Job Hunting Revisited

After several years of comfortable positions in Brazil I'm revisiting the world of the job hunting. After two months trying job hunting portals - and tired to re-type my CV in several different formats - I started thinking about innovative ways to demonstrate my abilities to the prospective employers. This blog entry is a laboratory about curriculum vitae formats. It discusses the way people interact in the job hunting universe and also presents a draft solution based on a CV XML Schema.

Trying the usability of some portals [1, 2, 3, ...] by myself I started to imagine that contractors should also have difficulties in finding a good candidate. The dynamic nature of information published on these portals produces a complexity hard to deal with: Which CVs are obsoletes?, Which jobs are already fulfilled? Which CVs are repeated among the several portals I have to visit before deciding who I will contact? There are also the issues related to the human resources management: imagine a portal offering to the contractors a list of Word documents containing the candidates profiles.A contractor should open every document in order to evaluate if the candidates match the position requirements. All this complexity makes people to waste time, and sometimes, to waste opportunities. My feeling after my recent experience is that the information technology could be better re-thought in order to facilitate the relationship between the companies and the professionals.

As a software programmer, my first thoughts were about a progam, and as a software architect my first thoughts were about patterns - the most remarkable issue on the job hunting portals is the absence of standardization. Every portal I visited presented a different way of registering. The most of them have a section where it is possible to upload a file - usually in Word, TXT or RTF format. All portals also have a section where users are forced to fulfill a very long form about their personal information - a boring and time consuming task. Despite that, many of the employers that sent me a mail through these job portals revealed not much knowledge about my profile. One of the reasons about that seems to be the difficulty to express in a piece of paper a long experience in software development. How to convince someone about my skills, how to know which technology the contractor will seek in my cv? Remember that idea of the first impression? Well, the first impression the most of contractors have about me is a mute, black&white report - a bit frustrating. I decided to try a more creative way to present myself to my future employers, a more impressive way to express my potential as a software designer.

Show me the code

As software technicians we expect a job candidate who has the ability to produce software :). Guided by this obvious motto, I started designing a Java software that helps people to evaluate my skills. The first step was to enumerate some requirements:

1. The software should be simple enough to permit the most of the contractors to run it without problems with installation and configuration. The J2SDK 1.5 should be the only installation requirement.
2. The software should be sized up in order to facilitate its distribution through e-mail.
3. The data model should support future modifications - the data model and the gui must be decoupled.
4. The software itself is part of the CV, its design and its implementation should obey the best practices in design patterns and Java Code Conventions.
5. The information of the cv software must be printable in a formatted report.
6. The software should support internationalization.
7. Multimedia is a must.

After some evaluation, I started drafting a XML Schema that models the skills of a job candidate - the most part of the schema was inspired on the information found at the popular job portals. With a stable model, I started thinking the ways to convert the XML data into a friendly graphical user interface. My first experience was a simple XSLT that converts the xml data into a Html page. At this point, I got a model and also a fancy output for my curriculum data - the next step was to produce something more impressive.

The first impression is the only impression a contractor will have about your cv

My second experiment was a Swing GUI. The goal of this gui was to catch the attention to my design skills. The Swing technology itself is not so relevant, but the ability to produce a complete solution from the scratch is always a good visiting card. After downloading the jar, just double click on it, or open a console and type: java -cp curriculum.jar silva.vieira.felipe.cv.gui.JCurriculum

Note: this software is just a prototype, it is not complete and eventually some of its features may not work. It requires Java 1.5 or higher. An issue: I tryied but I couldn't include a video in my Swing gui using the Java media Framework. If you know how to create a video player that can be deployed as an executable JAR , please let me know. I found several demo applets on the web and some Swing apps that read the videos from URLs - but I was unable to develop a player which retrieves the video file from inside the JAR.

Conclusions

The world becomes more competitive every day, and if you are interested on the best job positions, you must be innovative. If, per example, a project needs someone skilled about the Spring Framework, a curriculum in form of a Spring project seems much more attractive than a paper where the candidate writes I know Spring. Too much work just to present a curriculum? Maybe, but the second step for getting a good job is really to want the job, and to produce small projects with Java technology is always a pleasure anyway - that's the first step: to love the job :)). All my cv experiences consumed about 50 hours of effort, and the people have given me a nice feedback about that different way to introduce myself.

I'm still using job portals, and still thinking about better ways to control human resources. Some ideas point to web semantics applyied to the XML in order to provide interoperability among portals, other ones suggest an ERP dedicated to human resources and several other ideas have been being discussed with friends and through my JUG mailing list.

It is nor a complete project neither a recipt about how to obtain a good job, it is just an open discussion about the possibilities around job hunting. Perhaps in the future I could write my cv once, and reuse it on the several portals on the web.

If you have good ideas about how to elaborate a curriculum vitae, or about some creative strategies to use in a job hunting, please let us to know.