I don't have an education section on my resume, as I'm a high school dropout myself. Last year I was looking for a new job and shot my resume to probably a dozen different companies. Of those, the only company who asked about the lack of an education section was Bloomberg (of the ~8 people I had in-person interviews with, at least half of them asked me about it, in fact, which told me a lot about what the company was looking for). I'm not sure if it's indicative of the tech market at large, but no one else batted an eye at my lack of an education section and focused purely on my skills and experience.
I always ask this, but not for the reason you think: it's so that I, as an interviewer, can adapt the interview to you. Recent example, one candidate had no idea what I meant by "principle of locality", but I probed a bit, and he understood it perfectly well: but lacking a formal CS education, he didn't have the vocabulary. Same with big-O notation, some guys have never heard of it, but show them a code snippet and they'll tell you straight away how efficient it is.
For me, interviewing with a company is as much about me judging whether or not the company is a good fit for me as it is them judging whether or not I'm a good fit for them. If it's clear from the interviewers that they're looking for someone with a college degree and a CS background, then not only am I not a good fit for them, they're not a good fit for me. With the ability to choose to work for the vast majority of tech companies, I'd rather err on the side of being very picky about who I spend my time with. In the case of Bloomberg, those who asked me about my education were clearly biased (not in the question itself, but in the context, tone, etc) against those who are self-educated, and that's not at all the environment I want to work in.
In the mid-90s I got reasonably far down the road with an interview at DE Shaw / Juno and stopped it cold when they demanded school transcripts.
I guess I'm unreasonable, but, if you're looking for data points: hi, I'm a candidate who will turn you down cold if you require school information from me.
For a long time, I thought this was a New York thing, but, no; I got an offer from a very excellent NY tech/finance company a few years before we started Matasano, and nobody there was dumb enough to want to see my report cards.
There's a bit of space between "there's no education listed on your resume, what's up with that?" and "give us every ounce of data there is to be had about you being in school."
The first one is reasonable. The second one isn't, and in my opinion is also a waste of time.
I'm really trying to imagine where the "what's up with that" would even come up in any of the good interviews I've had. Who has time to waste with that? The best interviewers I've ever dealt with had me on my ass with algorithms, distributed systems, and concurrency questions moments after starting.
I agree, asking "where'd you go to school" isn't particularly offensive.
It seems like your education only matters up to a certain amount of experience. If someone has been out of school for ten years, I don't give a damn what happened back then.
When all I have to go on is education and a one-year failed startup, I'm going to ask at least a few questions about school. Even then, the startup is more useful.
I read that Google asks for it, but they are a bit, er, happy when it comes to statistical analysis. IIRC they were not impressed by the statistical power of transcripts.
I have a bachelor's degree, and I haven't included an education section on my resume for at least a decade. (I'm 40 years old) I've been at VP or C-level for a long time. That's largely because my degree is largely irrelevant to my career path, or at least I believe that putting it there wouldn't really advance the story I'm trying to put forward succinctly on a CV. I have an English degree, which has actually been incalculably key to my career as a software company founder and executive, since I studied writing and basically write for a living. But I founded my first company when I was still in college, and it's pretty much what happened from there that's part of my story. As it happens, I went ahead and finished my degree, but it wouldn't have mattered one whit if I hadn't.
The "art" to resumes (as I'm now in the process of learning, after not looking at mine for ten years), is to figure out how to best portray yourself to the exact person(s) you're submitting it to.
That should inform what sections are appropriate. Sometimes having interests and hobbies is beneficial. I've seen numerous folks at startups talk about how they like seeing things like interests and hobbies, as they feel it paints a more complete picture of the person. At larger companies, they might at a minimum not care about that, or even actively not want to learn that information (for fear of being accused of having discriminatory hiring practices).
I have a few friends who include that they are an Eagle Scout on their resume (I don't put it on mine). In the overwhelming majority of cases, that's probably not going to be helpful to a prospective employer, but maybe it catches someone's eye and serves as a launching off point in an interview.
I hire a lot of people, so I see a lot of resumes. My opinion on interests and hobbies is that you're making a statement by including it, so you need to be smart about it. If they're mundane and not salient to the job, then you're padding a thin resume, or just being dense by including them.
On the other hand, they have the ability to make you stand out or advance your "story" then they can make a big difference. For example, if I'm hiring an engineer, and they mention that they've been working on an interesting open source project, or they co-founded a local hackerspace, then that's a mark in their favor. I hired an intern, who I later hired on full-time, largely because he described a scrappy and interesting local entertainment directory website he had been working on launching. He'd been basically living as a ski bum for three years and working as a waiter, but his ambitious hobby made up for that.
This wasn't on his resume, but a another guy I hired recently let me know in the interview that he plays hockey seriously, and that was good to know, because honestly some engineers need to get out of the house more.
See, that's good to know (and I suppose ironic in the O'henry sense of the word).
The thing I've started to figure out is that there is almost no consensus on what people want to see on a resume (short of what they don't want to see).
Really? People lie about being Eagle Scouts? That says about as much about your character as lying about Mensa membership says about intelligence.
Presumably, that never happens on resumes with real career track records; if you have an established career, the upside to lying about being an Eagle Scout is relatively microscopic. I probably wouldn't "yea" an inexperienced candidate simply on account of their Boy Scout record. I have to wonder what these people are thinking.
Education is absolutely a boilerplate resume item. I can't even count the number of time irregularities in just that one section ended up providing deep insight into a good or bad candidate.
Everybody who has an education puts it on their resume even if it's 30 or 40 years old and they jam it at the bottom in a small font.
For example:
A weird school name - "International University of America", "University of New York City" often points to a diploma mill or a lack of degree
Missing GPA - The rule of thumb is, put it on if it's a 3.5 or higher. Don't put it on if it's lower and let the employer guess or ask during the interview. Or...if it's missing assume it's below a 3.5. It's up to you how much weight that has in the interview. You may be targeting a school or degree major that make it very hard to get a high GPA. If the school does some artsy fartsy "non-traditional" grading system and doesn't use GPAs, or they are from a foreign country with a different system, figure out what they do use and ask that during an interview. If the school is an "every one is a winner just for trying" school, they probably aren't the candidate you are looking for anyway.
"Attended xyz" or "Coursework in major abc" - means they didn't finish school. Somebody currently going will likely have a "estimated completion Spring of 20xx" or some such instead.
"Environment" - I see this often from candidates from India, and I don't know why this happens, but they'll list a perfectly good school and education credentials, then list environment and virtually every piece of hardware and software that they happened to have had in the room with them during their studies regardless of their use of it or not. Ignore this since it's obviously coming from some weird resume writing coaching and probably a result of trying to cram a CV into a resume format.
No colleges listed only a high school - no problem, if the candidate looks good, they might still be a fantastic hire. Especially if they are young and haven't decided what to do yet. You can always go back to school. You usually see this on resumes of young candidates or experienced candidates with no upper education.
There is no excuse to not have an education section on a resume. Experienced people will tend to put it at the bottom and let their work history speak for them, and inexperienced candidates will do the opposite. Resumes without that section should go straight in the shredder, same as resumes with typos, grammar errors, punctuation problems, a constantly changing font (or Comic Sans). It's like not putting your callback #, email address, home address or work history.
Also, if you are about to hire somebody based heavily on their education pedigree, you should absolutely use this service http://www.nslc.org/. The number of fake degrees on resumes is astonishing sometimes.
I spend a huge amount of time every week reading resumes and talking to candidates and it simply is not my experience that everyone who "has" an education puts it on their resume.
The only people who ever put their GPA on their resume are people with one or fewer jobs after college. Unless the best conversation you're prepared to have with a prospective employer is about your years in school, leave your GPA off your resume.
Any employer who "shreds" resumes without "Education" sections is a fool, full stop.
As somebody who also spends a lot of time in the resume weeds, I have to absolutely, but respectfully, disagree while keeping my feet warm this cold night on the burning embers of shredded resume fodder.
To be clear, lack of an education section does not equal lack of an education and lack of a formal education does not equal lack of an education.
Almost to the person, people who made it to an interview despite having problems (or a missing) education section fell apart under minor probing questions like "describe your part in a project you worked on at a previous employer you were particularly proud of" or "I see you attended courses at XYZ school, can you talk about the courses you took and why you didn't finish up?"
When these folks are hired, they almost always turn out to be disasters in one way or another...often becoming the worst possible employee, not quite bad enough to be fired.
More often than not their resumes turned out to be mostly made up resume puffery or gross omissions to cover up various consistent problems in their employment and education histories such as termination for cause or having partied their way out of school.
People with a solid education section, even if it's just High School and perhaps a supplementary "job related interests" section tend to do much better under probing because they aren't making anything up.
Every so often you might find somebody with an honest to goodness good reason for something, but it's almost not worth your while to wade through the future career grocery store baggers in the 1200 tall resume pile.
Best things to look for in experienced people, a steady career progression. Nobody starts out as a superstar, but good employees tend to be ones that move up over their career. 15 years as a "Programmer I" is not a good sign.
If somebody has an incomplete schooling on their resume, but a solidly progressing career over a number of years, it's probably worth talking to them, at least to find out why they didn't finish. It's often due to major life changes (kids, illness, divorce, etc.), but if you push a little you'll uncover lots of people who either
a) thought they were too smart for it all (they aren't, trust me)
b) partied their way to a mid-sophomore year expulsion
Best things to watch out for outside of the mandatory education section: a laundry list of every technology/language to come out in the last 30 years. better yet, if they make a matrix of all of these languages vs. their personal aptitude in the languages and they rank an 8 out of 10 or better in all of them. Run away, run far far away from this person. I've seen dozens of these guys hired over the years and they all turn out to be turds.
I have no idea how to respond to this, which I promise I did read, other than to say that across my whole career, some of the very best and most qualified people I've hired didn't have their "Education" on their resume. Some of them had degrees from very solid engineering schools, others didn't, but I didn't find that out until after we had hired. You're suggesting you'd shred their resumes. If you're serious, you're a fool. I don't believe you're serious, though.
Your hiring process sounds broken. For instance: you seem to put a lot of thought into what is on people's resumes. We don't. Resumes exist to secure job interviews. Your interview process is what selects good candidates, not your resume analysis.
Finally, a reminder: it is 2011, and for at least the least 18 months, it has been a white hot competitive market for talent. In my recruiting role, my job is to sell candidates on the notion that we're a great place to do application security. It is not my job to look for reasons not to talk to people based on their resumes. In fact, that is the opposite of my job. The notion of finding new and clever ways to screen people out of the process based on their resumes ("look, Bob! this candidate listed 'coursework in computational linguistics'! if he couldn't hack it to a degree, he'd never hack it here!") is crazy.
Maybe the problem is, you've plugged the top of your funnel into horrorshow sources like Monster.com and Craigslist (actually, Craigslist is better than Monster.com). Stop doing that.
I might have a negative impression of a candidate whose resume was riddled with misspellings. But I'd still talk to them.
We are very, very, very, very good at screening, by the way. Not a little bit good. Very good.
>you seem to put a lot of thought into what is on people's resumes.
I actually really don't. I screen resumes pretty quick and just check for a few things. Can they format their resume like a grownup? Does the information appear to be accurate? Does it show relevant skills for the position we're looking for? Does it show an upwards career progression? Are their any oddball things that I'd like to talk with them about (work gaps, unusual education path vs. career, a stint overseas, an unusually short time at a previous employer) etc.
>Resumes exist to secure job interviews.
Then I'd ask, what's the point? Just build a quick site to collect people's names, phone numbers and email addresses, call it "apply for a job with Matasano" and be done with it? If it's not important at all in your process, why are you wasting your and the candidates time?
>but I didn't find that out until after we had hired.
Hell, why do you even interview them? Just check that they have a pulse and valid residency paperwork.
I'm sitting here reading this really rather incredulous that you couldn't be bothered to even ask this during the interview process, or as part of the basic job application paperwork.
Perhaps I'm colored because I do tend to do lots of hiring for contract work and my clients do need that information or we've just hired a wallet to toss money into that won't be doing much productive for us except burning overhead.
>it is 2011, and for at least the least 18 months, it has been a white hot competitive market for talent
Disagree, it's very strongly an employers market right now, the market is saturated with relatively qualified people looking for work. For every position we open, we get a couple hundred resumes. It makes it very easy to be picky at every stage of the interview process. Resume screening is just step 1. The interview process is absolutely critical to step 2 I agree.
I've seen many many horribly broken interview processes, all kinds of clever tests, and Microsoft style quiz questions. Really just having a long conversation with a candidate, treating them as a person and letting them talk about their career, with some guiding questions is about it. If it's a technical position, get some code samples, and talk them through some relevant scenarios or algorithm questions or whatever makes sense.
All of the best hires I've ever gotten flew past those 2 steps.
And I swear to all that's holy I agree that Monster.com is not the place to go as an employer or as a job hunter. Ugh, pile of failure that whole site is these days.
> "look, Bob! this candidate listed 'coursework in computational linguistics'! if he couldn't hack it to a degree, he'd never hack it here!"
I have to go 80/20 against/with you on this. Degrees are easy compared to real life work - shockingly so. If somebody can't finish a degree program with nothing in particular stopping them on what basis should I trust that they can finish a multi-million dollar project under tremendous pressure? You aren't going to figure that out no matter how clever the interview is if they don't have the prior history.
All that being said, I do have experience with self-taught guys who really are very good. But they need to have something else that makes up for it, a really amazing interview, some kind of really spectacular past performance or even amazing personal hobby portfolio that shows off their skillset. But theses guys are very rare. And all of them put "High School" under their education section on their resume. But then they have amazing portfolios of work to compensate.
Sometimes the education section can be an important marker to show upward progression over a career. For example, somebody who went to school later in life, or went back for a Masters or PhD or some such.
Sometimes they demonstrate odd ways you might be able to use a person. For example, you might be hiring for a sales position, and get a resume for somebody with a degree in Literature. Awesome, I bet you can talk to them about improving your company's advertising copy which would help them hawk your stuff better. Or maybe they are a self taught programmer with an Art degree. Super! Maybe they can provide good insight into improving a product's look.
So yeah, if they can't be bothered to put something down on the resume about where they got their learnin' from, I ain't interested in the least.
I'm not going to say that 100% of my hires are the best and the brightest. But I've done far better at it than most of my peers at weeding out poor candidates.
It sounds like you're a tech recruiter or another guy from big corporate heritage. I say this because your answers are a shining paragon of why most of the participants at HN avoid and loathe big corporate jobs.
Do you have any particular programming qualifications yourself? I'm curious. While it is of course a great sign that you are reading HN, it doesn't sound like you know how to rate candidates in an objective and independent fashion.
Let me tell you that many of the legends in this field didn't finish or didn't attend college (and some didn't even finish high school) merely because college is really silly.
This conversation is great - and great fodder for my gripe that resume advice on the internet is useless unless it comes from the exact person or /maybe/ organization you want to be hired by. Everyone has their own idea of what the ideal application is, and they all think it's the most reasonable one.
It is not a buyer's market for talent right now. It's a seller's market. You may be getting 100 candidates for every position, but they're terrible candidates.
HN, GitHub, Stack Overflow --- if all you're prepared to do is run a job ad. We do other things; for instance, we run free classes in Chicago and Mountain View.
> 15 years as a "Programmer I" is not a good sign.
What is "Programmer I"? Is it some kind of specific grade scale, how standard it is? Then how does a startup of 5 people assign "Programmer" grades. How high does it go? Can't they just assign to each other the highest "Programmer" grade so it looks good on paper?
We spend the whole day with a candidate testing and interacting with them but we never bother looking at "Programmer" grade.
I've seen that kind of nomenclature only on sites like Monster or Salary.com and I've always felt similar as your comment: where do these come from? How come I was never told about it? How come my positions were never classified like this?
Overall, for me, it falls under these semi-established things that you're supposed to learn somehow. Some people know what it is and will make sure that their jobs are classified a certain way. Of course, since I don't know, I'm biased, but I feel that employers and employees that use them are probably not good cultural matches for me.
Most people get out of school and head for a mega corp for their first job. Boring mega corps like to put people into easy to categorize slots for the payroll people. It's an easy marker to look at in a candidate if their job = megacorp and their time in that position was more than a 2-4 years, their was probably an issue with them.
With really small companies, you have to on other things. I've worked for both kinds of companies, there's almost always some kind of title/responsibility change you can point to. It's not often that a person slaves over the same pile of code, in literally the same job for a decade.
Demonstrate that progression in the bullet points or beneath the title.
"Exposure to..." is also a red flag. I had one candidate who listed "Exposure to C++" at the top of the skills section of his CV. Turns out he meant that he ran programs written in C++ - he'd never written a line of it himself.
I'm curious how you'd regard someone with the following on their resume:
1. a decade of military service,
2. a link to a healthy portfolio on github,
3. A couple of years of professional experience as a developer,
3. but only a 2-year degree or coursework for a CS degree.
I'm not in the market, just curious as I weigh my options for continuing school.
If the military service is at all related, pump it up. Lots of MOSs are technical in nature.
The github portfolio can be really important. Especially if it contains a lot of really good looking stuff and represents lots of self improvement. I'll almost always pause to check out somebody's "portfolio" if they stick it on their resume. It provides me with far more info than just the resume format can.
Nothing wrong with 2 year degrees. It demonstrates being able to finish something, even if it's boring core coursework. Either way I'll usually ask if they want to go back to school, or finish it up. The answers are often helpful.
("I'm too smart for what they're teaching me" is never a good answer to that question btw)
But by all means, put it down there or I don't know about it.
Agree re: military service. I don't even care if your MOS is relevant to what I do; simply having served says something good about character and is always relevant.
Disagree, unsurprisingly, with the rest of this comment.
It's like not putting your callback #, email address, home address or work history.
I find it interesting that you're mentioning the home address because, somewhat recently, I completely revamped my resume and that was one of the item I got rid of. Sure at some point, if they hire you they'll need it, but until then, I don't think it helps in any way.
You could say that an employer wants to make sure the person is local, but if I apply, that means that I'm either local or that I'm willing to relocate.
As for GPA, I didn't know it was common practice to put that. I won't, mostly because I didn't graduate in the US and the grading system is very different.
You don't need to put your home address on your resume, but having some mailing address can be helpful; I've sent books to 4 or 5 candidates in the past month or so, and each time I had to ask for an address, which felt kind of awkward (like, maybe they didn't want to disclose their address?).
I think it's fair to worry that some brain-dead screening process will weed you out somewhere based on your address (ie, by sticking you in the "need to relocate" bucket), so for whatever this is worth: you definitely don't need to include your address on your resume. No reasonable company will discard a resume because it lacks a home address.