CV Duck
First and foremost, CV Duck is intended for developers and other specialists involved in developing digital products. It is widely believed that if you’re a good developer, whether you have a couple of resumes or you have none at all doesn’t matter; you’ll be able to easily find a job in any case. But according to DataArt specialists, a good CV can do you a world of good. Selecting their future employees, they go through hundreds of resumes on a daily basis, and it isn’t rare that people with good experience make the same mistakes that newbies do. Many of them turn out to be great specialists, but their CV doesn’t make this obvious.
Unlike their product-based counterparts, DataArt offers technological consulting services to clients all over the world. The company has been working in this sphere for over 20 years, which allowed them to achieve in-depth and varied expertise not only in the development of IT solutions but also in the field of evaluating and developing the skills and competencies of their staff. It was this solid experience that provided the foundation for DataArt’s new service. As of now, it is only available in Russia and Ukraine, but the company envisages to launch on other markers as well.
“We at DataArt love to share our knowledge and do it in different formats, from the development of professional communities to the creation of Skillotron, an online platform for self-testing of programmers. CV Duck is a new way for us to contribute to the development of the international IT community. The first weeks of CV Duck’s beta testing have demonstrated that the service is in high demand in Russia and Ukraine at the very least, and we hope that it will continue to grow in the months to follow,” commented Yulia Zavileyskaya, senior vice-president of DataArt.
The IT industry has a range of features that distinguish it from others. This is a highly globalized market, so the CV standards that have been established here are different from local CV-organization traditions current in other industries. For example, it isn’t common for Russian specialists to include a short personal summary in the beginning of their CV. And the few people that do it often omit the information that’s really worth mentioning. But this is a crucial part of your CV that often makes it or breaks it because headhunters don’t usually spend that much time on reading them in their entirety. What’s more, standard templates on job-searching websites aren’t really fit for tech specialists. Using these templates, people often include too much inessential information and leave out the most important parts, highlight the DataArt specialists.
A beta version of CV Duck has been launched in December and available ever since. All you need to do to have your CV appraised is to upload it on the website. Getting a reviewed document will take a couple of weeks, over the course of which the company’s experts evaluate the uploaded document and draw their recommendations concerning both its layout and contents, whilst also checking it for any stylistic, spelling and punctuation errors (this service is currently only available in the Russian and Ukrainian languages).
Despite the fact that different employers may have different priorities when picking a candidate for a job, what they look for in CVs isn’t a timeline of events in a person’s life, but rather this person’s potential and whether they will be a good match for the job or not. That’s why your resume needs to indicate the technologies and frameworks you’ve worked with, the industries you specialize in, and the things you’d like to do professionally. Your chances of being invited to an interview at this great IT company depend on how comprehensively and comprehensibly all this information is represented in your CV, as this is what headhunters scout for in the experience section.
What makes the CV Duck service special is that all CVs are reviewed by real people. All CV Duck referees are experts with a wealth of experience of working in IT, which enables them to give industry-specific recommendations. In addition, CV Duck is the only service out there that combines the expertise of HR specialists from different countries with a personalized approach, best international practices, and the local language and industry specifics. For example, the majority of Russian IT specialists create their CVs in Russian as not everyone aims to start their career from working at Google, leaning towards the internal market instead. By the same token, many specialists in other countries opt for writing their resume in their own language rather than English, which makes English-language CV compilers unsuitable.
Generally, though, industry-specific HR specialists all over the world hold a pretty much similar vision of what an ideal IT resume would look like, give or take a couple of minor local differences. That’s why CV Duck’s HR consultants base their recommendation on the international practice. And CV Duck’s editors help the service users keep to the right professional style and express their thoughts in a clear and organized way.
What to do if you’re not an IT specialist but still want a great resume
Any ITMO student can submit their resume to the University’s Careers Center for evaluation. The documents will be reviewed by the Center’s specialists together with their colleagues from the HR department, which allows for a comprehensive and high-quality appraisal of budding specialists’ CVs.
Evaluating the resumes, the reviewers will focus on a variety of different points. For example, they will check if your CV photo conforms to the accepted standards (don’t worry if it doesn’t, as ITMO’s student news outlet Megabyte Media and the Careers Center will be glad to offer their help in taking a new one), and if the resume has all the information it should to boost your employability to the max. The Careers Center specialists strongly advise for creating a bespoke CV for every job you apply for, so another thing they’ll check for is whether your resume indicates your desired job or profession, basing on which they’ll form an individual strategy for working with your resume. They’ll also look at the education and work experience sections, providing recommendations on the best way of organizing this information.
Special attention will also be paid to your language skills, computer proficiency and hobbies. Many think that the latter is a petty matter that the employers don’t care about, but in the reality, companies want to hire well-rounded people with lots of interests, so this section does play a big role.
What you’ll get in the end is a reviewed resume chock-full of valuable recommendations. Note that after you improve it, you can send your CV back to have it analyzed once again.
