My resume has been included for your review…

Vishnu NamVar
5 min readJul 10, 2020

CV, the first step

This article is about my personal experience of living with a CV since I prepared my first CV back in 1999 and the multiple iterations it went through and how the trend was changing in front of my eyes for the last two decades.

Hope some of the points below will help others..getting to the track and stuck in the track..be hopeful!!

Even though I did not make many job changes, I have had the opportunity to interview a very large number candidates at different skill levels and job roles, be it face to face or job fair. This gave me a even bigger picture on the evolution of CV. Also I occasionally appeared for interviews to prepare my self for a change any time.

Experience of enriching a CV

When I joined IBM 17 years back, I met with a senior technology evangelist, whom I still remember and respect as my first professional Guru. His passion and kind attitude and more over his eagerness to explain technology to a junior colleague like me and my friends was a blessing for us. Those sessions were seeding the passion for technology is us. Those days our main focus of discussions were on Lotus Notes and application development. We used to sit and discuss for many hours.

One of the key advises Me and my friends received from him was to learn & work on new things as if you can add half pages every six months to CV. I literally followed that and CV was growing and growing. Every piece of information got added to CV and kept of trying to pick up new pieces of work, to get the CV growing.

As the technology is growing so fast, we all know very well that most of the work done years back has become obsolete and nobody will listen the glories of things like JSP (Java Server Pages), there is no antique value indeed.

Ideal size

Ideal size of a CV as I understand for a 15+ years experience is 2 pages and go up to 3 pages.

Having reviewed a large number of CV and conducted equally large number of technical interviews, what would matter for me is the first and second page, and how they can impress the reviewer or the interviewer. I hope the same applies for the automated screening software, as they may not be trained for the tool names and topics which are already obsolete.

Social presence

The social presence makes a big difference and it helps in the process of hiring from a job seeker perspective and from a hiring perspective. Social presence helps to connect both and gives the extra layer of credibility and trust. But the most important is getting to know each other and what is in front of both as the problems to solve, and how well they can team up. Some of the them I realized, later than never,

Meetup & Conferences

Meetups & Technical conferences are more common than ever before. These excellent platforms for networking. If you presenting with real use cases of technologies, I am sure there will be lots of attendees will remember you for days to come and may get in touch with you if there is a need.

Stackoverflow or Opensource

Platforms like Stackoverflow is a good to express the technical expertise and get more credits and keep connected to the developer community and challenges around the development space. I have seen that, many recruiters review the Stackoverflow profiles as a part of the process.

Working on opensource projects and getting a good credibility on the Github definitely is a differentiator.

Recommendations and LinkedIn

Platforms like LinkedIn is getting used heavily in hiring the right talent and we can see many innovative ways of highlighting the skills and getting endorsements, recommendations. It looks like covering letter is almost vanished now and LinkedIn profile is a good covering letter.

What would have been the advise now

I am sure If I were to meet the senior technology evangelist now as fresher, his advise will be to focus on above platforms and have a footprint.

Social skills

Empathy, one of the surprising events related to an interview was in 2012, I was in the fifth round of an interview, after finishing programming test for 3 hours, technical and so on.

5th round was catching up with the hiring manager and finally that also went fine and next round, the sixth was a telephonic with a senior employee from a remote location.

It was lunch time and I was totally tired after long hours, so I requested to continue after the lunch. For some reason It was not taken in the right spirit and I was rejected, later I came to know from my head hunter partner (he was also initially furious to me until I completely explained). Now I feel happy that I did not got selected to work for them.

I feel empathy is the right social skill which could have been applied in this context. In general social skills like empathy is equally important for both sides of an interview table, at the end they need to work as a team!

Job Description(JD)

Most of the times a JD will accompany a job posting, if not a job seeker can make the JD accurate and up to the point. It is risky to go ahead with interview when the JD is not clear itself, as it will be like chasing a dream which is not clear in mind.

Once the JD is clear and the job seeker finds it matching with the inspiration, time to apply and prepare based on the JD points and sharper your skills to express you matching skills during the interview with quantitative examples.

Better to be honest about the skills and many a time you may not get on the job training, especially in senior positions. You cannot go to the field and practice during a world cup final, aim is to go and deliver.

What amazed me

Personally observed that CV preparation is an art and one of the amazing experience was a 40 page CV seen this year, 2020. That was an encyclopedia of the telecom domain. Other experiences like lots of language construct issues, copy paste issues, mismatches in time spent in projects etc.

Short and sweet

My CV has grown in size and slowly started reducing, as if CV also needs to follow the law of nature. I am sure I will also end up with a one page CV soon, Yes I want to.

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Vishnu NamVar

#passion4technology #agile #sports4fitness #code2run #betterlife #run2explore