[oclug] off-topic: Resumes

[Bill Omer]

Hey all,

Before I start, sorry for the somewhat off-topic post.
I have been thinking allot about resumes for the technical person.   I have
always been told to keep your resume to one page, two at the most.  However,
when you work in the field of which I do (UNIX/Linux Administration), it's
rather hard to keep your resume that short, without selling your self short.
For example, I might list a project that have I worked on, where I had to do
several different tasks to complete the main objective, and to keep it short
and sweet, I only list small portions of what I did, using as many keywords
as possible (like Perl, PHP, Apache, Sendmail, Bash, Korn etc..etc..).

Now the problem that I have come across is that even though I feel that I
have done the best I can do to keep the resume short and sweet, I am still
cutting my self short.   For example, just yesterday I got a call from a
recruiter that I have worked with in the past.   There is a company located
in the city closest to me (Louisville, Kentucky) who has just merged over to
Apache (I believe they were using IIS on NT servers....).   They are having
some major problems with both the apache configuration as well as their
Linux systems.   Should be a fairly short, yet challenging project that
shouldn't take more than a week or two.   I have worked with apache for a
fairly long time (quite a few years, and I work with apache on a nearly
dialy basis) and I feel that I'm defiantly the man for the job.  However,
they said they want someone with more experience.

So the problem that I see is that staying with the main outline for a
standard resume can hurt a person in a field such as the one I work in.  Is
there a different format that I should be using?   Am I doing something
wrong?   I just don't think that with my current paper that I'm showing my
talent the way it should be shown.   Now once I'm in the door and able to
have an interview, I'm golden, but getting them to say "Oh this guy is
young, but seems to know what he's talking about, lets get him in here" is
the hard part.

-Bill