One of my job responsibilities at NetworkATS is to interview technical candidates. Maybe I’m in the minority, but I really do enjoy interviewing candidates. Not only does it provide a short break from daily tasks such as coding, testing, dealing with clients, responding to RFPs, etc., I’ve gotten an inside view of other IT shops and learned how other organizations deal with their IT needs. One day I might interview a recent college graduate for an entry-level position. Another day I may talk with an experienced IT consultant who’s looking for a Project Manager position. Unlike the typical human resources person, I try to spend a few minutes reviewing each resume that comes across my desk. Regardless of the position you’re interested in, below are a few simple things that you can apply to your resume if you don’t want a job interview.

List Every Software Application, Language or Tool You’ve Ever Used

In today’s slow moving IT world, it’s critically important to list every software application, language or tool that you’ve ever used. You never know when someone’s going to have a project that’s going to require in-depth knowledge of CP/M, Windows 95. COBOL or Fortran. Let’s look at a two resumes I received last year in response to a job posting for Microsoft .Net developers:

OK, this candidate has both ASP.Net and VB.Net experience. Good. He also has VB 6. OK, that’s good to know. He has DOS, Windows 95, NT, 2000, XP and 2003 Server experience, too. Not too shabby. I’m also glad to see that we can count on him for both structured and object oriented analysis (What I need are people that can deal with un-structured analysis and change-oriented analysis!) Now, let’s compare this resume to the one below.

Now, this is an impressive resume for someone applying for a .Net developer position. He’s got 12 years of Visual Studio experience. Wow. Since this resume was one I received in 2005, that would mean that he started using Visual Studio in 1993. Impressive. Equally impressive is his 3 years of experience in Very Rapid Prototyping. I wonder how many years he spent Prototyping and Rapid Prototyping before being comfortable with Very Rapid Prototyping. What comes after a few years of Very Rapid Prototyping? Double Very Rapid Prototyping, perhaps? In case you were curious, his resume was a svelte seven pages long.

Use English in New and Innovative Ways

Here’s an example.

Here’s another example of using English in new and innovative ways.

Be Vague When Describing Your Previous Experience

It’s important to be vague when describing your previous job or educational experience. The less I know about what you’ve done in previous jobs, the more you and I have to talk about during the interview process. Also, if you also follow rule 1 listed above, List Every Software Application, Language or Tool You’ve Ever Used, why bother writing descriptive prose about what you actually did? Let the long list of technical skills speak for itself!

Here’s an example for your consideration:

This snippet below is a good example of two rules: being vague and using English in creative ways.

If your resume follows these three simple rules, I guarantee that you’ll succeed in not getting a job interview with me. Do you have other “rules” to add to my list? Post them in the comments section…

Right now, Technorati is currently tracking over 58.5 million blogs.  In August, David Sifry posted an article about the state of the blogosphere.  Key points from his article:

• The Blogosphere is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago.
• About 175,000 new weblogs were created each day, which means that on average, there are more than 2 blogs created each second of each day.
• Total posting volume of the blogosphere continues to rise, showing about 1.6 Million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second.
• The most prevalent times for English-language posting is between the hours of 10AM and 2PM Pacific time, with an additional spike at around 5PM Pacific time.

Here are a few blogs (out of the universe of 50 million+ blogs) that I read on a regular basis and recommend highly.

• How to Change the World - Guy Kawasaki is best known for being an Apple evangelist; however, what many of you may not know is that he also started a company called ACIUS, best known for a product called 4th Dimension.  Right now, Guy is a managing director at Garage Technology Ventures, a seed-stage and early-stage venture capital fund based in Palo Alto, CA.His blog focuses on two things that he’s done and knows very, very well: What it’s like to be an enterpreneur and What it’s like to be a venture capitalist.
• Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO - Matt Cutts works for Google and is well-known in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) community.  His blog is an insider’s look into the important, but sometimes fuzzy, world of search engine optimization.  In addition to his blog, Matt has produced and posted a couple of video clips where he answers questions from readers or discusses the search engine topic du jour.
• ScottGu’s Blog - Don’t read Scott Guthrie’s blog unless you’re a real Microsoft geek (or want to be one).  Scott is a General Manager in the Microsoft Developer division and runs the development teams that build products like the .Net CLR, Atlas and IIS 7.0.  If you don’t know what all three of those products are, don’t read Scott’s blog.  If you do know what those three products are and are looking for the latest, well-written technical news about Microsoft development products, I would highly recommend keeping a tab on his blog.

As an IT consulting firm providing network integration, web design and software development services to small to medium sized clients in the D.C. area, we receive lots of RFPs (both solicited and unsolicited).  Please note that most of the RFPs I deal with are in the area of web design and development, so some of my comments may not apply to RFPs for different services or products; however, in general, I think my comments apply across many kinds of RFPs and other formal (or informal) solicitations for products and/or services.

The RFPs I review vary greatly in terms of quality and quantity.  I’ve seen good proposals that are no more than a couple of pages.  I’ve seen not-so-good proposals that go on for 20 to 30 pages.  Quantity (or the thud factor) does not necessarily correspond to quality.  Since most of the proposals I read are related to web development, the discussion points and examples below will be geared towards that particular kind of RFP.  Here’s what I think all good proposals should include:

• What are the critical success factors and key requirements for the project?
• Who’s involved in the decision-making process?
• What criteria is being used to select a vendor?
• What internal (or external) constraints affect the project?
• How much has been budgeted for the project?

As a general rule, the more time and energy that the proposer invests in the RFP, the more likely we can either (a) propose a solution that we believe meets their requirements or (b) help them find a vendor that is better suited for their project or (c) decline to bid, which saves everyone time.

I’ll deal with these five discussion points in future blog entries.  If you have others you’d like to see added, please let me know.  The true power of a blog is not in the initial posts, but in the subsequent discussion that it provokes.

As always, I welcome your comments about this blog.  Post them online for everyone to view or e-mail them to me at james99 (at) networkats (dot) com.

This morning, our business development manager forwarded me an e-mail that was posted to the ASAE technology listserv.  The person who posted the e-mail had a question about Microsoft Excel.  In an effort to help him, as well as the larger ASAE community, I spent a few minutes researching an answer to his question.  I used a couple of different resources and finally came across a newsgroup posting (via Google Groups) that answered his question.  What’s interesting to me is not the question itself, but the process he used to get his question answered.

I don’t know the person who posted the e-mail personally; let’s call him John for now.  John, like many of us, probably has certain people within his circle of friends, relatives and co-workers that he turns to for help on certain issues.  For me, I have a friend and former co-worker that I look to for advice on the latest cell phones, PDAs, MP3 players and other high-tech gadgets.  This friend likes keeping up-to-date on the hottest tech toys, and I value his opinion highly.  Let’s assume for a minute that John, our answer seeker, went to his trusted circle and was unable to get the question answered.  Where does he turn to next?  At some point, John decided to post his question to the ASAE community (via the listserv).  I’ll reveal at the end whether or not his question was answered.  In the meantime, let’s talk more about harnessing the power of crowds.

By sending his question to the listserv, John was indeed harnessing the power of crowds.  According to Wikipedia, listservs have been around since 1986.  Originally, they were used to send e-mails to lots of people at a single time.  Now, they’re used by hundreds of groups and organizations, not only to distribute e-mails from the group leaders to group members but also as a means to foster e-mail-based communication between group members.  Now there are hundreds of different ways to harness the power of crowds; I’ll touch upon a few of the more noteworthy types now.

Bulletin board systems (BBS) and Usenet newsgroups were two of the earliest computer-based group discussion systems.  I fondly remember dialing up BBS systems on my Apple II personal computer with my 300-baud modem.  Needless to say, I was overjoyed when I received a 1200-baud modem for Christmas one year.  That meant I could download things four times as fast!  The vast majority of BBS systems were made extinct by the growth of the World Wide Web and the Internet; however, some, such as The Well, have survived and morphed into internet-based discussion forums.

Established in 1980, Usenet newsgroups are still in use today.  Originally it began as a system of posting articles to well-defined topics called newsgroups, which themselves are logically organized into a subject hierarchy.  At its peak, there were hundreds of newsgroups and many thousands of regular users.  While other types of web-based applications have passed Usenet newsgroups in popularity, there are still thousands of people who posts to newsgroup regularly.  In addition, the archive of Usenet newsgroups, originally started by a company called Deja News and now owned by Google under the Google Groups name, is especially helpful when searching for information about a topic that might be a few years old, such as a question about a network card running under Windows 98.

There are web sites, such as Google Answers and Yahoo! Answers (notice that they don’t name their services Google Questions or Yahoo! Questions) , that bring together people who have questions to ask with people that like answering other people’s questions.  With Google Answers, Google has pre-screened a limited number of researchers.  Customers with questions pay a small non-refundable listing fee to post the question and offer a price for an answer.  Question askers don’t pay unless they’re satisfied with the answer.  Yahoo! Answers has a similar structure, except that no money changes hands.  Instead, Yahoo! offers a points system, with additional privileges available for users once they reach a certain point tier.  While it costs points to post a question, you earn points for choosing a best answer for your question, answering questions or having your answer selected as the best answer.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (Mturk) is an interesting twist on the concept of harnessing the power of crowds.  Instead of a simple question-and-answer structure that Google Answers and Yahoo! Answers uses, Mturk leverages the power of the human brain and its ability to handle certain tasks, such as identifying objects in a picture, much more efficiently and accurately than any machine or computer can.  Instead of question askers and question answerers, Mturk has requesters and people who complete tasks.  What’s the incentive for people to complete tasks?  You guessed it… money, usually very small amounts though.  When the Mturk service was introduced a few years ago, the only requesters were other groups within Amazon.  Now, they are dozens of requesters that post very interesting and different tasks.  I’ve seen requests as varied as selecting the best picture that represents a specific business to writing trivia questions on current events to transcribing podcasts.  While Mturk hasn’t taken off in the same way that Google Answers or Yahoo! Answers has, I think we’ll see many more similar services in the future.

So, there are numerous places that John could have turned to for an answer to his question about Excel.  In the future, there won’t be a need for traditional printed or electronic documentation.  Instead, software vendors will simply provide a user interface on top of one (or more) of these existing ways of leveraging the knowledge of large numbers and provide low-cost, accurate, on-demand help 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

In the end, John (not his real name) received several replies to his question and sent back a note to the list thanking the numerous people who replied and stating that he did get his question answered.  For once, a story with a happy ending

Recently, a client asked us to review a report entitled “Web Site Optimization”.  The report was written by an SEO consultant and it reviewed a web site that we had recently redesigned for this client and provided a set of recommendations.  After I read the report and had a chance to reflect on its contents, it occurred to me that much of the search engine optimization landscape has changed in the past few years.  Recommendations that were appropriate a few years ago may not be useful anymore.

First and foremost, content is king.  Search engine and their spiders, crawlers, indexers, etc. are much more intelligent now that they were even a year or two ago.  Techniques such as keyword stuffing, cloaking and landing (or doorway) pages aren’t as effective and may actually penalize web sites.  Write quality content that your users will find beneficial.  Now,

Second, links to other high-quality web sites are good.  It’s the same advice that your parents gave you when you were younger.  If you hang out with good kids, chances are good that you’ll be pulled along with them.  If you decide to be friends with the “bad” kids, you’re also going to be dragged down with them.  Well, the same basic concept is true with SEO.  First, let me provide an brief explanation about Google’s PageRank and why high quality backlinks matter.  The concept of PageRank is a fundamental part of Google and its powerful search engine.  Basically, PageRank is a methodology which uses the basic concept of the internet, hyperlinks between documents, at the core of deciding what web sites and pages are most relevant when processing a search request. 

Third, use tools (and techniques) provided by major search engines offer to allow your web site to be more easily indexed.  Since Google is the 800-pound search engine gorilla, I’ll focus on their Google Sitemaps tool for a moment.  A Google Sitemap file is an XML file that describes the structure of your web site.  There are other attributes that you can use to describe how content on your web site is structured, how frequently it updates, and what sections are more important than others.

Fourth, follow certain basic techniques or rules of thumb to insure that search engines can easily find, index and categorize your site.  All of you probably are familiar with these rules.  Don’t use frames.  Use META tags.  Make sure that all of your images have ALT tags.  Use a robots.txt file to indicate what should (and more importantly, what shouldn’t) be indexed by well-behaved spiders.

A discussion of SEO techniques would not be complete without a list of references for further reading.  Hyperlinking is the fundamental building block of the world wide web, right?  I find the following authors, web sites and pages helpful:

• Matt Cutts
• Google Webmaster Blog
• Pronet Advertising