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.