Spend a half hour surfing www.whatis.com or www.techadvice.com and you can get friendly with a handful of popular technology programming terms such as Enterprise JavaBeans, Active Server Page and MQSeries.
Spend an hour memorizing bits out of PowerBuilder Developer’s Journal or Pen Computing magazine at the corner bookstore, and you’ll be able to speak geek like an experienced programmer.Call it creative deceit. Call it flat-out lying, but techies, specifically programmers or software engineers, have been beefing themselves up with buzzwords to get jobs–awfully good jobs. Boatloads talked their way into well-paying positions over the last decade. Are they tricksters? Turns out, they were just taking advantage of equally unqualified recruiters.
“When you sound comfortable using programming jargon, people assume you are technically shrewd,” said Jason Sensat, a programmer at a local private investment firm who is involved in hiring software engineers.
“I could talk about Extreme Programming–a stripped-down software-development process–to a recruiter and get into the values of it, using phrases such as `constant integration of production and development code,’ and `rapid releases of software on four-and-six-week cycles,'” he said.
“But while I may be talking moderately intelligently about EP, I really haven’t said anything about it at all,” said Sensat, 30.
Tell that to someone who doesn’t have a clue about technology.
“Companies lack the technical skills to determine whether someone is just speaking the technology or if they have the breadth of knowledge,” said Ken Daubenspeck, president of Chicago-based Daubenspeck & Associates Ltd., an executive information-technology recruitment firm.
They also can’t always check references, since many of the start-ups candidates used to work for are out of business, he said.
Throw in career Web sites or “candidate auction” boards and the deception doubles, Daubenspeck said, because recruiters often use search engines to scour the boards for buzzwords.
And candidates know that.
They drop in terms such as “systems integrator” and “object-oriented,” and throw around the names of hot proprietary technologies like Ariba, Sibel and i2, to give the impression they are up on all the latest, he said.
Java and family are buzzworthy skills now, said programmer Sensat. , “Touch on Java and these areas and the more a recruiter will think you’re qualified,” he said. “And if it’s non-technical recruiter, forget it–you’ve already fooled them.”
The only way recruiters won’t get fooled by highbrow tech talk is if the people doing the interviews work with the technology in question daily, Sensat said.
“Buzz phrases such as `distributive applications networks,’ `redundancy of servers’ and `high availablity’ all actually do mean things, but [talking about them is meaningful] only if you have actually implemented them and used them in the right context recently,” said Steve Loranz, a senior systems analyst at Chicago-based BrandGuard Corp., which offers Web-based custom marketing tools.
“You can say that you’ve done network administration, but if two or three years have passed since that time, the industry changes so fast that you really aren’t an expert at it anymore,” said Loranz, who is 26.
Loranz, who has hired programmers, said he would much rather a candidate admit to not knowing a particular technology rather than feign experience during an interview.
“If they don’t know about a specific technology but explain how they would find out about it, that’s a plus; if they hesitate about whether or not they know a technology and start talking in buzzwords, then that’s a flag,” he said.
“I often run into a candidate who says he or she had six months of experience programming a certain language, but that experience was really being one of five people on a team who worked on a project, with the candidate never actually doing any coding,” said Chris Parker, founder of Glen Ellyn-based BigCabinet Inc., a marketing communications-applications service provider.
“You can walk the walk and talk the talk, but what it boils down to is can you program a page that works?” he said.
Parker, who mostly hires entry-level database, Web and client-server application programmers straight out of college, said while the right buzzwords planted on a resume most definitely help get a newbie noticed, he’s not fooled by the frills.
“I give a candidate a capability exercise, such as creating an online database to hold product information that would allow a customer to search on specific criteria,” he said. “Languages such as (Microsoft) ASP and Java Applets would be necessary to do this exercise,” Parker said.
While all this skullduggery may seem amusing to a casual observer, the consequences of bringing the wrong person on board can be very costly to a company.
The average cost to hire one person is $25,000 to $30,000, not including the fee of around $5,000 paid to an agency, said Daubenspeck of the IT recruiting firm. In addition, add the cost of bringing a candidate in and lost unbilled hours of time spent in the whole process, he said.
Sounds like a swindle, and it is, he said. “But that’s just the soft stuff; the hard costs are all over the streets.
“If you want to see what the cost of truly bad hires is, [look at] all of those companies that tried to buy their way into that space without truly determining whether their people were qualified and now are failing or are out of business,” Daubenspeck said.
Attempted resume fraud seems to be picking up with the recent decline in high-tech jobs, said Johnathan Tal, chief executive officer of San Jose-based Tal Global Corp., which performs pre-employment background investigations.
“People are desperate for positions, so they will do anything,” Tal said.
Thirty percent of the resumes checked by the company have a salary or education misinformation on them, the two most common kinds of lies, he said.
“It might say $90,000 instead of $40,000 was made at a previous job, or that a person has a master’s degree in computer science when they only have a bachelor’s,” Tal said.
Tech companies, too, are getting better at screening candidates.
Today, 80 percent of them perform pre-employment background checks, said Tal, who also is the president of the World Association of Detectives, a group of international investigative and security consulting firms.
But companies don’t do much when they find out a candidate has strayed from the truth.
“The rule is that people get caught; they are disregarded; and then they move on,” Tal said. “Companies are very reluctant to terminate someone’s career.”
“It’s unfortunate because we notice the same names coming back in our checks,” Tal said. Employers are quiet because they are afraid of litigation, said Steve Leibovitz, branch manager of Des Plaines-based Omni One Information Technology Recruitment.
“If you sued everyone that fibbed on a resume, you would be in court all day long,” Leibovitz said. “These people haven’t committed a crime; all they’ve done is mislead a potential employer into believing they had the qualifications for job.”
In any event, interview trickery won’t get you far nowadays, Daubenspeck said.
“Technology has gotten much more complex and people have had to get more sophisticated in their knowledge,” he said. “Now corporations are trying to link all their disparate systems together and individuals who are limited in knowledge will be weeded out,” he said.
