I’m picky for several very important reasons, but are most important to me:

1. My team builds good stuff. I need to know that you’re intelligent, driven, (nice), teachable, bold when boldness is required and humble when humility is required. But more on this in a second, because;
2. I expect that someone who says they’re proficient in a technology actually is proficient in that technology.

For instance, if you’re a Java developer, you should know how to make an Object immutable. You should know how to make an Object comparable to another instance of itself. You should know what the difference is between protected and private. You should be able to tell me one thing that is different between Java 1.4 and Java 1.6 . There’s a lot, so it’s not a tough question.

If JavaScript is your thing, you should know the difference between == and ===. Or how document.onload and onDocumentReady differ and why you might want to bind to one or the other. And tell me something about why closures are cool, why namespacing is useful, and why a given script library is your favorite. (Mine is jQuery, because chaining is awesome.)

And so on. I’ve met quite a few people who throw up all over their shoes when asked questions like that.

In any case, back to my first reason. The hard skill questions aren’t even the most important to me. Obviously I will not hire you as a software engineer if you can’t engineer software, but let’s move beyond that point and say that you can. And that you’re pretty good at it. There are a few simple questions that anyone with more than a few moments of professional experience should be able to answer:

What single professional accomplishment are you most proud of in your career? I want to know that you can be (at least a little bit) proud of something you’ve done. You show me that you care about the work you do by having something you can wear like a badge when asked. People who say things like “I strive to succeed in everything I do” are full of crap. They don’t take any pride in their work. I need an example.

Give me an example of a professional mistake you made and what you did to resolve it, learn from it, make sure it never happened again, etc. I need to know you think you’re human. (Unless you aren’t, in which case you might get a pass.) I need to see that you can acknowledge a mistake and respond to it professionally. Every single person who works for me now can do that, and it makes working with them a million times better. We’re people. We’re messy. We screw up. We’re wrong. And if we’re the least bit intelligent, we learn from it and move on.

In what working environment do you do your best work? I’m looking for self-awareness here. For me, I work best when I’m a little bit cold, physically comfortable, caffeinated, and listening to music. I do not work best in a hot room with annoying noises like crying babies, ringing cell phones, sounds from IM clients and LOUD TALKERS. Ican get by without natural light (though not forever), but temperature and the sounds around me are most important. If you can’t tell me something like that, then you aren’t paying attention to yourself. I’m willing to wager that less than 1% of the population can actually work “anywhere”. We all have physical and emotional triggers. Two of mine are heat and screamy people.

And untrimmed finger nails when I’m typing, but that’s self-resolvable. One moment…

I am consistently surprised by how many people can’t answer these questions. A peer asked me if I considered that I might be losing good candidates by requiring these be answerable. I don’t think so; for my present search, and in all but one case, there has been something else (technical skill, bad references, hygiene, etc.) that has also ruled out a candidate. My picky instincts are something like 88% defensible. I can live with that.

I wrote this several months ago after a particularly annoying set of calls with a “recruiter” from a local staffing firm. At the time, I was helping another team in my division interview candidates for a Senior Developer with exceptionally strong JavaScript skills. In one particular month, the same recruiter called me four or five times, each time using a different name from the same “services” firm. It is entirely possible that he actually was someone new each time, but each call sounded the same to me. Every time my response was nearly identical:

I don’t make financial decisions related to hiring, so I’m not in a position to hear about recruiting services, nor do I have any interest, but thank you anyway.

Each time, he kept talking.

Dude. I know you’re just doing your job, but you’re doing it wrong.

As a hiring manager, I have a strong personal distaste for recruiting firms and staffing agencies. I know that sometimes, these services are necessary in order to find the right candidate for a specialized position, to find a short-term whiz to save the day on a tough project, etc. I have nothing against recruiting companies that are working for me. I am, of course, notably complacent when it comes to the one time I needed a staffing firm in order to find gainful employment. That experience was incredibly painless, having met a representative from the firm at a job fair and starting work the next week.

No, this sort of experience has nothing to do with what ails me. Instead, my beef has to do with the cold calls from folks I’ll refer to as Job Sales Engineers, or JSEs for short. I absolutely will not paint them with the same brush as I do the recruiters I work with on a more regular basis inside of my company for the primary reason that the technical recruiters in the office are pretty darn good, and it would do them a serious disservice to be categorized in such a way.

So, Rant on:

JSEs are never technical enough and/or have not worked in the industry

Every JSE I speak to, which is currently averaging one every two weeks or so, has about 20% of the technical knowledge required to find the right candidate for a position. So, when the recruiting department posts a job saying that we’re looking for a Senior Web Developer with experience integrating a Java Applet with a JavaScript-driven user interface, and the recruiter calls and thinks that their ASP.Net candidate with the term “AJAX” on their résumé is qualified, I hang up on them. It’s not even the platform disparities that are so bothersome, it’s that they don’t know what these terms mean. Here I am, looking for someone who can sub-class a language (whose object-oriented nature is basically a hack) in their sleep, and a recruiter toddles around each word.

JSEs lead with acronyms, not accomplishments

Yes, the irony of using an acronym to complain about someone using acronyms is not lost on me…

Every call starts with something like “I see you are looking for a web developer. I have a candidate coming out of XYZ Blue Chip Company. He’s got Struts, AJAX, HTML, XML, Oracle and SQL…” Ok first of all, why do I care that he has both Oracle and SQL experience? The syntactical differences between PL-SQL and SQL (I’m presuming SQL92 unless they’re using a new revision of an engine which supports one of the later standards) are insignificant enough for a developer who isn’t solely a database developer, that no one should ever put both of them on a skills list. I could possibly consider them individually important if you’d been responsible for writing specialized database connectivity modules. Then again, if you’re listing AJAX without mentioning JavaScript, what exactly do you mean?

Secondly, brevity is just as important on the phone as it is on a résumé! Tell me what the person DID. Say “I have a candidate who just finished a very successful cross-functional project utilizing similar technologies to the ones listed in your posting. They have a long track record of delivering quality work on time.” That might catch my attention, should I be in the position to care. Heck, I know a guy whose nickname was something like “the bugless wonder”. If you’ve got someone like him, tell me about that.

JSEs cold call rather than establish relationships

This shouldn’t even be an issue. Even the most tenacious, annoying salesperson knows that the best way to make a sale is to use an existing relationship to get you in the door and into the front of someone’s mind. Recruiters don’t do that, and if they’re trying to, they do a terrible job of crafting that initial relationship. You’re going to have to convince me to talk to you, so why not buy me a cup of coffee? You have until I finish drinking it to convince me I should ever want to pick up the phone again.

Careful, though, I can drop a cup of coffee in seconds, so talk fast.

JSEs don’t do their homework

This usually manifests itself in an obvious data-mining of LinkedIn without regard for the appropriate person to call. I’m sure many sales folks do things like this as well. They need to find any “in” and I can’t entirely knock the tactic in theory. In practice, though, it’s a waste of my time to talk to you, so don’t call me. That’s why my LinkedIn contact settings explicitly say “Please do not contact me on behalf of recruiting or third-party services for my company.” READ IT!

On top of that, I’m not the development manager. Nuance is a publically traded software company with thousands of employees. We have more than one division. There isn’t one “development manager”. I mean, I’m flattered that you think someone of my tenure could run such a vast empire of developers across several countries, but seriously? Flattery won’t make me want to listen to you, it just tells me you didn’t do your homework.

Besides, Nuance has an entire recruiting staff of its own to do the dirty workawesome task of finding candidates for open jobs — the “hiring managers” are only called that because they have positions to be filled, and get involved in the process once candidates are selected. Our recruiters do a pretty solid job at finding leads once they fully grok the position, which only adds to my annoyance that independent recruiters call me directly to try to get a foot in the door here.

Since writing this several months back, I’m down to about one call every six to eight weeks, which is tolerable. One of our in-house recruiters told me to transfer said calls right to him. Ever since I think they figured out that my easy out makes me a bad mark.

This is perfectly fine by me.

Image courtesy of us (design studio)‘s Human Chicken project

There’s a time for a skills-based resume – when making a career change, for instance – but that isn’t the same as a generic resume. A skills-based resume should still utilize your previous position, but when you describe your accomplishments, they should be phrased in a way that shows the applicable career-shifting skill, rather than the domain-specific skill.