A new approach to the resume skills section

Stop. You're overthinking this. The purpose of a resume isn't to sell you as an employee; it's to sell you as an interview candidate. Two very different things.<p>Keep your resume concise, send it as a PDF (if you're working with a system that doesn't allow PDFs, chances are you're targeting the wrong system at your prospective employer), make sure it gracefully includes the right keywords, groom your work history so that it sells your suitability for the role instead of trying to tell your life's story, and put the balance of your energy into a cover letter.<p>Then tear the cover letter off, turn that into an email, send it to the guy who's actually going to manage the role they're hiring for, and attach your simple PDF resume to it.<p>Done, move on to getting ready for the interview.

It's not beneficial to the applicant to be very specific about skills -- the applicant would much rather you were in the dark about it, and had to interview him to get a specific idea of his skillsets.<p>In other words, the incentives just don't line up, so this will never happen.<p>You could FORCE applicants to fill something out, but people would still game the system just by marking everything 777 or marking everything to a pattern determined by the job posting etc.

I usually just put dates next to skills (2005-present, etc) which gives some indication. Unix file permissions are a good idiot filter, but unfortunately most recruitment agents are <i>completely</i> clueless and wouldn't understand it.

That still requires people to make self accessment of their skills. There's isn't much incentive to be completely honest on their resume, if they put it on their resume they should be able to 777 all those skills but that rarely happens.

The skills section of a resume serves two masters, the HR Dept/Recruiters, and hiring managers. You need to list out every keyword ever to get through the first, yet somehow signal to the second which skills are more prominent than others.<p>A pie chart, tag cloud, or some other visualization would probably go a long way - just don't get too obfuscated, or HR will just get confused &#38; move on to the next guy.

I like it. Another benefit is it could help you filter out prospective employers. Most people wouldn't get it, but the ones that did would be promising.

The skills section of a resume tells about what "self-assessed skills" a candidate have. It's never meant to tell how good a candidate is.<p>The efficiency, mastery and attitude of a candidate will be determined in the technical exam and personal interview not by a detailed resume or the "unix permissions" metaphor.<p>That is exactly why we have a "hiring process" in the first place.

<i>Sometimes I think that programmers should keep two versions of their resume, one for recruiters and one for other developers. But that's a totally different topic all together. </i> <a href="http://blog.rishavrastogi.com/?q=node/2" rel="nofollow">http://blog.rishavrastogi.com/?q=node/2</a>

Have people classify their relative skill distribution using a pie chart. Test them on a slice or two to calibrate. Dumb idea?