> While AJ’s government work experience gave him a good amount of cred in the public sector, he found that making the move to industry, and startups especially, was near impossible. It wasn’t that he was blowing interviews. He just couldn’t get through the filter in the first place.
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> It was AJ, a candidate that Zouhair Belkoura, KeepSafe’s cofounder and CEO, readily admits he would have overlooked, had he come in through traditional channels.
This was the story of my job search three years ago. It still kinda is.
I'm going through this right now as well. I ran my own business for 7 years, making content websites monetized through google adsense, building games, and freelancing, among other things. The primary source of revenue was adsense, and it paid the bills enough for me not to need a "real job" for years. 18 months ago, the adsense revenue started to dry up, and in an effort to make some additional income, I started looking for a normal job again.
I ended up reluctantly taking a job working for the State of California, mostly because the schedule was flexible and it was a 5 minute commute. In the last 18 months I've gotten two promotions, including one four months after I started which is unheard of in state service (and which my bosses had to fight HR to get). I spearheaded the acquisition and implemented of a version control system, which no one hear had ever used (they were just FTPing files all the time, risking overwriting of others' work etc), and got buy-in from all the developers who now say they couldn't imagine working without it. I also now wear a variety of hats besides programming including sysadmin work, dba work, architecture design, etc. My bosses rely on me more and more everyday just for my opinions and advice, let alone the work I do.
Yet now, when I send out my resume, it's almost always crickets. A year and a half ago, when the first item on my work experience list was "failed entrepreneurship", the response rate to my resume was about 80% (not even talking about interviews, just getting a response at all). Now it's more like 20%, all because the first item in my work experience section is my current job working in public service.
I admit, many of my coworkers probably deserve the reputation that public sector work has. A significant number of them are clock-watchers that the bosses don't even try to assign anything important to, because they know they don't give a shit and can't easily be fired (union), they are just filling a chair waiting for their public pension to accumulate over 20-30 years. Nevertheless, I also list on my resume all of the above, including the pioneering (for us) work I've accomplished here implementing version control etc. I never intended to stay here more than a couple of years, but I also never intended for this job to have such a negative impact on my job prospects.
I think I am probably going to revise my resume to leave this job off completely, and just say I've been working for myself for 9 years instead of 7. I predict sadly that this will return the response rate back to what it was before I had this job.
Depending on how you write your resume, I think that your public sector job could be a draw for smart employers. Hell, if you pitched it on your resume the way you pitched it here I'd absolutely want to get you in and talk to you about how you A) handled the failure of your business, B) pivoted to having a real job and C) overcame the crazy obstacles in public sector work to make real impact.
The fact that you can and did push change in public sector is huge, HUGE to anyone with half a brain. It's all in how you tell your story.
What was the thing a about AJ's cv that his TS/DV clearance Cyber Sec job made so hard if your recruiting out of that pool you know whats what.
My cv makes reference to some experiments I worked on at my first job which are described in very generic terms to avoid any problems with the official secrets act.
eg "complex problems involving digitizing data, from both still and high-speed film cameras."
I do like the idea of a straight up pitch using the more interesting jobs I have done
> What was the thing a about AJ's cv that his TS/DV clearance Cyber Sec job made so hard if your recruiting out of that pool you know whats what.
In that sense he had an advantage over me. The sec people know the deal with the engineers who work for the government on this stuff. I did radar signal processing code; without details I can't share it becomes very hard for me to explain how my background is relevant even though I could prove it in a practical task.
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> It was AJ, a candidate that Zouhair Belkoura, KeepSafe’s cofounder and CEO, readily admits he would have overlooked, had he come in through traditional channels.
This was the story of my job search three years ago. It still kinda is.