Tech Pros, CV Skills Matrix

The world of Technology is a constantly evolving one and it can be difficult for a Tech Pro to articulate their technical skills on their CV, in this article I share a tip that all technical professionals can adopt to get more interviews, avoid nonrelative ones, and land their, next role.

My name Is Matthew De Castro Silva, and I am a Tech Recruiter/Head/SME across the globe, one of my many day-to-day tasks is to support candidates through interview processes and quite often make CV recommendations, before presenting it to the hiring community, the most common one being the introduction of a "Skill Matrix".

The Skills Matrix is a simple yet highly effective way to project your technical "toolkit" and make your CV stand out to the receiver. More often than not the person who looks at your CV first is none technical and has many CVs to scan before selecting the "best" ones, the first place a none Technical recruiter will look is the job title, company name, length of service, degree, years of experience and in best case scenarios they will (Ctrl F) required skills to determine the best candidates.

These are all valuable recruitment CV scanning data points but when it comes to tech this can be very limiting and often leads to good candidates being rejected. My technique is very different as I use complex Bullion strings to pick up required skills as well as different versions or transferable technical skills and platforms and then identify if the candidate is working on the same or similar concepts, areas of development, domains, or projects.

As an example, a Ctrl F recruiter may search for "C++" and will not pick up a pro who has put "CPP" much the same as "Windows Desktop Applications" as opposed to ("WPF" OR "WCF" OR "WinForms" OR "Presentation function"......)

How to create my Skills Matrix?

Firstly you need to list your technical skills, for each skill you will also need to put a short description of what you used that particular skill for and how long in years and months you have practiced this skill e.g.

C# | programming the back end of WPF on C# in the development of Desktop Applications | 3 Years 4 months

Then order the skills with most used on the top and least used on the bottom and put this into a chart as seen below, possition the chart on the top of your CV underneath your "statement" or "introduction". A good skills matrix should also be categorized into areas of tech e.g. Programming Languages | Frameworks | Protocols/Standards.

This will allow the viewer to not only identify the right skills but also the right type of developer. It is important to put accurate amount of experience and not give the time since first starting to use the tool!!

As you can see this is very simple and is very effective! this should help you to get more invites for interviews and hopefully land you your dream job.

I hope you have found this helpful and if so please share it with your technical community! I look forward to seeing your modified Skills Matrix C!!