This means that you have to do an excellent sales job to your prospective employer, something at which we techies are not generally very skilled. Your two sales tools are your résumé and the interview, in that order. Without a good résumé you won't get through to the stage where you can express yourself directly. In this article I cover making winning, attractive résumés. My follow-up article will take you into the interview room.

Let's start by looking at the interview process from the recruiter's point of view. Responsibility for hiring new people normally lies in the hands of the manager and the technical lead of the project for whom the new recruit is going to work. Think about that. Hiring you is not a full-time occupation for them. It might not even be a major item in their agenda; it's probably just one more task in a big pile that they are struggling to get through. You've got to make it easy for them.

The Big Easy
I once read about someone hiring a manual laborer at the peak of the unemployment crisis. For this single, unskilled position he received 400 applications. It would have taken days to read them all, time he did not have. Instead, he arbitrarily decided to read only those applications written on blue note paper, which reduced the number of potential candidates to about 20.

Clearly no technical recruiter would use such a technique, but you get the picture. It's been a long day, it's 6 PM, and she wants to go home to her family but first she has to look at half a dozen résumés before leaving. You want yours to be the preferred choice, so you need to make it stand out and have all the information she needs immediately obvious.

We're talking user-friendly documents here. Consider these few rules:

• Don't use fancy fonts. Maybe 14-point Catz Pyjamas looks great on your screen, but chances are that the people receiving your document by e-mail won't have that font installed. That means your cute design suddenly turns into Courier. Oops. Stick to the most common fonts, and that means Times New Roman and Arial.
  
• Use a common format. No matter how you feel about Microsoft, the most common and most reliable format for documents is Microsoft Word. Although Adobe Acrobat and PDF solve the font problem, they require the receiver to have the reader software installed. It's most unlikely that they will bother to download it just to read your résumé.
  
  HTML is an option as long as it's a single file and looks good on any browser. That effectively eliminates including photographs and any dynamic behavior. You can be sure that your résumé will be e-mailed around as an attachment, and any special attachments that can be lost in the process will be lost.
  
• Keep it short. Your potential employer wants to know if you can do the job, not learn your life history. Keep to the facts, and preferably tune the information to the particular job application. I will address this in more detail later.
  
• Keep it ordered. Put down the facts in reverse chronological order. They want to know what you've been up to most recently as that's most likely to be relevant.
• Check it. Use a spell-checker and carefully proofread what you've written. Even better, ask one or more of your friends to read it. Some common typos are real words (form vs. from), so be careful. Spell-checkers can't check acronyms, and they often ignore words in uppercase, so double-check those manually.

Here is a special word of warning to people using agencies. Many of them consider reformatting your carefully-crafted résumé to be part of their "added value." Unfortunately, they almost all fail to take into account the rules I've set out above. Even worse, not only do they crush out any originality in the presentation, but they introduce errors. Make sure that you see what they intend to send out about you before they put you on the circuit.