First off, it's really amazing how much you can get done first thing in the morning when you're the only one in the office... as I was, from 7 to about 9 this morning.

Second off, what is up with people and their resumes? You wouldn't think writing a good resume would be that hard, but damn if we don't get in the most useless resumes anyway. I mean, if you just do the following 3 things, you'd be better than probably 75% of the resumes I've seen in the last month:

1. Spell check your resume. Grammar check it too. I've seen people use "where" when they meant "were", I've seen them spell "design" "desing", I mean come on, people! The worst are the ones where they've obviously just pasted their resume from Word and it still has spelling errors! Look for the red squiggly lines!
2. Make sure your skills and your experience match up with each other. I see these resumes that have page-long lists of skills -- but their work experience is two tiny paragraphs, neither of which mentions any of those skills. All that does is make me wonder why you didn't put down those experiences. Are you lying about the skills, too lazy to type up your experiences, or just dumb? I've got a stack of 100 resumes in front of me, and when I decide who I want to call, you can be very sure I'm going to pick the guy who took the time to tell me exactly how he's done this stuff before.
3. Make sure your experience listing is detailed, and tailored to the job. If I'm interviewing for a job about administering Windows servers, then I want to know when you've done that before, how complex the situation was, and how well you handled it. I don't want a one-line description of each job, even if it means the resume goes over 1 or 2 pages. Describe the job, then list (with details!) major project accomplishments. Impress me.

Work has been a learning experience the last two weeks. My boss told me to hire a new IT guy for our company. Did I mention I've never hired anyone before, and in fact only ever interviewed one person? Yeah. It's weird being on the other side of a phone interview. And difficult to know what questions to ask, that will actually tell you something about the interviewee. I can't possibly do worse than our last two hires, though, I guess.

Actually, this job is proving just about ideal so far. I'm in a position where I have maximum responsiblity and flexibility; I'm designing our software from the ground up; I'm learning about hiring people and managing contractors/part timers; and I don't have to give up the coding to do it. I really think I'm learning a great deal both about software design and development, and about my own skills. I feel really lucky that I got this job, even if it did take two tries. Especially when I talk to some of my employee prospects about their current jobs. :)