When I started here at The Bay Citizen we had less than 2 months to figure out what our site needed to do and get it running.  The first days and weeks were spent in impromptu meetings, in front of whiteboards and furiously coding what would quickly become what you see in front of you now.  This is exactly what I love about my career.  I love coming into a new organization and translating ideas to the web.  I like this so much that it is what I have built my career around.  In 12 years I have done this exactly six times, not including the countless side projects and experiments. As a result, my resume reads a bit differently than what I consider standard --  my average tenure is 2 years and you probably haven't heard of any of the companies I've worked for. 

Maybe this is normal and fine, but I have done a fair amount of hiring over the last 12 years and I think when faced with a stack of a hundred resumes with limited time to review, you need things to make yourself stand out.  It seems that if you have a known company on your resume, along with proper skills and experience, you might have a leg up on the competition.  However, I know that I am not the only one with this issue, in fact many developers have an average tenure of a year or less.  This isn't to say they are bad developers, but the industry has a way of chewing up developers and spitting them out, coupled with the fact that nearly 90% of start ups fail and you have a recipe for resume disaster.

I decided it might be interesting to reach out to some prominent technologists and ask them what they thought of this issue.  My question to them was simple: Is employer name recognition important when you are reviewing resumes?

Emmett Shear, CTO, justin.tv

I think employer name recognition can definitely help your cause, but it depends a lot on exactly what your position was at that company. If you're the guy who architected Google Search, ok, that's huge. If you are one of the original YouTube engineers who scaled that site up, that's really impressive. If you're the program manager who wrote the spec for Access, I'm going to pay attention. But if you were just Some Programmer at a big company (or small company) with no particular claim to fame, it's not going to help or hurt you much where you worked.

Mike Schiraldi, Member of the Technical Staff, reddit

When reviewing resumes, I consider recognizable employers in the experience section to be roughly as significant as a recognizable university on the Education section. That is, it's not absolutely essential in this day and age, but it certainly helps.

I am interested in hiring the best engineers - independent of the recognition of the name of their prior employer.  Having familiarity of a prior employer may facilitate conducting background checks for that particular candidate.

It is one of over a dozen factors that are considered while reviewing resumes. What's most important is what this person has accomplished as a team member that is relevant to the job we are hiring for. If someone has had a job at a company that has an excellent brand and is a very big, famous and respected company, that does not necessarily mean this person was a good employee. Even if the person was a great employee, it does not necessarily follow that they'd be a good match for the job we have to offer. 

For example, someone who was one of only two engineers in a successful startup indicates that there is a high likelihood this person was a good engineer since it is not likely that he/she did not contribute much. On the other hand an engineer coming out of a big company, even if it has a good reputation for having engineers (e.g. Google or Yahoo), could have been someone who didn't contribute much and rode along on the success of the overall large organization. 

So we give far greater emphasis to what the person did, what his/her role was and what experiences this person gained in the previous job. That doesn't mean that employer name recognition isn't important. Name recognition of the employer can give an indication of relevant job experience. After all, as employers we are likely to know the names of many companies that do work similar to the work we do. 

In summary, it is just one of over a dozen factors to consider in reviewing a resume of a potential candidate.

A brand name employer helps - certainly when reviewing a large number of resumes. If you have a 100 resumes to look at you probably want to make fewer than 20 calls and you need a quick way to filter.  If I see something like Search Engineer at Google, I'd probably have a sense of what the employee is capable of and the sort of work environment he has been in, I'd be inclined to reach out.  On the other hand, if I see a resume that looks interesting  but has no brand name employers, I would at least research some of the employers to see the quality of the work.

Name recognition never hurts, but I factor independent work -- open-source contributions, side projects, code/design experiments -- far more than previous work history.  It's a good gauge of their passion for technology, and it can be very difficult to evaluate an individual's contributions to a project when they're working in a large team.

After reading all of these responses, I think it pretty much boils down to, yes.  It is a good thing to have name recognition on your resume.  I'll also infer from these responses that what everyone is looking for in a resume is a sense of passion in career and that name recognition is just one of many ways that people look for this passion.

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