On Resumes and Communications Skills

Like most startups, we get a lot of resumes, and we spend a lot of our time reading them. But no matter how much time we spend in aggregate, we only have a few minutes to go over any particular resume. After reading hundreds of resumes and interviewing dozens of people, we’ve gotten a pretty good sense of who will work out.

And who will not.

One of the top things we look at, both when reading resumes and when interviewing, is communication skills. We’ve talked to many folks who were clearly bright, but whose lack of ability to communicate tanked their interviews. In fact, lack of communication skills is probably equal to lack of technical competence in terms of driving rejections..

One of the most egregious offenders at the resume review step is overly long resumes. These are one of the clearest indicators of lack of communication skills: A single page for every five years of experience tends to be plenty. Can’t do it? Then your communication skills may need some polishing. At in-person interviews we see the same issues as well – candidates who do not take time to make sure that they understand problems posed to them, who do not ask clarifying questions, who do not explain their thought process when solving problems, who ramble for minutes rather than answering a question succinctly. In a small, highly collaborative company, folks who cannot communicate are hamstrung in their ability to influence, their ability to solve problems in a timely manner, their ability to deliver code that matches requirements.

We dream of a new kind of resume – one that is clean, and clear, and free of technical jargon. One that communicates passion and aptitude, energy and enthusiasm, intelligence and sociability. The usual resume template of “here is where and when I worked and what my title was and what technologies were involved” is a poor communicator. What about resumes that speak to a person’s true career development?

For example, a timeline of technical maturity, with location of employment as a secondary concern? After all, if you’ve worked at one company for 10 years but grew constantly, why should that take as much space as a position where you worked for only 1 year?

So we lay down this challenge – rethink your resume, send us something original, something more than simply where you worked and what you know! Something that communicates who you are, and what you are about.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Inversion as a Technique for Innovation

Innovation will make or break a startup like Sociable Labs: We have to keep up with what is going on in the Social world on the technological, psychological, social, and business fronts, and then quickly apply new capabilities and patterns to help our customers and move our platform forward.

Transforming knowledge into innovation is something we think about a lot, and not just at a subconscious level: We apply a number of techniques, one of the most powerful of which is inversion.

To understand the power of inversion, consider a few different examples: In the business space, consider the traditional auction in which users bid the price of a product up. The technique of inversion involves looking for vectors of action or design and inverting them. In this case, we see a clear and simple vector where prices are being bid up. What if we invert that and bid prices down? In that case, we get reverse auctions, which are a powerful and useful variant. Let’s find another opportunity for inversion: What if we inverted the role of the buyer into a seller, and set up a barter system where sellers could join together to exchange goods via an offer system?

Another interesting recent example in the education space is the inversion of homework and schooling – an experiment where students do their homework in school, and study at home. An approach that has, apparently, shown some promise.

In the technology world, there are great examples of powerful inversions: For example, the idea of inversion of control, where systems do not directly go and find other systems (e.g. a CRM system going out to find an email system to send notifications) but are wired together by an external agent. Another example is the idea of using the shape of the tables in a database to generate classes for an application. Inverting this would say that we should use the shape of classes to generate databases, and indeed both patterns are useful and present in the industry.

Sometimes though, one vector of approach does not work well, but its inversion does. For example, we have not seen immense success in bringing companies’ commerce systems to Facebook applications, but inverting that and bringing Facebook’s Open Graph to companies’ commerce sites has worked amazingly well.

As we experiment and develop new systems and solutions, we always try to look at a variety of inversions in order to see if we have covered possibility space in a thorough way. We hope this technique helps you generate new ideas.