ThoughtFactory.CreateThought() A random collection of thoughts from an easily bored developer

The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth

There's no denying that recruiters deliver a useful service to the IT consulting industry; without them we'd never be able to hire personnel with more than 2 or 3 degrees of separation from our current employees. However, the extended reach comes at a cost. The recruiters themselves are not IT consultants, and they also have limited time. This means that they need a way of placing candidates in positions that does not involve deep knowledge of the domain or a vast amount of time. A really effective way of doing this is through tagging.

The problem with tags, though, is that you can game the results if you know what people are searching for. The IT job market realised long ago that common industry buzz words and "hot technologies" form a large portion of the obvious tags that recruiters will be searching for. Since then candidates have been peppering their resumes with them in order to catch the eye of recruiters.

The good news is that job seekers usually won't put in keywords that have nothing to do with their technology space, meaning that you still get .Net developers sent through for .Net jobs and Java developers interviewing for Java jobs. The bad news is that a lot of candidates are rather liberal in lacing their resumes with terms that they think the employer will be looking for rather than terms that actually reflect their experience and understanding. They also have a tendency to apply this focus on keywords to the other parts of the interview process. What they don't realise is that no one involved in the actual hiring process cares about buzz words, so they are going to assume that you have experience with whatever you mention and treat you as such.

This is especially true at technical interviews. If you've indicated that you know all about XP, TDD, DDD, ORM and a bunch of other cool acronyms then you should expect to be asked questions about them. Questions like this usually carry much more weight, as you have set an expectation. To falter here indicates that you have either been dishonest or just don’t know what you’re talking about.

For example, if the interviewer asks you about a technology you know nothing about and you haven’t given them any reason to think that you know something about it then it's perfectly acceptable to say “I don’t know”. If, however, you indicated that you knew of the technology in question then not giving a decent answer looks really bad.

It's not uncommon for a potential employee to mention a technology that they know nothing about just because they might think that the interviewer wants to hear them say it. Pro tip: If a company wants you to mention random technologies you know nothing about just so they can tick it off on a list then that's probably not a company any decent consultant would want to work for. Any company worth their salt should be looking to assess your current abilities and your potential to grow, not trying to check off a list of buzz words to see if you are “compliant” with their “technology stack”.

So please, next time you submit a resume or go for an interview just try and focus on your actual experience and aspirations rather than getting hung up on what you think the company expects you to mention. Remember that there’s a good chance the person interviewing you either does a similar job to the one you’re applying for or has done in the past, so they’re going to be able to call you out if you don’t know what you’re talking about.