I recently went back into the Packet Pushers archive and listened to show 345: How to Further Your IT Infrastructure Career with guest Katherine McNamara. Katherine holds a CCIE and the title of Consulting Systems Engineer for Cisco. She referenced a blog post of hers on the show in regards to hiring, interviewing, and a seeming dearth of talented people in the job market. I went to her website network-node.com and found the post I'm referring to.
“Not trying to sound cynical or mean to anyone in the field here but for every 30-40 people we’d interview for the position, we’d get lucky if there was 1 would could answer CCNA-level questions. Obviously, I tried to give the people a fair shake by asking them questions based on the experience and skills they claimed on their resume but most failed at that. If we were hiring for entry-level positions, maybe some of these entry-level gaps could be excused but most companies have a business to run and desperately need someone who can hit the ground running. They can’t afford to stop their business for 2-3 years while they try to train up someone completely green on how to have decent skills and not everyone is willing to learn. That much is clear by the fact that there’s people with 10+ years of experience who either let their skills fade or didn’t try to learn anything outside of the daily tasks they were doing every day. ”
During the episode, Katherine said she would be more impressed by an applicant's blog than just about anything else. A resume is a snapshot in time, whereas a blog is a timeline. If someone is applying for a Network Engineer position and has posts on his or her blog discussing the merits of routing protocols or the latest and greatest hardware from Cisco, that person would stand out in a crowd of applicants.