IT Certification FAQ

A: A headhunter is all about volume, and not about trying to figure you out. One trick that might help is to realize how they go about matching canidates to jobs.

Recruiter step 1
 Enter in all the industry buzz words that the job requires like
   Windows NT, Windows 2000, Cisco Router,
   CCNA, MSCE, SCSI, blah blah blah
Step 2
Do a search through my pool of resumes for matches on those keywords.

A point of importance here, recruiters do not actually understand what they are reading many times, it isnt actually required for what they do. What is importaint to note is that they are looking for keywords.

You being a networking professional know that you cant have a CCNP without already having your CCNA, so you may list your CCNP and not your CCNA. If you encounter a recruiter who doesn't know this, you may miss a potential hit on a job that requires a CCNA. I had a recruiter who clued me into all this a few years back.

Another piece of advice, make sure that your resume will fit on a single page, and is readable even when faxed. some recruiters will allow you to give them a two or three page resume, and they accept it, but when they send it over to be evaluated, I know that on a regular basis, they only send the first page, and then ask the customer (hiring company) if they want to see more.

Supply the recruiter with tools to make his job easier. I created a 1 page resume that the recruiter could sell me with, I then created 2 additional pages of keywords, buzzwords, and search phrases that shold be used to create hits on my resume. Made the job for the recruiter easy and I got matched up to a better set of possible jobs.

Also, run the freaking spell check, then proof read it afterwards to make sure it didnt change words or acronym. Freind of mine had "Fibre Channel" on his resume, and spell check changed it to "Fiber Channel" and he lost the interview on that one item alone. In all fairness the job was to act as a Fibre Channel test engineer.

Don't bother spell checking this post, I am not looking for a job, and I
dont care if I miss-spelled anything on a usenet post :)

Chris Lionetti

A+, Net+, Server+, Security+, MCP, MCSE, MCT, HP-STAR, BCFP, SNIA-L1, SNIA-L2, SNIA-L3, CIW

p.s. When I get bored at work, I go out and nail a new cert. Some of them are rather eclectic storage area networking certs.

source: alt.certification.cisco
added: June 2003

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