These 'lying on your cv' articles.

[Doggy Styles]

I interviewed three candidates recently and asked each one if they were any good at softball, for the department's softball team. I wonder what they thought of that?

[Xenophon]

I interviewed three candidates recently and asked each one if they were any good at softball, for the department's softball team. I wonder what they thought of that?

Is softball the same as what I remember from my school days as rounders?

Or is it some indoor baseball?

[Tarquin Farquhar]

It's the CV-driven ignorant-agent-steered method of recruiting that is the problem.

1. You've got 100 buzzwords that you could put on your CV. The client wants 10, plus another 20 nice-to-haves. The agent turns that into 30. You'd better have all of those 30. But if you have all 100, the agent will think that you're diluted in the required skills and don't stand out, and the client will think you're lying.

2. The purpose of the CV is supposed to be to get an interview. But both agents and clients use it mainly in a negative way, to eliminate 95-99% of applicants, chucking most of them out in an instant, on a whim almost. "I am very good, very clever, very experienced, and would do this job wonderfully well" is a statement that might be true but has no place in this process.

3. A CV has become a way to "get past" the process as far as an interview. But a CV that will get past the agent will often not get past the client.

[Scary]

I interviewed three candidates recently and asked each one if they were any good at softball, for the department's softball team. I wonder what they thought of that?

I've got 3 years commercial experience of Softball.NET.

[newblood]

There's a moral there somwhere, but I just can't seem to work it out

Never admit you lied.

[doodab]

I've got soft balls.

[BolshieBastard]

The big "F" in that WTF is well deserved.

A better requirement woud be something like "don't care if you've used toad but want somebody who, if they haven't used it, will be running queries on it within 5 minutes of install, and within 20 minutes with the help file will be able to do some basic performance tuning, because they do know SQL and how a RDBMS works".


And you're spot-on, get all the buzzwords in (though some agents, probably with limited reading ability, will complain that your CV is too long). You can lose contracts for not having mentioned something that you see not so much as a skill, more a part of the grammar; not a "skill" but just one of the thousands of little things that you know, that gets your work done.

The problem is the CV, or rather the CV-driven way of doing things. Or to be blunt, the problem is agents who don't know what the words on the CV mean, and how the job is done. A large proportion of them, I'd guess.

The problem of having all these buzz words then becomes one of 'how much experience' do you have on this that and the other. Invariably, you're back to enhancing your skills to have a chance of interview.

It still goes back to the original problem. A lot of things can be picked up in a day. I'd had no experience of SQL but after a couple of hours, I could search for the info I needed in a database.

[EternalOptimist]

Never admit you lied.

Dafty. Its 'Never speak with your mouth full'

[newblood]

Dafty. Its 'Never speak with your mouth full'

yeh but my way is much more manly and direct. Yours is sheepish girly phrase :P

[Doggy Styles]

Is softball the same as what I remember from my school days as rounders?

Or is it some indoor baseball?

Rounders is simpler and better.

Softball is like baseball but the ball is bigger and it's bowled underarm. It's not actually soft but it's not as hard as a cricket ball. Nevertheless all fielders wear those poofy gloves for catching. Not manly.

There's loads of dodgy little rules in softball - for example, you can't be caught behind off an edge, but if you lob it up to the keeper that's out. And I still get confused about run-outs and double-outs.