Buzzword compliant profiles

I’ve been building engineering teams for over a decade. Even though I initially hated that part of my job, I grew to love the process of identifying, onboarding and integrating new engineers to my team. I recently signed a contract with a few companies to identify good engineering talent for them and while I was reviewing a few LinkedIn profiles, I was struck by how painfully similar they all were. Sure, job history and education details differ but in terms of skills, they all looked identical. They were all buzzword compliant.

Padding your skills

In today’s world where what you project online is valued a lot more than who you really are, developers tend to fill their profile up with all kinds of skills. I’m guilty of that too. My own profile is filled with skills that I have some passing knowledge about. The last time I did anything meaningful with Apache Solr was back in 2010, so of course, I have it on my profile.

I’ll admit that I’ve reached a stage in my career where I’m not marketing myself as a full-time programmer but I don’t remember the last time I added any skills to my profile or cared if anyone endorsed me for them. Speaking of endorsements — to all my well meaning, non-technical friends who endorse my skills on LinkedIn, please don’t. I appreciate the thought but some of you (I’m looking at you, my Sales and HR friends) have no idea what Hibernate is. If you thought it is a period of time where all body functions slow down and you drift off into some semi-unproductive state, you won’t be that far off but you really don’t know what it is.

To my developer friends, I’m not blaming you. I understand why you feel compelled to add every technical skill known to man on your profile. I can see the thought process that’s going through your mind. You did some work with React, so you feel confident in listing that as a skill. At some point, you did an evaluation of Angular vs React, so why not add Angular (even though you technically never worked with it)? Everyone is looking for Node Ninjas¹ and because you already know JavaScript, why not list Node as well? Your DevOps engineer is playing around with Docker and at some point you will interact with it, so why not highlight the full-stackworthiness of your profile by adding it? Your site runs on AWS so regardless of whether you have actually provisioned an EC2 instance or not, it’s not really a lie to list that as a skill, right? And so on.

Engineers as marketers

As hiring managers, we have plenty of recruiting solutions but they all sit on top of an existing, inefficient process. Hiring managers typically start their search by looking for profiles that match some keywords. As a developer considering new opportunities, your goal is to at least show up in that search result. You might as well throw all manner of skills on your profile, just so you have the chance to be considered for a role. Forget nailing the interview and getting the job — the first step is to be seen. Developers are doing what marketers do with SEO. Making sure their profiles “rank” higher.

Taking the SEO analogy further, by relying on keyword matching, hiring managers are only considering engineers who know how to market themselves. Knowing how to market yourself is an underrated skill to have but that has nothing to do with being a great developer. Unless there’s a fundamental change in the way potential candidates are identified and screened, you will always have developers who pad their profiles² and hiring managers who miss the opportunity to consider engineers who can’t stand out in the sea of resumes and profiles.

[1] Don’t call yourself a Ninja or a Rockstar in your profile. I know plenty of good engineering leaders who work in awesome companies who would reject a profile simply based on that. Unless…see below.

[2] I’m sure there are engineers who pad their profiles with all kinds of skills and can actually back them up. If you are one of them, more power to you. You can say whatever you want, including calling yourself a Ninja.