Let's talk resume's for a minute. You want that interview don't you? Well, sometimes all you have to get you there is your resume (although personal reference is the best way if you can get it, an area where networking and doing quality work can help).

There's a million places on the internet to help you decide how to structure your resume. I have only gotten one criticizm from my resume, and I am not sure if it's the content or the structure which works best. But here's a couple of pointers which I think have helped out my resume.

1. Place a logo of any certifications you have if available (e.g. MCSD). These are real eye catchers. Make the images small though..
2. Place your specific skills separate from your experience, preferably near the top. This makes it easy to survive the first pass from the recruiter/manager.
3. Sell yourself! Research “power“ words and make any experience descriptions short and chock full of those words.

Now, there's a few easy tips of what to do. I have been helping staff for years, and here's some of the gems I have seen.

• Horrible writing and spelling.
• Obviously exagerated skills and experiences (4 years experience, 10 years at a certain skill)
• Never say you are an expert at anything, even if you are. Humility goes a long way, and if the interviewer knows more, you'll be humbled by them, as I witnessed in the past week.
• Use nice paper if submitting a hardcopy (I received one handwritten on a partial piece of paper -- I kid you not)

It's not tough... just use some common sense!

Someone asked me today if I knew that you couldn't use GETDATE() in functions in SQL Server. Well, I did, so I dug out this solution I had found a while back, and decided to post it, since I am sure others have come across the same issue.

Basically, you use a view to do the work for you... here you go!

CREATE VIEW Function_Assist_GETDATE

/********************************************************
*
* A view to return one row, with one column, the current
* date/time from the built-in function GETDATE().  This
* view allows a UDF to bypass the restriction on access to
* the non-deterministic getdate() function.
*
* Attribution: Based on a newsgroup posting in by Mikhail
*   Berlyant in microsoft.public.sqlserver.programming
*
* Common Usage:
DECLARE @dtVar datetime
select @dtVAr = [GetDate] from Function_Assist_GETDATE
**********************************************************/

AS
    SELECT getdate() as [GetDate]

GO

GRANT SELECT on Function_Assist_GETDATE to PUBLIC
GO