Recently, Peg Bogema and I gave a presentation to the Ann Arbor Association of Women in Computing. The topic: Insider Tips on Resume Writing, Interviewing and More. The bad news is that we told attendees that our presentation would only last an hour at most. The good news is that most everyone was still there, taking notes, after more than 2 hours of stimulating discussion.

Feedback from the presentation has been very good, and we’ve had the opportunity to help several candidates implement some of the resume ideas that were discussed. Because of the positive response, we will likely be repeating this event. Stay tuned for where and when!

Okay, maybe I am overselling our upcoming presentation a little bit.

Brian Skory (Technical Staffing Specialist) and I (VP Operations) bump into the same issues over and over again when we are working with candidates for job and contract openings.

They fall into the following classes:

Class #1: Resume needs work. It’s too long, too short, not organized well, lacking in details, etc.

Class #2: Candidates want to pump us for ideas about how to find opportunities.

Class #3: Candidates make blunders in interviews because they aren’t well prepared, which probably comes from a lack of familiarity with current interviewing styles and conventions.

In truth, Brian and I answer the same questions, give the same advice, pull our hair out over the same issues pretty regularly.

So we decided to create a presentation that addresses a lot of the most common issues and questions.

Now what, you would rightly ask, are our bona fides?

Brian has been working directly with our clients and our candidates for several years. He gets feedback about why clients don’t like candidate resumes. He gets feedback about why clients are passing on candidates. And he fields a lot of candidate questions. He is a wealth of practical knowledge that comes from a wide variety of managers.

I have an interesting mix of experience. I am often a hiring manager myself, because I am read resumes and interview candidates for the software development projects that we are awarded as outsourced contracts. In addition, I still process the enormous influx of resumes we receive in response to job and contract postings when our regular recruiter, Ursula Kellman, is on vacation. Like I’m doing this week. When you read 50 resumes in a day, day in and day out, you start to develop a very good sense of what communicates and what does not.

So Brian and I have a nice mix of experience to give some very practical advice. But only for the high-tech workers (Web, Software, Embedded Systems, Network Engineers, Technical Managers, etc.). Accountants and teachers are not going to find our advice very useful. By the same token, listening to generalists is not very helpful to high-tech workers!

The presentation will be held on March 24th from 6:00 to 9:00 PM at Ann Arbor Spark. The registration page can be found on the Ann Arbor Chapter of the Association for Women in Computing’s Event Calendar.

For more than a year, my co-worker Brian Skory has been sending out a monthly eNewsletter that contains insights and tips on how to get hired in the current environment. Some of his advice is tailored to specific situations and some is more general, but it’s all good information.

The publication is called Getting Hired: Insider Secrets from the Trenches and with over a year’s worth of issues, there is a lot of content that many job seekers would find useful. So, I’ve taken his work and implemented it on its own page at http://stoutsystems.com/getting-hired/.

Now these posts will show up in our blog’s RSS Feed and have their very own place on stoutsystems.com. And we’re still sending Getting Hired as an eNewsletter. You can subscribe by sending us an email.

We recently went through a bit of a firedrill checking business references for a candidate.

While the running-around-tearing-my-hair-out experience is still fresh, I thought I would jot down a few things that any job seeker should know about handling business references.

Protect your Business References

I’ve talked with many job seekers who refuse to give out any information about their business references until the very late stages of interviewing. They cite experiences with unscrupulous head hunters who contacted their business references to try to entice them away from their current jobs. Not nice.

When dealing directly with a prospective employer, you can feel comfortable giving out your business reference information. They aren’t head hunters, so you can be 99% certain that they won’t abuse them.

When dealing with recruiters and agencies, you are entitled to understand their policy on business references. Ours is simple: we don’t contact anyone’s business references without express permission. Period.

Your business references will be grateful (and much more willing) if they are not bombarded with phone calls that start out, “YOUR NAME HERE gave me your name and phone number.”

Keep tabs on your Business References

I find it incredibly frustrating when a job seeker gives me a business reference with bad contact info. People change their jobs, their cell phone numbers and their email addresses like I change my haircut.

What I find even more frustrating is when I tell a job seeker that the phone number or email address they gave me is bad, and the response is, “Here, try this one.” What? No, no, no, no, no. YOU try that one!

When you are going through the interviewing process, you can do double duty by (a) calling or emailing your business references and warning them that they are likely to hear from prospective employers, (b) asking your business references to confirm that the phone number and email address you have for them are still the best ones to use.

This one should be obvious…

Should you include this manager or that manager on your business reference list? What are the criteria? This one should be obvious.

First, can the person speak freely? Some companies have a policy against providing business references. If a business reference is only capable of giving employment verification, it’s not much of a business reference at all.

Second, will the person give you a positive reference? You should ask this before you include anyone on your business reference list.

I know, I know… You think this is obvious. But I myself have been used as a business reference by people who I haven’t worked with for ten years or more. Worse yet, I’ve been used as a business reference by people who I cannot recommend. I will candidly tell anyone who asks whether or not I’ll give them a good reference. I think all job seekers should be smart enough to ask!

Online scammers have come up with yet another way to take advantage of unsuspecting victims, this time by capitalizing on the large number of job seekers currently in the market place. The latest con is to pose as a recruiter and put up a fake job posting or even a fictitious job board. Job seekers then respond to a posting (or are approached by a “recruiter”) whereby the scammer requests personal information such as “a social security number to get you set up with a profile in our system” or “bank account information so we can begin a preliminary credit check.”

Let me be clear about this, in case there is any doubt – the initial recruitment process does NOT require social security numbers, bank account information, personal taxes, or anything else out of the ordinary. Even when setting up an online profile with a recruitment firm or a corporate job board, the most you will be asked for at that stage of the process is exactly what is on your resume but in an expanded form (contact info, skills, accomplishments, work history, references, and such). Yes, at some point in the hiring process you will need to provide someone with information of a more personal nature, but at that point there will be no doubt as to the identity of the person with whom you are dealing (more than likely this will be HR or the hiring manager at the job site).

Here are a couple of safeguards to prevent identity theft (or worse) when responding to a recruiter or a job posting.

1. As stated above, be suspicious if you are asked for a social security number, bank information or tax information – for any reason.

2. When approached by a recruiter with whom you’re not familiar, ask the recruiter for detailed contact info. Then do an Internet search to establish whether or not the recruiter can be verified. Make sure everything looks good, and then call back the main business number and ask for that individual.

3. Con artists of this type more than likely are not going to spend the dollars it costs to post on a DICE, Monster, or CareerBuilder type site - they will tend to post mostly on the free boards.

There are plenty of good recruiters, job boards and posting sites out there, and armed with a grain of common sense and an awareness of the information above, there is no reason why a job seeker shouldn’t have a successful job search experience when utilizing these useful tools.

A list of some reported scams can be found at consumerfraudreporting.com.