IDLE HANDS

Picture by https://www.flickr.com/photos/slgc/

I don’t have a CV anymore.

I stopped several years ago when I joined TAT, mostly because I had a job I liked and did not feel like hunting for a new one, and a little because it takes time to maintain it. And whenI’ve been approached by external agencies wanting to win me over to “the new next big super thing, that I’m totally the correct person for”. Either by recommendation or LinkedIn or this here blog I have refused to provide a CV. I have several reasons for this, and I will list them here in an unordered list, hoping to get more to stop having CV’s and maybe spark some sort of discussion about this. So far every one of my colleagues and friends I’ve talked to have been agreeing with me.

• The information is already on LinkedIn. I have spent some time to add a lot of information to my profile over at LinkedIn, it contains everything a CV contains anyway.
• CV’s are old school. Again, why would you want something that’s already available at LinkedIn?
• Un polite 1. When the second question you get is “can I have your CV” what you really are saying to me is “give me a list of what you have done, I’m not really interested in listening to what you want to do now”. What the second question should be is “What do you want to do?” or “This is how I think you will fit with us.
• Un polite 2. When a conversation starts with “Can I have your CV” it signals a lot of trust-issues.
• Bad experiences 1. I met a recruiter once, he talked and talked about what he could do for me, selling it as it was the best thing without any concrete stuff. I answered a lot of questions but it was not until he heard about a technology I worked with 7 years ago that he made a connection to where he wanted me to start. LOL, I had begun that sentence with “I never want to do blah blah blah again”.
• Bad experience 2. One place where I was working we where told to update our CV’s and send them in, real urgent. Two days after the deadlines there where massive layoffs of those that did not have the correct buzzwords in their CV’s.
• Bad experience 3. Technology is hard, there are a gazillion technologies and everything is fluid. I understand that it is hard for someone that not works hands on with the technology that it is hard to keep up and understand. But using simple word matching is still not acceptable. Not if you are recruiting techie talent.
• Being a cog. A CV is begging to be put into a big machine that looks for keywords and you will be nothing more then a cog in that machine. I don not want to be that.
• Changeable. When I was working as a consultant, my managers usually took my CV and “polished” it, I did not think that was strange at the time, but now I really do. If I write who I am, what I have done, why would that not be awesome enough in it’s own right? If I need to add lipstick and gloss different to wherever I send it, it’s probably not good enough or representative enough of me. So getting a CV should actually scare an employer rather then make them happy.

So what do I have instead?

• I have a LinkedIn, where I provide a lot of the information available in the traditional CV form. It however is static in the sense that I don’t make a special tailored version for anyone.
• I have my blog, where I post a lot of the things I do with my spare time.

Will I ever make a CV again? I’m not saying that I never ever will make a CV or provide information that way, but the circumstances and the time points against it.