Impressive company names on resumes

Had a discussion this morning with a friend about the names of companies on a resume, specifically technical resumes. He took the viewpoint that having a known name on a resume is a career plus; my view is that this can only be determined knowing who is reading the resume.

Recruiters, I believe, latch on to high profile names like GE, Pepsi, or JP Morgan that appear on resumes and immediately develop a positive value assessment of the person irrespective of the content and accomplishments. Software engineers will look at the types of technologies developed and worked on and may actually view big company names as evidence of too much process and politics.

For instance, read the following:

Designed and developed a video game for the Windows XP platform, built on a proprietary 3D engine and implemented in C++ and DirectX. The project was a technical exercise in implementing common features found in games today: 3D graphics, real-time shadows (using shadow volumes), portal culling/rendering, oct-tree culling, character animations (skeletal and keyframe), AI pathfinding, particles, collision detection, image post-processing (bloom filter, color fades and blurs).

Technically, this is great stuff. But how many recruiters would degrade this if the name of the company were not EA but some smaller company trying to gain a foothold in the games market?

Thoughts?

Comment by pam claughton on December 16, 2008 at 2:37pm: Steve,
I've found that it's not so much that recruiters judge...it's that clients do. There are certain companies that clients don't want people from. Sadly, they have the assumption that candidates working at those clients are less desireable. It's difficult to overcome that preconception.

However, sometimes names do get both the recruiter and client excited. If I see Google or Microsoft on a resume, so far that has always correlated with the candidate being outstanding.

There are all kinds of assumptions though. Sometimes it's more about the size of the company than the name, and the reaction of course will vary depending on the size of the client. For instance, those large companies you mentioned would not be viewed favorably by one of my smaller clients. They'd have exactly the response you mentioned, too big, stuffy, not nimble enough, too much emphasis on frameworks vs. core Java skills.

Comment by Steve Levy on December 16, 2008 at 5:30pm: I'll bet you that if you take identical two resumes - just like studies done with race, age, and gender - and have one with name companies and the other with smaller, less well known ones and ask recruiters to rate the skill level of the person, the one with the large companies will be rated higher. Thoughts?

Comment by Steve Levy on December 16, 2008 at 5:31pm: What happened to Pony Boy???

Comment by Dan Nuroo on December 17, 2008 at 4:56am: Company names will definitely bring out biases one way or another.. Currently speaking from an internal role at the moment, working in the IT Consulting world... I have to say, some of our competitors employees will carry more weight than others purely because of the company name, and an assumption that they must understand our business. There are others that I am loathe to look at as I have been burnt a few times.. (Same applies to uni's as well)

As an agency Recruiter I once had a guy apply to me, who went on and on in his cv about his experience with Java in a particular company. This particular company had been a client of mine for years and funnily enough, it was a Microsoft only site.... a downside of dropping company names a little flippantly maybe