Resume Motivation

The other day I blogged about my new SAS-Resources site and some of my motivations for creating it. But I left one motivation out of that introductory post. Not because it is less important, actually it's one of the most important. So important that I wanted to talk about it in its very own post. So what motivation is that? Resumes. Specifically, resumes are broken.

They don't work. They fail you the job seeker. They fail the companies who want to hire you. They're a terrible way of communicating who you are and what you are capable of. Recruiters scan resumes for keywords. So people naturally cram their resumes full of keywords. The result is unreadable. It tells you nothing about the human you may be hiring.

Just as an example, I googled SAS RESUMES. The first hit was a sample resume from scribd.com:
SAS Developer Sample Resume

The good new is, if you want to learn how to write your SAS developer resume, this is a good one to follow. The bad news is, it's just as bad as most of the others. It's lacking one very important thing: a body of work.

A body of work is a much better way of showing who you are and what you are capable of. So when I started thinking about creating SAS-Resources it was very important for me to create a platform that people could use to promote themselves. Not every programmer has time to answer questions on mailing lists and forums, or write lengthy blog posts (ha!), or put together and present papers at conferences. But surely you've written code that could be explained in a recipe. So that another programmer who is wondering "How do I ___ in SAS?" could read your recipe and "like" it. Which creates an online body of work that you could easily share through your public profile (exa: www.sas-resources.com/user/stephen/public). Thus communicating to a potential employer that you are not just a set of keywords and technical terms, but a good coder who can get things done and explain how you did it.