The Ticket to Finding Good Tech Talent

Prasad Tenjerla, COO

Finding the right talent for that critical technical position in your company is like winning the lottery. When you are trying to acquire the right person for a technical position, it takes tremendous effort: screening, testing technical skills, evaluating equivalent positions, assessing personality, etc. These are all very time consuming and could involve many current employees.

There are many procedural frameworks available in the market to distinguish if a potential recruit has the technical expertise they claim, or if they merely talk a good game. Common mistake supervisors or managers make is expecting a new person, who has a different history of specific experiences and successes, will be able to perform instantly to the same ability in a new and dissimilar environment. There are new people, different personalities, procedures, equipment, expectations, etc. This is where the expectation and reality of life differ.

INCREASE YOUR CHANCES FOR SUCCESS

When going through the hiring process, especially for a non-technical person looking for an IT professional, it’s important to keep certain things in mind to help you recognize the correct talent. Whether it’s for full-time permanent employees or contract consultants, the first time you’re hiring technical employees or the hundredth, remember these:

• Candidates are trying to get the job. Although they may be very knowledgeable in the technical area you’re looking for, they may answer questions based on what they think you want to hear.
• References are always helpful, but keep in mind that they are given to you by the potential employee. They are only going to give you people that will provide a positive picture of their abilities and performance. That doesn’t mean it’s a wrong picture, but do listen to the references input knowing they already like your candidate.
• For the technical side, there are different online resources available, but it always helps to have another person assist with the evaluation. Make sure to ask questions that require a description of an issue they needed to address and ask the candidate to draw out or whiteboard how they solved this problem. Tell them of a problem your company has had and ask how they would resolve it.
• It’s easy for interviewers to do some research and discover the type of questions that your company asks during interviews. Glassdoor is a growing resource for job seekers and often has interview questions posted in their reviews. Being aware of this can help you assess the candidate – are they using the information just to get the right answer, or to better understand the needs of your company and how it works?
• Remember the soft skills. For tech positions, tech skills are essential. But the soft skills of conversation, communication, and personality can determine if this candidate will be a good match for the current team or situation.

PROVIDE A WINNING STRATEGY

Once you’ve vetted your new recruit and made them your new employee, it’s important to give them the opportunity to succeed. It’s not uncommon to have probationary periods so that both you and the new IT employee can determine if this really is a winning combination.

To help give everyone the best chances for success, it’s important to have a plan for integrating the new team member.

• Provide the time and training needed to understand your companies procedures, processes, and idiosyncrasies. Both sides need to get better acquainted and allow for an adjustment period.
• Supervisors and management should take some time and develop an understanding of the person’s strengths.  Assignment for deliverables, tasks, and duties should progress as this assessment takes place. It’s easy for managers to get carried away when they have additional help and assign new employees too much too soon.
• Create an environment where their talent can grow and flourish. Keep challenging them to present solutions to problems, since they have a different perspective as the new person. Don’t be quickly dismissive, or they will stop suggesting solutions and eventually be discouraged. Then the process of hiring could need to start all over again.  
• Keep inspiring them. Allow your new team member to showcase their talents. Provide them with guidance on ways to improve. Provide specific objectives and driving milestones to encourage reaching their potential and hopefully exceed your expectations.

Despite all the money, time, background checks, and review, you’ll only know if you’ve hit all those lucky numbers when the new technical recruit begins working. That is when you’ll find out if you’ve hit the jackpot.

5 Tips for a Top Tech Resume for IT Professionals

Prasad Tenjerla, COO

You have 6 to 10 seconds. That’s the amount of time an employer looks at a CV or resume before deciding whether the applicant should be considered for a technology staffing, job, or any position. That isn’t much time, and may seem unfair. However, snap decisions need to be made when you have hundreds of people applying for the same job. Harsh, but very true.

There are some keys to making sure that your resume gets you to the next step in the interview process.

1) Adjust your resume to target the job:

There was a time when you would write one resume and send it out to every position that vaguely looked interesting. Those days are gone. With the volume of positions open and the amount of applicants coming through, it’s important to look at the technology staffing description and target your talents and skills to meet the employer’s expectations. Use the same keywords in your resume that they’ve used in their job posting. Reorganize your project work with the most relevant being at the top of the list.

CV’s tend to be longer than resumes, but that doesn’t mean they should be a short novel. After reading all of these resumes, the recruiter or Human Resources person will get bored after only a few pages. The traditional rule still applies – resumes should be no more than 2 pages (1 is better) and CV’s should be more than 4 pages (3 is better). And again, target the important information towards the beginning.

2) Put those IT Skills at the top:

List out your IT skills and specialties, keeping your strengths first, and progressing down. Remember, you’re targeting the posted job so start with your most relevant and strongest technical skills. Leave off things like Microsoft Office, or Excel. These day’s you’re expected to have a good knowledge of standard office software, regardless of the type of work you do.

If you are applying for specific type of job, HTML specialist, for example, don’t just mention HTML expert in your skills and then never mention HTML again. Make sure you have utilized it in other projects and jobs and mention what you did. This is something that will catch the resume reviewers’ eye and corroborate your statement that you are an expert.

3) Focus on Accomplishments, Leave off the Objectives:

There may be some fields where it’s still appropriate to list out objectives, if you’re just out of school or looking for a different line of work for example. For the most part, it’s unnecessary for IT professionals. Your objective, by submitting your resume, is to get the job. Don’t waste the CV real estate on that and put the focus on your accomplishments. Include details about your software solutions and specific projects.

Emphasize the accomplishments of your positions over mere duties. Don’t be vague by saying things like “reduced downtime”. Include quantifiable details such as “reduced downtime by 20% which increased customer satisfaction by 30%.” Add some detail on how you accomplished this and what tools you used.

4) Don’t be overly Technical:

It’s important to be clear and concise in your presentation. As counter-intuitive as is sounds, don’t be too techy or use too many technical words. The person doing the resume review may not have a strong IT background so they may not be able to follow along.

Also, try not to use too many acronyms or buzz words. Each company has its own way of referring to certain procedures or things, so it might not translate well for another company.  At least once layout what the acronym means (Sealed Air Container) and from there you can use the abbreviation (SAC).

5) Be neat, clear and concise: 

Keep your CV or resume neatly organized with a logical progression. Make sure to double and triple check all spelling and grammar. Spell Check catches certain obvious misspellings, but it can also miss certain phrases and words, especially for fairly technical documents. Have several people review your resume, or use some of the online tools, to make sure your grammar contains no glaring mistakes.

It’s also important to have a professional email address. Daydreamer2121 doesn’t match the professional and security requirements for a high-level position at a pharmaceutical company. When attaching your resume, you should make sure it has your name instead of something vague like myresume.doc. BobSmithHTMLResume.pdf makes it easier for the technology staffing team and recruiters to find again when they need it.

Overall, details matter when putting together a CV. It shows your professionalism as well as your skill level. It lets the recruiter know that you are the one they want to hire and gives you the best chance to get that job you want

All about Facial Recognition Technology

Srinivas Chintakindi, Manager – Technology/Products at PamTen

WHAT IS FACIAL RECOGNITION?

Facial recognition is the least intrusive and fastest-growing field of biometric technology. Biometrics, in general, is the body’s measurements and calculations – the metrics of the human body and characteristics.  The study of the body’s measurements and relationships goes back throughout humankind, but the technology to quantify it has been significantly advanced by current technology.

There are several forms of biometric technology:

• Retinal and/or Iris scans
• Fingerprint recognition
• Palm scan
• DNA matching
• Facial Recognition

Focusing on Facial Recognition, with the latest developments in technology, systems are now able to identify a person’s face and verify who that face belongs to from any digital image.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Facial recognition analyzes the characteristics of a person’s face through the input of a digital image. It measures the overall facial structure, including certain measurements of distance and depth that create the hills, peaks, and valleys of a face. These measurements are retained in a database as a faceprint and are compared when a user stands before the camera or sends another digital image. It is estimated that biometric facial recognition technology will soon overtake fingerprint biometrics as the most popular form of security for user authentication. Currently, Apple’s iPhone X and some Android phones include Face ID technology that lets users unlock their phone with a Faceprint mapped by the Phone’s camera.

There are a variety of facial recognition methodologies, but in general, they work by comparing selected facial features from the given image with already stored facial data within a data source. When the image is fed into the software, it maps the individual’s facial features mathematically and stores the data as a faceprint. Then the software uses machine/deep learning algorithms to compare a live capture or digital image to the stored faceprints to verify an individual’s identity.

Every face has numerous, distinguishable landmarks; the different peaks and valleys that make up unique facial features. Each human face has approximately 80 nodal points that are measured for verifications. Some of these measured by the Facial Recognition Technology are:

• Distance between the eyes
• Width of the nose
• Distance between nose and lips
• Depth of the eye sockets
• The shape of the cheekbones
• Eye shape
• Skin texture
• The length of the jaw line

These nodal points are measured creating a numerical code, the faceprint, representing the face in the database.

Have you posted a picture to Facebook and noticed that the system often automatically asks if you’d like to tag other friends that are in the picture? That’s because Facebook uses facial recognition software to tag individuals in photographs. Each time an individual is tagged in a photograph, the software stores mapping information about that person’s facial characteristics. Once enough data has been collected, the software can use that information to identify a specific individual’s face when it appears in a new photograph. As the largest social media platform in the world, it’s building quite an extensive data base of faces.

WHAT CAN IT BE USED FOR?

Facial recognition is getting more popular and being used in many commercial and governmental industries. Below are some of examples of how facial recognition is currently being used.

• Law enforcement is using this software more frequently for a variety of reasons: to scan crowds for wanted men and women, check suspects against mug shots, and protect the nation borders. It can also be used to find missing children and victims of human trafficking. In the event of missing child or person, their image can be added to the database and security systems at public places like airports, train stations, and bus terminals that can scan the crowd continuously. It can alert the law enforcement if any matching Face is found.
• For large events and concerts, facial recognition software can be used to identify the guests at the gate and can decide whether the person purchased the tickets for that event or not. If they did it can check-in the guest automatically.
• Facial recognition can be used to diagnose diseases that cause detectable changes in appearance.
• Face recognition is currently being used to instantly identify when known shoplifters, organized retail criminals, or people with a history of fraud enter retail establishments. Photographs of individuals can be matched against large databases of criminals so that loss prevention and retail security professionals can be instantly notified when a criminal that prevents a threat enters a store.
• Dating sites match the people with similar features, because some people are most attracted to those that look like them.
• Social media sites use this technology to tag the people automatically every time images are uploaded.
• Casinos can use the facial recognition software to help addictive gamblers. It can also help the casinos by identifying the cheaters or advantage gamblers. It can identify members of voluntary exclusion lists and alerts the casinos. These people can cost casinos big fines if they are caught gambling. Along with casinos, bars can also use this technology to identify the underage drinkers.
• Mobile companies can use the Face as an authentication mechanism to unlock a phone or smart mobile device. Mobile purchases can also be purchased with facial recognition.
• Face recognition surveillance systems can instantly identify when expelled students, dangerous parents, drug dealers, or other individuals that pose a threat to school safety enter school grounds. By alerting school security guards in real-time, face recognition can reduce the risk of violent acts. In addition to making the schools/universities safer, this technology can also be used to take student attendance automatically.
• Advertising companies can use Facial recognition technology to identify the age and gender of people by making educated guesses based on previous biometrics and provide targeted advertisements in open spaces like gas stations.
• Face recognition can work as a means of access control to ensure that only authorized individuals get into facilities like labs, boardrooms, bank vaults, training centers for athletes, and other sensitive locations.

Facial recognition technology has many positive applications. But it also raises many questions about personal privacy and governmental and commercial intrusion. How do you feel about the growing incorporation of facial recognition technology in our lives?

Quick Tip to Strengthen Your Password

There are certain applications and websites that you use on a regular basis. Do you cringe every time that application you are logging in to says, “Time to Change Your Password”?  Most people do. Trying to figure out a new password AND remember it is a challenge to almost everyone trying to practice better cybersecurity.

One thing you can do to help make your password more secure is to make it longer. Passwords that are only 4 or 5 characters long can be cracked by hackers in seconds. The strongest passwords are now 8 to 12 characters long and contain capital and lower case letters, numbers, and characters. If the system you’re using allows it, upwards of 15 characters provide even better protection.

If you’re worried that a longer password will be harder to remember, there are ways to overcome that and make it memorable but not easily recognizable.

For example:   I<32b@t8Ec#  That’s 11 characters long, using all the components for a strong password. How is it memorable? If you look closely it says I love to be at the beach. Memorable, but not easily recognizable.

You can also use a phrase and turn it into a password. Think of a phrase or song lyric that you can associate with the website. For example: Don’t stop believing.  If you do some substitutions and use underscores for the spaces, you can get D0n+_$tOp_b31i3viNg. That would definitely be more challenging for a hacker to crack. It’s a phrase you’ll remember and will likely remember the substitutions after a time or two.

Cybercriminals are getting smarter and their code-breaking systems are starting to recognize some of the substitutions: @ for a or at, 3 for e.  Long passwords, though, are still your best protection.

It’s also extremely important to change your password on a regular basis and do not repeat a password on a given website or across accounts.

Make Two Step Verification Part of Your Cybersecurity Routine

An extra coat helps keep you warm. A deadbolt lock on your door, along with your regular lock, makes the door harder to break into. Doesn’t it make sense to up your cybersecurity and give your personal data the same level of protection?

Two Factor Authentication (often abbreviated to 2FA) adds that extra layer of protection to your online presence.  Sites like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Apple, PayPal, and others have been using it for a long time. More and more websites and applications are adding it as an additional way to protect the information that users share with them.

Many of the apps you use frequently might have been asking you if you’d like to activate Two Factor Authentication. Don’t think of it as another annoying thing to enter, but think of the extra protection it adds. Hackers are actively looking at ways to acquire your personal data and everyone is a target.  

Entering your user name and password is one step of verifying your identity. 2FA typically comes in 3 methods:

• Something common that you set such as a password, PIN, zip code or answer to a question
• A code or response sent to a phone, credit card or fob
• A biometric response, such as a fingerprint, retina, face or voice

After entering your user name and password, you’ll be asked for authentication based on the method used by the system you are logging into. The most common is a code texted to your Smartphone. That code must then be entered to gain access. Typically there is a very specific time frame to enter the information. This is important because it also limits the amount of time a cybercriminal would have to gain access.

There are several benefits to using Two Factor Authentication. It improves general security by making it harder for attackers to impersonate you. In doing so it helps reduce fraud and identity theft. This builds a more secure online relationship for businesses and consumers.

Two-factor authentication comes in various shapes and sizes with varying levels of protection.  While 2FA is an added layer of protection it is only as good as the owner’s security. If the owner shares the authentication information, misplaces the physical token, or stores the authentication information in an unsecured manner, then no two-factor authentication technology is going to be able to protect your accounts. 2FA is a great way to improve your security if you follow best practices and stay alert.

Adding extra security to your online life does require an extra step, but the protection it provides is as cozy as that extra winter coat.

Don’t Get Caught by a SMiShing Scam

What’s SMiSh?

People are becoming wiser and more vigilant about checking where emails are coming from, or whether that link in social media should be clicked. Unfortunately, hackers and cyber thieves are getting smarter too. The latest entry into identity and data theft is SMiShing.

SMiShing is a phishing scam using Short Message Service (SMS) text messages. With the proliferation of cell phone use, personal emailing is declining. Criminals are looking for the next open window to access information. Even if you have security on your phone like pin numbers, facial recognition, or scanners, responding to a wayward text could give the scammer an all access pass to the information on your phone.

What does SMiShing look like?

These texts can take on several different forms. They can be looking for several different responses. Have you gotten any messages like this?

“Your Gmail account has been compromised and deactivated for your protection. Text back SENDNOW in order to reactivate your account.”

“We have identified some unusual activity on your online banking. Please log in via http://bit.wi/tAkU4 to secure your account.”

“Final Notification: Your Apple ID is about to expire. Prevent this by confirming your Apple ID at http://update-apple.us”

“Your Bank Alert: Your CARD starting with 4278 has been deactivated. Contact us immediately at – 206-497-2211”

“CollegeU has a new way to connect with Alumni like you. Please reply YES to confirm, or STOP to cancel. Msgrates may vary.”

These types of texts play on your fears and take advantage of the immediacy of text messaging. At first glance, they might seem genuine. But always be cautious of messages that come uninvited or from places that you aren’t familiar with.

What Can You Do?

There are some precautions that you can take when you get a text from your bank or other numbers that are suspicious or make you concerned for your cyber security.

• Start by taking your time. SMiShing texts count on the fast response reflex. But don’t rush to answer if you have the slightest inkling there’s something false about the email. Do the research first before responding.
• Most banks do not text customers. Never click on a link or call a number in the text. Instead, call the customer service number on their website or on your statement. If it’s something genuine, they’ll know and be able to advise you. If it’s a scam, let the bank know you’ve received it and delete the text.
• Do a search on the web and look up the number and message. You’ll see if there are other posts with this message or scams with the number.
• If the message is from a legitimate company, call the company directly first. Talk to their customer service team and ask if this is a legitimate text. If they don’t know or they aren’t familiar with it, delete the text.
• Any link in a text should meet the same criteria as an email link. If it doesn’t say https://, it’s not real.
• Look for suspicious numbers that don’t look like real mobile phone numbers, like “5000“.These numbers link to email-to-text services, which are sometimes used by scam artists to avoid providing their actual phone numbers.
• Don’t store your credit card or banking information on your smartphone. If the information isn’t there, thieves can’t steal it even if they do slip malware onto your phone.

Other precautions you can take to make sure your phone is secure is to have  a good antivirus program installed and turn on a Text Alias or “Block texts from the internet” feature if your service provider supports these features. Always remember to turn off Bluetooth, wi-fi, and location services if you don’t need them.

Don’t Get SMiShed – but if you do…

If you think that you are a victim of smishing, you should contact law enforcement to report the scam. You can also file a complaint with the FCC at no cost. 

Scammers and hackers are always trying to find their way into your data. Make sure you don’t give them a way in!