Braintree lead tech recruiter
Carrie McComb, the lead tech recruiter at Braintree and a ten year veteran of tech recruiting, shares what she looks for in successful candidates.
Every year I find myself paying less and less attention to the skills and roles on a resume. Instead of following traditional resume advice, here are a few things that catch my eye when looking at potential candidates. Go beyond the perimeters of a resume and get involved with the evolving world of work. You’ll stand to gain more than a job opportunity — even a chance to improve your skills.
Online Courses and Continuous Learning
I like to think of the power of show vs. tell. Putting java on your resume means very little. Putting java on your resume and showing employers that you can develop in java incorporating object oriented principles is much more effective.
To take it a step further, showing your java and OO abilities and including how you continue to improve and grow in this area by taking classes and joining meetups and forums is a recruiter’s dream come true (well this recruiter anyway…call me).
If you’re taking online courses from Udacity it shows me that you value continuous learning. Not to mention, its an entertaining conversation piece. What made you choose Applied Cryptography?
Collaborative coding
Why should you love a collaborative code management site like Github? If your account is public, potential employers can see your activity. Are you contributing to projects? Are you building your own projects?
All of this activity is informative to recruiters. Not only can it be used for insight into who you are and how you code, it can be used as a tool for recruiters to find you. There are several recruiting tools out there that crawl social sites for activity; they then aggregate it and present it to participating recruiters. The more active you are, the more you appear in these searches.
Community Profiles
In case you haven’t looked around, development has become a very social practice. Open communication and collaboration is important to employers and to communities.
People who ask thoughtful questions and provide courteous responses to questions on Stack Overflow, Quora, and other sites tend to earn the respect of their peers. Aside from the respect, perhaps the most obvious value from the communities is the ability to absorb endless amounts of knowledge from your peers.
