Getting a job has changed

Back in the '90s getting a job was very different. First, a person would review your resume, normally HR, and call you in for a face-to-face, where the personnel at the company would evaluate your personality, assess whether or not you were a fit culturally and then pass you along to get an idea of your technical skills.

The second phase of the interview process generally involved taking a test of sorts to evaluate your technical skills. Assuming you did relatively well on the exam, you were called in again for final set of interviews where your technical skills were again tested in a face-to-face, this time looking to see how you address and solve issues on the fly, how you carried yourself and how you fit in with people already employed at the company.

If all went well, an offer was presented and off you went to start your new career path. That is in fact how I started out. At that moment in time, having a diverse set of skills with a willingness to learn and advance those skills, or learn new ones, was highly valued. In fact, as a solutions consultant, being able to go onto customer sites with diverse technologies, pickup whatever technologies that customer employed and then developing a solution based on those technologies was paramount to success as a solutions consultant.

Fast forward to today and one will notice a dramatic change in the dynamics of the hiring practices for companies. For one, HR rarely seems to get involved in that first step of the process. AI systems have taken over the process of wading through candidate's resumes, focusing more on key words, specific certifications and a work history where Fortune 500 companies listed on resumes carry way more weight than those candidates with lesser-known employers.

More often than not, many good resumes are tossed by the weigh side as indicators that today's algorithms look for and trigger on are not found. The result is a candidate will receive an email, sometimes within minutes of applying for a job, that they have been passed over.

This is not only depressing, but also disheartening, leaving many candidates often questioning their skillsets. To add insult to injury, many companies are laser focused on specific skills. You may have great aptitude for writing SQL and one would think that having worked with systems like Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Informix, MySQL, etc would get you a foot in the door, but todays algorithms are looking for certifications. Are you certified in Oracle? You may have spent decades working on and building networks but do you have a CCNP? An employer will never know your propensity for setting up routers using the latest routing protocols or your ability to write stored procedures that can run on a multitude of Relational database systems because the resume evaluation algorithm has already tossed your resume to the reject pile.

And experience? What does that buy you? Back in the 90's experience was the building block to a good career. You had to earn that experience of course, but once you had a few years under your belt, you could use it to catapult you to that next higher paying job. In fact, in some cases, experience circumvented a college degree, with employers willing to overlook a degree in leu of relevant experience, but in today's world experience doesn't get you past that first algorithm.

SO WHAT DOES ONE DO?

If there was a definitive answer to that question, I probably wouldn't be writing this article. In fact, I would probably be employed! However, with that said, if you are in the tech industry, be it Telecommunications, software engineer, solutions architect, network engineer, etc,...there are some pathways to explore that may get you past that pesky resume firewall employers have put in place.

First off, for those of us with extensive experience, it is definitely beneficial to trim down that resume. Employers will tend to only look at your most recent experience, generally your last 10 to 15 years worth. Anything older than that you can safely edit out.

Secondly, employers want to see what you have done recently. It doesn't matter if you developed client-server systems in C++ twenty years ago, what have you worked with over the last five years? Pick out those core technologies that you have most recently worked in and focus in on those. Anything older on your resume can be edited out.

Terminology, in our industry acronyms run rampant and today's resume firewalls tend to focus in on those. If you want to your resume to be reviewed by something that breathes, look at the job description, pick out the acronyms that the company listed, determine which ones you know about and list those. For instance, you may have worked with the RIPv1, RIPv2, BGP and EIGRP routing protocols but the job description lists EIGRP, IS-IS and OSPF. List BGP and EIGRP routing protocols on your resume and maybe read up on IS-IS and OSPF to get a handle on those so that you can talk about them.

Finally, if you are unemployed, getting a certification is an expense that you may not be able to afford, but it may give you some traction out there in the job market. Start small, figure out where you want to be, cybersecurity, networking, software development, cloud expert and pick one. Then try to get a first step certification in that field. For instance, maybe you want to work in the AWS cloud. You have some experience, but nothing really that gets you past the AI sentinels. Pick up a book on AWS, start small, like AWS Practioner or AWS Solutions Architect Associate, and focus on just that. Get your cert and tack it on to your LinkedIn profile and resume.

Now, none of my suggestions are a shoo-in for getting a job or even getting past those digital demogorgons, but if you can poke enough holes through a company's façade to let in a little light on your talents and presence, maybe, just maybe someone with a pulse may notice you and dig you out.