobe Illustrator, Mill and Lathe and so on. And if you’re really courageous the resume finishes off with a few of your hobbies.

Now, put yourself in the shoes of the person reading your resume, (remember, yours is being read at the same time that many others are being read). What will the person reading your resume think? What will they feel? What will they do with the information you provided?

I’ll tell you what I thought when I reviewed resumes during the hiring process at ATL.

Name and contact information: This is important, but not useful. I’m not making any decision based on that information.

Objective: Hmmm, it’s good to be direct and clear. But I posted a job opening and you applied. I’m pretty sure I know what your objective is. This too, never really proved useful, except to eliminate candidates whose objectives did not match mine. Notice what happened here – I used the objective to eliminate, not to differentiate.

Education and GPA: Important, but again not useful. I was hiring engineers… so anyone submitting a resume without an engineering background was eliminated. The reality is that everyone applying for my job openings had an engineering background, so this was not a distinguishing factor. How about the GPA? Sure someone with an unusually low GPA would be removed. But for the most part everyone had GPAs ranging from 3.2ish to 4.0. In my way of thinking, everyone in this GPA range had equal likelihood of succeeding in the company. So GPA was also not much of a distinguisher.

List of Skills: Because of the fact that college graduates matriculate from accredited universities, they emerge with similar skills (at least in terms of how skills show up as bullet points in a resume). You might be surprised at how similar skill lists look on resumes. So, if prepared poorly, the list of skills really wasn’t useful in knowing who should be hired and who should be eliminated.

Let’s pause here and reflect on the content above; at least half of the real estate in a resume is dedicated to the information above and basically none of it helps the person making the hiring decision. So when I made hiring decisions, how did I use resumes to help me? I didn’t totally realize it at the time, but when I only used resumes to make decisions, I struggled significantly to distinguish between candidates. I used what I could from a resume, which included the following information:

Work Experience and Professional Accomplishments (Awards): This is important and useful. If someone had had an internship or a related job, or if that person won an award related to the job, the candidate would move up in the ranking. Many students just graduating often haven’t planned well enough to make this part of their resume appealing. They don’t have experience or professional accomplishment yet. If that is your situation, that’s not a show-stopper. It just means you need to start building up that part of your story before you will land your dream job.

Hobbies: Not very important, but it can be useful. I often considered the candidate’s list of hobbies. Why? It was truly one of the only differentiating elements of a resume. I used this to try to understand: “Who is this person? What are they all about?”

While you prepare/revise your resume, consider the amount of resume real estate dedicated to the items above. Work under the principle that things that are important and useful should take the most real estate.

How one interview changed my life

Ok, that is dramatic, but it might be true. I brought in a young engineer named Jaremy Flake to interview. He was one of many people who looked great on the resume. If you haven’t gotten the point yet, get it now, virtually everyone looks great on a resume. I generally ended up interviewing many, many people because the resume just wasn’t much help. Anyway, when Jaremy came in for an interview he brought a portfolio.

I was literally blown away. 

Seeing his portfolio was like finally taking a blind fold off. I knew so much about him so quickly. His portfolio said infinitely more about him than his resume. From that moment forward, I have had great, great respect for portfolios and the role they can play in the hiring process. Notice that Jaremy was not asked to bring a portfolio. In fact, I knew nothing about portfolios at that point in my career; had someone mentioned portfolios to me, I probably would have been just as skeptical as people are when I mention portfolios to them. The point here is that Jaremy got the job. He was and still is one of the best engineers I’ve ever hired. It’s not that having a portfolio made him the best. It’s that having an excellent portfolio made it very obvious to me see that Jaremy was the best candidate. 

Many years after that experience with Jaremy, I was interviewing engineering students for a prestigious fellowship, and someone brought in a portfolio without me asking for it. Intrigued, I asked “I’m curious to know why you decided to bring a portfolio to this interview.” His response was golden, and one that all of us should remember: 

Without a portfolio, how else are you going to know I can do the things I say I can do? 

Think about it. You can tell me you can make a Solidworks rendering, or you can show me. You can tell me you know how to use a mill or you can show me a picture of something you milled. Telling me says almost nothing, while showing me says almost everything.

Your references will be called

Some people in their resumes and portfolios tell a story that is not a true representation of their work or of themselves. They have in-a-way oversold who they are and what they can do. Honesty always wins in the long run. Remember that. Assume that your interviewer will contact each of your references. When I did this I was looking for validation. Validation that what was presented in the resume and portfolio was true, and to find out if the way the candidate views himself is the same as others view him.

Provide them even if not asked for. Contact your references in advance and ask them if they will be a sort of standing reference that you can keep in your resume. Tell them why you have asked them; “I believe you would be an excellent reference because you know my work ethic and know my creativity skills well”. Choose only people who have known you for a least a year. Don’t choose people who will give a biased opinion about you, like your aunt, or a classmate. Choose references who can say something meaningful and credibly about your design and engineering work.

Why are we talking about this

First of all, if you have made it this far in the article, way-to-go! You have chosen the easier way. I have given you the insiders view to the how the resume, portfolio, and references – all things you can build now – play into the hiring process. Your job now is to do something about this. What should you do? Start building all three of these now. Look back at projects you already did and collect or take proper photos (frame the subject well, clear out background garbage, have good lighting), plan now to look for class items that can become portfolio items as you move through each semester. Plan now to do a personal project soon. Start designing your career and adding things to your portfolio that help evolve your career.

More

My favorite podcast on this topic.

 


Keep reading, Part 2 How to Get the Jobs - Tips

How to Get the Job - Part 2: Tips

How to Get the Job - Part 2: Tips

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