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hiring Archives - AWS Managed Services by Anchor

May 16 2013
1

How to smack people in the face with your resume

By | Technical | No Comments

It’s hiring time again here at Anchor1 and that means we’ve been sifting resumes. Lots of them. We’d like to offer some advice. There’s no shortage of advice on what to put in a resume, how to format it, and how to highlight the most salient terms. All that still applies, but our advice is not about that. You don’t have much time to make an impression with your resume. Let’s make the seconds count by cutting the cruft from your resume and focusing on what matters. Short is good, shorter is better. We think this also applies to resumes: Keep your resume to 1 page. But, you might say, my career history is far too extensive to keep to a single page. That’s a nice problem to have, but…

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May 03 2013
1

Hiring only the best

By | Technical | No Comments

Regular readers of this blog will know that we’re hiring – we’re always hiring, in fact, and we’re going to be talking about it more in the near future. Hiring good people is really hard, so a smart company is always ready to scoop up a great candidate when they crop up. Hiring is hard because there’s a lot of really good people out there, but not that many great people out there. The esteemed Joel Spolsky covered this at length over a decade ago in The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing, but it comes down to this: We only want the very best and can’t afford to do otherwise. Here’s why… As a webhosting company, Anchor operates in a pretty unique space. We provide a level of support that goes…

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Dec 04 2012
2

Practical and hands-on hiring for sysadmins

By | Technical | No Comments

Hiring good staff is hard. As a company that revolves around employing Very Smart People, we know this very well. (And if you’re a Very Smart Person that can get stuff done, please get in touch) Plenty of companies have written about their hiring processes and the brilliant methods (“tricks” if you will) they’ve found for picking the best candidates and sifting out the rest. They’re a great read, but we think it’s really about finding what works best for you. We think Joel has a lot of great ideas, but we ignore the bits that are specific to hiring coders. We’d like to share some new stuff that we’ve been doing, including a very practical hiring test that we’re not aware anyone else is doing. We don’t honestly know…

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Aug 30 2012
1

RecruitLoop – A fresh approach to recruiting

By | Company News | No Comments

As people may have noticed, Anchor has been recruiting a lot of new staff in recent times. Apart from the usual sysadmin technical staff, we’ve been actively looking for extra sales champions too. Now I’ve been recruiting technical staff for quite a few years, and for the most part, both Anchor as a company and I have a really good idea what we’re looking for in our technical team; we’re an overtly technical company, we already know what good techs look like! On the sales front though, I’ve always found it to be a more challenging proposition. Where do good sales people hang out? As a relatively small company, how do we attract good talent and convince them to work for us and not Megacorp Ltd? We sell a very…

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Dec 06 2011
1

Getting a start in IT: Part 2

By | Technical | No Comments

(This is the second part in a two-part series on getting your first job in IT. Part 1 of the series covers getting a job in the first place; this article is about the sort of job you can expect when you’re starting out) Working in IT, like anything in life, is a learning curve. You start out knowing nothing, and you slowly gain experience and knowledge that allows you to work at a higher level, on more difficult (and, hopefully, interesting) problems. A difficult fact for many people to accept is that there is no substitute for real experience. TAFE (community college), University, and industry certifications are not equivalents. These academic credentials have their value, but they’re not an equivalent for experience. They’re like power mirrors or window tinting…

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Dec 05 2011
1

Getting a start in IT: Part 1

By | Technical | No Comments

Nobody in the IT industry was born with into it. At some point in the (distant?) past, every one of us was in the position of looking for (or falling into) our first job in the industry. I think us old hands forget how daunting that process was, the memory having been dimmed by the passage of time. So I’ve written a couple of posts (Part 2 will be coming out in a few days) to try and demystify the process a little, for people who might be looking to get their start. (Obligatory pimpage: Anchor is often looking for good people; keep an eye on our jobs page for new positions as they come up) Competition for good entry-level jobs in IT is always going to be tough. Whether…

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