Choose your recruiter / placement agency carefully. They have no interest in *you*, only in their share of *your money*.
I recently had a guy apply to work for me through a recruiter. His resume - via the placement agency - described his 25 years of experience "...as evidensed by these saple prejects...".
He was seeking a full time contract position for $125.00 per hour.
The placement agency was somewhat offended when I suggested that for a quarter million per year, most reasonably competent people might be able to figure out how the spell checker works in MSWORD.
Competence with office products is not a barrier to entry for >recruiters<.
Worse, many contingent recruiters are arrogant enough to 'punch up your resume a little' without your knowledge or consent. The ones who are just slightly less slimy will ask your permission before submitting it, and may even admit to a little editing, but all will be extremely reluctant to reveal exactly how they represent you.
Consider using Word to make a PDF file, and sending _that_ to recruiters.
SNORGY...thank you! I'm glad to see someone else who feels that a resume tells a lot more than the chronology of experience.
Engineers are supposed to be detailed. When I get a resume or cover letter with words misspelled or poor grammar, it immediately goes in the trash or, as you did, I call the recruiter and tell them that if they can't put enough effort into making sure a candidate they put forward can at least make a reasonable presentation, I don't need either of them.
Last week I got an unsolicited resume from an "engineer" with over 20 years of experience and had "extensive experience in structural engineering". He was looking for a senior level position.
Strike one-unsolicited, no prior contact
Strike two-had my name backwards in the address (Last Name, First Name, Middle Name with no commas or separators)...obviously from a mailing list he purchased or scavenged from the licensing board...that's not an ego thing with me, it just shows he doesn't pay attention to detail
Strike three-misrepresentation...he's not licensed as a P.E.....he's an E.I., looking for a "senior" position.
I second the comment about recruiters effing with your resume. I once received a call from a potential employer, who wanted to discuss my experience and qualifications over the phone. We got a few minutes into the conversation, and I was starting to get a bit puzzled by the topics that were coming up. I asked whether he had the right resume, and he read my name off of it. I asked if it would be acceptable to him to pause for a few minutes and fax me the resume, so that I could look at the same thing he was. He sounded a bit worried by that - but did it - and boy had the document changed. I faxed back a proper copy of my resume, we started over, and I (eventually) got the job.
Companies who maintain an internal set of CVs which they use when bidding for work are prone to using some creative license. Mine was tweaked a little to make it more acceptable to a client. I was in a supporting role rather than lead and it probably wouldn't make much difference but I objected in principle because I was the one in the front line facing a client who thought I knew more about certain things than I actually did. Potentially it could have put me in an awkward position, but I was up front with the client and told him precisely what my areas of expertise were and which bits I was less familiar with. We had a great working relationship.
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If we learn from our mistakes I'm getting a great education!
One thing I learned from working with recruiters is to make sure you put as many buzz words in there as possible. A lot of times your resume goes into a database, a client calls up and gives them some key words, they search there database and pull the first 10 resumes they come across.
As an example many years ago I got called to an interview for a landscaping drafter even though I was a senior piping designer. Strictly because I had the right key words in the recruiters database. I ended up going to the interview anyways and got an offer from another department in the company.
I work for a large blue chip engineering company as the group CAD guru, but a few years ago I left and went to try my hand as an engineering recuitment consultant. FOOL! I can testify from first hand experience having worked for two companies, a small private one and the largest engineering recruitment agency in Europe, that they are indeed the biggest load of moral depleted S of B's I have ever some across. The $ is king and recruiters will do anything to boost their commission. I saw one guy poach one of his own engineers from a company he had a preferred supplier status with because he could get him more money and himself more commission on another job only to replace him with someone of a lesser caliber and was THANKED by the company who he poached the guy from!!!!! seriously, they are a bunch of sh*tehawks. Doctoring your CV is just one of a bunch of tricks they play. They will fabricate and advertise a fantastic looking job which will never exist just to get your CV's in so that they can market you out. Be warned. I lasted 4 months in total because I just wasn't/couldn't be ruthless enough.
Best regards
Simon NX4.0.4.2 MP10 - TCEng 9.1.3.6.c - (NX6.0.3.6 MP2 native)
