Yeah, but the resume' hits the round file long before that choice can be made at most places. It's there for folks who network and go around HR because they're known by the hiring manager.
Most of my jobs have been hired that way in my career. It's nice to hear, "I called you because we need someone who knows what they're doing..." from an old friend, but I did have a full year once where the timing just never worked out for that and took a menial "monitor the backup jobs" sysadmin position a friend had his boss create out of thin air, just to pay the bills that year.
In IT another methodology is to obtain specific tech certifications, but those expire and don't show whether you have any depth beyond that specific specialty. And people who don't know you may worry they'll be burnt by a pony with only one trick: Taking tests.
Some tests include hands on and are worth far more than others. Cisco, RedHat, and SANS come to mind... But keeping those three current would be an effective pay decrease of $10K every year or two. If you're doing consulting work, it's probably necessary at a large form anyway, but they might pay for it. Anywhere else, you're buying. So you have to weigh the cost/benefit and decide accordingly. A single SANS cert will run $5K or more, all in. If it doesn't make you at least $5K plus taxes, or save your job, or gain you one when you're on the street looking... Ain't worth it.
I have two friends pestering me to come back to conferencing. It's flattering and all, but I'm enjoying what I'm doing now and their hints at salary are virtually identical to where I'm at.
What they don't know is they could steal me in a heartbeat with significant paid time off, and by significant I mean 5 weeks a year is all it would take. The place I'm at right now is stingy with time off even for 10 year employees. They're very relaxed about in/out of office nowadays, but "instant availability" is critical, and that doesn't lend well to travel, especially via light aircraft.
I'm coming up on five years and was hired to do something completely different than I ended up doing, but that's ok. The guy who hired me (VP, Engineering) had a political falling out with the upper management and was gone a month after I hired on, so I had to make myself useful in ways other than he intended. That's been a key to most of my career. "What needs to get done, and when do you need it done by?" and then just figure it out. Most telecom "lifers" don't have that attitude or they had it beat out of them by poor management or Union tactics, somewhere along the line.
Overall, perseverance and the knowledge that computers only do exactly as they're told, has been more useful to me than any of the "I love me" certificates and "wallpaper" so far.
We'll see how that works out in my 50s when tech-ageism starts to rear it's ugly head. Well that and the fact it's cheaper to hire the 20-something and make excuses for their mistakes, than to pay a "Senior" salary in IT still. The industry thinks outages and downtime are the norm. They do not have to be, but you have to cough up cash for the right gear and the right folks to run it, not to have outages be your "norm".
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