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Joel Rants About Resumes
rbrandis writes "Mr. Spolsky's latest rant is about writing a resume that will be read "Please do not use cover letters that you copied out of a book. If you write 'I understand the position also requires a candidate who is team- and detail-oriented, works well under pressure, and is able to deal with people in departments throughout the firm' then at best people will think you're a bullshit artist and at worst they will think that you were not born with the part of the brain that allows you to form your own thoughts and ideas.""
Sometimes they do look for a conformist that will work hard and implement company policy without asking to many questions. In those cases a well written and not to bold resume/CV could help. Unfortunately you dont have much chance of knowing that until after the interview.
This is my sig, show me yours
A great cover letter won't even help you get the resume passed to the person who is doing the hiring.
Having been responsible for the interview process, I have to agree with 95% of Joel's comments. I also used e-mail as the principal method of communication, because it allowed me to drag and drop organize an otherwise unruly pile of paper.
While I never saw an application that said "hire me d00d" from Yahoo, as he seems to be quoting, I saw some pretty awful stuff. The fact of the matter is most jobs will generate far more interest in the position than it is possible to interview through, so a good resume is your only hope of getting to the phone interview in my book.
In my experience, 50% of all applications (or more) are either:
a) Unqualified: why are you wasting your time? If I ask for C++ experience, your VB skills are probably not going to help debug the memory leaks you create.
b) Illiterate: I'm a poor speller too, but I found "spell check" and a proofreader, why can't you?
c) Inflexable: my favorite category. "I work from home in California, and telecommute" isn't going to fill position in southern Arizona. I was shocked by the quantity of these in 1999, heyday of stupid applications.
I do however make some allowances for international applicants. Some of my best finds were people with 80% command of English, but 100% command of C++, architecture and design. I'm willing to work with a language barrier, so I thought he was a bit agressive in that area.
Sig under construction since 1998.
It is amazing how poor most resume submissions are. They follow the common pattern, but in doing so manage to not stand out at all.
For example, people applying for art positions (like 3D artist) will send a resume but not a portfolio. What's up with that? I could not care less where they went to school, I only care what they can do.
The cover letter is by far the most import thing in most instances. It needs to say what the applicant is capable of. What they have done that is similar. And why they want to work for the company in question (which they should show some clue about).
Don't use "Resume Writer 2.0", just sit down and write something intelligent. Put yourself in the frame of mind of the person who has to wade through the huge influx of job seekers. Think about you would want to see in a resume/cover letter.
David Whatley
Joel's comments may be applicable when applying straight to a person within a dept. But unfortunately for many companies, the resumes are sent through HR first.
The HR people usually don't know the tecnical details about a job all that well, so they filter based on presense of Buzzwords (or so it seems a lot of the time). If you don't put the admittadly moronic "detail oriented, forward-thinking, team player" in your resume, it may not even get to the person who can actually understand what is written on the resume!
Of course this only applies to technical positions. If you are applying to a job that only asks for MS OFFICE skills, HR can probably figure it out.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
This is exactly why people correct other people's English mistakes. If you aren't using it correctly when you are in casual conversation (or casual correspondence, as the case may be), you might not use it correctly when it actually matters.
Sure, he understands what you mean if you write "i m interested in your job," but if you don't have the patience or care to make even that one sentence cover letter correct, why on earth would an employer want to take a chance on you?
I'm done apologizing for wanting people to speak and spell and use English correctly. For most of you, this is your native language! Why is it shameful to want to speak it correctly?
(I probably made some grammar errors in there. I'm SURE I did, and I'm sure someone will pounce on them. I proofread this, and I have spellcheck running, and I have a pretty decent working knowledge of grammar in English, so, you know, I'm trying.)
Also spell check and let an unemployed English major review it.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
While I understand his frustrations, the reality is that there are a lot of people--*especially* a lot of techies--out there looking for work. And spending the time/energy to develop a complete narrative cover letter for each position you send your resume to is simply time prohibitive.
I'm willing to bet that 99% of people who are looking for work right now are taking a "shotgun" approach. This isn't the *best* way to get your resume out, but it is the quickest. And if you're looking to get your foot in the same door as several hundred others, speed counts. As does as much exposure as possible--hoping that somewhere, somehow, your resume will generate interest.
Ultimately, the best way to generate interest is to carefully research the company you're submitting to, the position, check for networking opportunities (very important!), etc. But this isn't always practical--and it's tough to tell how much extra attention that will generate. From the job seeker's standpoint, sometimes "shotgun" is the most practical, even if it doesn't generate as much interest each time it's sent out.
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
According to Joel's article, there's two reasons why he wouldn't consider you for a job if you did that. First:
And second:
I've known career counselors that have told me to do the same things you've described, but I have to admit Joel is making a lot of sense here. His company runs on very few employees, and he's always been extremely selective, so perhaps his hiring process is not the norm. However, in these times when every employer is getting hundreds of resumes for even the lowliest position, they can afford to be every bit as selective (some might say arbitrary) in their hiring processes.
Let the content of your resume do the talking, not the presentation. Follow the instructions the employer gives for applying, and proofread your application several times for clarity and spelling. Beyond that, there's not much you could that that would serve any purpose beyond annoying a potential employer. IANAHM, though. Just a schmuck who recently landed a job.
Joel - in all fairness this *is* a summer internship you are receiving resumes for. These people haven't got a great deal of experience - the fact that they put time into writing a halfway decent cover letter should be a positive thing, not a reason to chuck their potentially good resume in the trash.
Or maybe teamwork and being detail oriented are both bad attributes for a software engineer?
I'm a 2000 man.
> and bullshit questions like "what is your greatest weakness".
+1 Insightful. If you don't want me to play your interview like a game, then don't make it a game. Questions like that only test my ability to study and come up with my best material before an interview. Is that what you really want, or do you want honest answers? A question like that is like your wife asking you, "Does this dress make me look fat?" The answer can only be honest if it's the truth, otherwise you must lie. If it's a sales position and you want to test my ability to bullshit smoothly, that's fine I suppose.
While I'm ranting, what's with filling out "applications". If I'm applying for a sysadmin or programmer position, you have my resume. It details everything I'm required to copy onto your damn 6 page, small type, not-enough-room, non-online-pen-online-sore-fingers application. I will fill out a life history and anything else you want if you are actually interested in me, but don't make me fill out a phonebook before I'm even issued a first interview.
And what does it matter what high school I attended? I haven't been near that town since I went to college. Who cares where I went to high school?!? It's not like I had much of a choice in the matter. And don't put a 3"x1" space and expect me to write "School Name, Address, and Phone Number" on it. Otherwise, make it an online application so you can easily change the font to 3pt when you print it out.
Again and again, I see job positions for which the applicant is asked to submit a resume via a textbox in a web form. Usually, no mention is given of what format is allowed (Plain ASCII? HTML? PDF? Tex?), so one pretty much has to assume least-common denominator, and submit in ASCII. Then, one has to pray to the line-width gods that the end product (printed out? online?) will not look too horrible compared to what you just put in.
So, for those on the other side of the table, can you please implement a simple web-file-upload protocol, and tell us what format you like?
"...here's what I do with the resumes: I make three piles: Good, OK, and Bad. I give the same resumes to Michael and he does the same thing. There are always enough people that we both put in the Good pile that those are really the only people that stand a chance. In principle if we can't find enough people we like that we both rated as "good" we would consider some people who got Good/OK, but in practice this has never happened."
After my (1st) layoff, I attended a resume seminar paid for by the company. The speaker mentioned this one principle: That your resume was a tool to get the company to interview you. Not only were qualifications important, but your resume had to communicate that you were interesting or unique in some way - the point of the latter being that it would brand your resume into their minds and guarantee you an interview.
If X number of people all have basically the same qualifications and skills, and they all have decent looking resumes, the separating factor then becomes personality or uniqueness (something that would say "hey this guy would make a cool and interesting co-worker/subordinate).
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
Its very difficult to be objective and to find a "one size fits all" sort of resume guide. Even one that is written by Joel Spolsky.
Joel has some criteria that he considers more important than others.. Fine. He's doing the hiring, it is his perogative (sp?). The thing is, not all hiring managers are ticked off by the same things that Joel rants about.
I have seen resumes with a few (minor) spelling errors that wouldn't have been caught by spellcheck make it into a short list. I've also seen letter perfect ones rejected. Obviously, some managers scan through and look for work experience and qualifications. They don't notice (or care) about "having a space only AFTER the comma" (direct quote from his rant).
I also don't completely agree with his idea that "if you don't have the right qualifications, don't apply for the job". I've applied for a job asking for 4 years experience, but I only had 2 (or a bit less). I still got the job. It is a nitpick, but if you think you're close enough, it's worth giving it a shot. Obviously, asking for a DBA and getting a COBOL programmer applying isn't ideal, but some employers are flexible about years of experience and specific technologies.
Last, but not least, I don't have a domain of my own. I use my Yahoo address and check mail on it regularly. What's wrong with using a free email service anyway ?
Sorry, Mr. Spolsky. You have good points, but I wonder if your rant deserves the publicity that it is going to get with a frontpage Slashdot story. Apologies for the rant of my own :)
So, it's amazing this skill set is not available, because now they'll have to export the job offshore where apparently all the IT workers have this skill set.
Honestly, I'm surprised people look at cover letters at all, it's all fluff anyway.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Pah! I dismiss your resume out of hand. That's a song from The Hobbit, not The Lord of the Rings...
Cheers,
Ian
I agree with most of Joel's rants. I have been a rep at a local college(a highly reputable tech school) job fair numerous times.
I am truly amazed at how crappy some resumes are. Some students hand me resumes that are printed off-centered, bad photocopies, wrinkled from the folder they just stuffed it in, etc. If they can't take the time to print their resumes on quality paper and carry them in a resume binder, I tend to believe they are just as careless when they are working.
Spacing and formatting is also a huge problem. Highlight the most important aspects of your resume. When looking at hundreds of resumes in a few hours, you want to be able to easily spot education and skill set (especially when dealing with college students who have little experience).
Many applicants came to the job fair dressed in non-formal attire. This is not good. At least, wear a shirt and tie. Don't roll out of bed and throw on some jeans, take the time to look presentable.
Like Solsky says, do these factors hurt an applicant if they have they meet the necessary requirements, sometimes. When applying for a job, you are selling yourself and must put your best effort in every little detail. From resume to dress, you will be scrutinized and judged. Look your best.
100% Insightful
The computer is not a typewriter.
I don't think you're disagreeing all that much, really. If you're sending out 100+ resumes a day THAT YOU'RE QUALIFIED FOR, then you should have NO trouble finding a job, determination or not.
If, on the other hand, you're sending out 100+ resumes to places you're not qualified for, all you're doing is wasting everybody's time, yours included.
These aren't your hobbies, they are your qualifications, list them as such. The reason they inquire is because they see them as such, too. If you have done volunteer work (an excellent contribution to building your profile) don't list it under some category of Social Activies, put it where it belongs. Eveything you do that is related to the position you desire should be list as your qualifications, not under 'Hobbies'
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'd say they get what they are asking for. When you it on a job site or paper 85% of the text is about profiling the company and 25%(if you are lucky) are about the job. When you call them on a job you really find interesting, the people to contact are almost impossible to reach and most of the time they are unwilling to talk to you.
And it bugs me, because when I do find a job that looks interesting, I want to write something that they can use.
I have been reading af fair deal of job applications so I know when you have to read through 200 mails, you have to catch people's interest in the two first lines. Don't start with your life story, start with something that tells the reader that you can offer what they need and you are relevant for the job and they will read on. But it is hard to write something they can use when all you got are their marketing speech and you might focus on the wrong things in your application.
Maybe he was hired by a CS guy who actually knew that C+ is a programming language and that anyone that knows something as exotic as C+ must be quite a hacker.
I've heard about it from section 1.4 (p10) of Bjarne Stroustup's "The C++ Programming language, Third edition." Furthermore it is briefly mentioned here and here (with an unreliable account of the evolution of c++ which according to Stroustrup is unrelated to C+.)
Look a monkey!
First of all, applying for jobs you think you're qualified for is very subjective. You're really limiting yourself by only applying for exact matches. What's wrong with my applying for a job that asks for "some Perl" when I have a lot of experience in PHP? Sure, it's not an exact match, but they're not asking for senior level and my PHP skillz will surely transfer over fairly nicely. Additionally, it's hard to tell who else applied for the job. Just like scholarships, sometimes you can get jobs you thought you'd get because there would be lots of other better applications. What if everyone else in the area thought the same thing? You might have a 1 in 1000 shot of getting those jobs, but if you send out 1000 resumes, by luck you're almost guarenteed one of those good jobs.
Second, I do follow the job descriptions carefully. If they ask for e-mail, I send e-mail.
I don't know, it doesn't hurt to fish around, but I'm not going to spend all day on it. I save that for the perfect fits.
No job I've gotten has ever come from following up on an advertisment, anyway. They all came from networking. In each case, somebody at the company reccomended me to a hiring manager, and I sent a simple resume with nothing more than an e-mail talking about why I think I would be right for the job (and vice versa) instead of a cover letter.
Stay in touch with people you enjoy working with, even after changing jobs. That's the best advice anybody can give you. If you have connections, you will never need to mess with all this "what is the right way to write a cover letter?" nonsense, because any hiring manager who has already been out for a beer with you is not going to care about that B.S. any more than you do.
# In the olden days resumes were sent out in the mail and included a cover sheet on top which explained why the resume was being sent. Now that we use email, there is no reason whatsoever to send the cover letter as an attachment and then write a "cover cover" letter in the body of the email. It's just senseless.
# Even stupider is submitting two big Word documents with no body text in the email. This just gets you spam filtered. I don't even SEE these.
There so many, seemingly endless ways of doing things, that getting stuff like this shouldn't be an issue for people hiring. The first part above, I see no problem having text in the body of the email that is a cover letter, then attaching a PDF or something of the same cover letter. Why? Text if they can't read a PDF, and PDF if they want a nice printout of it. It's not senseless as Joel puts it.
The next quote above, about 2 attachments and no body. This is something you as the recruiter, HR, or drone in charge of the first round of hiring should have stated in your advertisement. Maybe not if it is a newspaper ad for lack of space, but online definately. Say that you don't accept word documents, or say that you must put your cover letter as plain text in the body of the email, etc. Give the applicants some rules to follow. If they cannot do that, it's a good first filter... not a reason for ranting.
My bigest pet peeve in my 9 months of unemployment before finally getting a job, is that the ads hardly ever stated what kind of documents they wanted. If they didn't say, I usually sent the stuff as plain text, hoping that it would be legible on their end. Other times based on the company, I would try to make a judgement as to whether they would know what to do with a PDF and would send the resume as that. Sometimes with cover letter attached as plain text with a brief note in the body of the email say why i'm sending this email. Sometimes with the cover letter as text in the body. If they said "WORD DOC ONLY" I would usually reconsider sending them anything.
Everyone should just say how they want it, and it would minimize these wastefull rants from Joel.
The worst part about resumes, is that you never get feedback from the company you sent it to. And by never I mean 1 out of 50 might send you back a canned, automated email response. Fog Creek does this if I remember correctly, I applied there last summer. Atleast it felt canned. Which was great though, because it was the first response I got back from anyone or anything over the course of many months. That after having my resume and and cover letters reviewed by english majors, parents, people in the software industry and former coworkers.
Why is it a racist remark?
Indians aren't a race. They are a nationality. There are a wide variety of ethnicities in India.
To point out that a large number have in common a particular grammatical mistake isn't racist. It's just observation.
"Stupid Indians" might be getting closer - at least it's prejudice of some sort.
There are a lot of problems that could be solved more easily if there wasn't always someone jumping out to call "racist" anytime someone points out a statistical truth about a demographic. Hey, is it racist to say that American Jews are better educated than the general population? No? Then how can it be racist to say that American blacks are less well-educated than the general population? If we can't even say it out loud, how can we solve it?
If Joel can't tell his Indian candidates (albeit in a somewhat snotty way), hey, I pay attention to grammar and punctuation, so don't give me a resume that looks like you pasted it from AIM, than how are they going to learn that his standards, and those of American employers generally, may differ from the standards to which they are accustomed?
I didn't see any racism in his rant -- the resumes I've read from most Indians are littered with spelling mistakes, terrible punctuation, incomprehensible English, etc. Not that I'm an expert in any of those areas, but sheesh, take the time to make it look halfways decent. Find a truly native speaker to fix it up for you.
I could be god's gift to engineering, but if I happened to be in the unlucky half, I'd probably still be searching...
Clarification - they want senior-level guys, but pay them entry level salaries and have them do the work of both the entry-level guy and the senior-level guy they laid off.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
If the job requires some Perl and some Perl is not on your resume, you will be weeded out. There will be applicants with some Perl and you won't be one of them. You might get by if it is a preferred skill, but they would just post it again if they really wanted that skill.
The real solution is to learn some Perl before you apply, even if it is only a few hours of experience. With me I kept seeing jobs requiring applicants with experience in X. I ended up setting up my own little IT department at home and I spent some time learning how to use X. If you want to be honest on your resume, say proficient in A, B, and C and then some experience with X, Y, and Z. Everybody, even the recruiter, knows that some experience could be a 1 hour class or a year of working experience. Hopefully they'll choose to clear it up in the interview (be honest if they ask).
Different places like different things. Some resume reviewers like the bullshit fluff, some don't. Sometimes being different will make you stand out from the crowd, sometimes it will get your papers in the dumpster.
I had praises about my reseme at one place (although it was not enough to get me hired but not because of the resume), and a few weeks later a recruiter told me to completely redo it.
The people who read resumes and cover letters are as diverse as the people who write them. Anyone who claims there is One Right Way is a bigger bullshit artist than those who write fluffy cover letters.
Table-ized A.I.
See, I don't get this. I wear ties when expected by our dippy culture, but I never understood what the hell they are supposed to mean. As far as I can tell, it's some pointless relic from an bygone era. I'm not saying show up in torn jeans, but why can't people be comfortable in an interveiw instead of tarting themselves up with clothing they will never be wearing on the job? Why can't we have some sort of happy medium?
Some of the most brilliant engineers and scientists have are perpetually casual dressers. It's irrelevant. Drug dealers wear suits. Kenneth Lay wore suits. Saddam Hussein wore suits. It's meaningless.
We hired a guy last year who showed up in an expensive Italian suit (he came from a semi-rich family). He turned out to be one of the biggest screw ups we've ever had, and was fired six months later for accessing porn sites on his work PC.
--- Ban humanity.
I think his point was to get a decent e-mail account. Pay something for it, they're cheap. It think it looks much better when you apply for a job from an e-mail address like "mail@yournamehere.com" that it does applying for "girlcrazy2000@hotmail.com", especially for an IT position where you're supposed to be "in the know".
Also, even if the ad isn't for a competing company, do you really want to help someone else advertise their products on your job application? Seems unprofessional to me too. You don't put a banner ad on a printer resume.
(some might say arbitrary)
In a certain sense, yes the process is arbitrary, and frankly most of the process is bullshit. Nobody really cares where you want to be in five years. They just ask that question because they have to ask questions and don't know what else to ask.
Here's the deal, and you can read it all over Spolsky's piece:
You get hired because they like you, or at least dislike you less than the other candidates.
That's it. You're a Cubs fan. The candidate is a Cubs fan. Something stupid like that. It's a matter of "vibes." You're just not allowed to admit that officially in these ultra uptight egalitarian times when everyone is supposed to be equal as a human being.
Resumes and qualifications are tools used to eliminate candidates, not hire them. You can't make your resume "grab 'em" except in the negative sense. Then the basic purpose of an interview is to find out who you want to hire. As in, "Do I like this guy," or, yes it happens, "Nice tits."
It's kinda arbitrary.
Unless, of course, you've got the best tits.
KFG
Because he's looking for reasons to weed applicants out. If he sees your resume for three positions he's posted and then gets it from four headhunters, he's going to see desperation and round-file you. Read what he wrote:Employers are looking for employees who have a genuine interest in the position, work, and company business. They don't want to hire someone who is going to jump ship at the first sign of a higher paying job or someone who's just interested in doing the minimum necessary to get by.
Go ahead, apply for every job THAT YOU'RE QUALIFIED FOR, and sort through the results yourself.
You do that. I'll carefully research the firms that I apply to and only submit resumes and carefully crafted cover letters for those positions where I have a genuine interest. While I'm interviewing, you can be running off another 300 resumes at Kinko's.
If your prospective employer thinks you should sit around on your ass and pretend that you're qualified and live off of Ramen and potatos for months while you wait, then you probably don't want to work for him.
Your prospective employer thinks that that you should be a highly-respected professional with a network of professional contacts that are eager to have you work for their firms or are recommending you to other firms. The prospective employer thinks that you should be someone who is in-demand and that it's a privilege to have the opportunity to hire you. If that's not you, then expect a long job search ending in a dead-end job and substandard pay.
The comment about networking is dead on.
I've ranted, er, posted, about this in the past. Geeks need to learn how to network! The crap IT guys know how to network, and that's how they end up getting the jobs for which the real geeks are far more qualified.
Networking does NOT mean calling up everyone you know and asking them for a job.
Networking means that you:
1. Spend time developing a good 30 second description about the type of job you want and why you will be good at it.
2. Make a list of people you know who might know something about the jobs you want OR know someone else who knows something about the jobs you want.
3. Contact these people, give them your SHORT description of what you're looking for, and ask them if they have any advice or know anyone else that you should talk to. If you hat making cold calls, e-mail is fine for the initial contact. Just make it short, to the point, and use the spell checker.
4. Since you didn't waste their time or make them feel uncomfortable by asking for a job, they are likely to refer you to people they know.
5. Repeat as necessary.
This really works. I have gotten every job I've ever had via networking. The parent post is right: once you have an "in", you don't have to agonize so much over the cover letter. Your time is far better spent on networking than on sending out hundreds of resumes to every company you think might possibly hire you.
If you're fresh out of school and don't have many contacts yet... try your alumni association. Really. I occasionally get contacted from my alumni association, and I'm always happy to try to help. Heck, some weeks, if it gives me an excuse to get out of the office and have a nice lunch, I'd give job hunting advice to my arch enemy. I'll certainly do it for some kid fresh out of school, and I'll probably even pay for lunch.
Employment applications actually do have a valid purpose. It's a way for your prospective employer to get you to list your work experience, education, and so forth on a form where at the bottom you sign that any falsified information is reason for you to either not be hired or to be immediately terminated.
Joel on Software painless software management
His strategy seems to be: rant like a lunatic and behave like a jerk. Then, only people with low self-esteem will apply and management will become really easy. Great idea.
Of course, lots of big organizations had figured that one out long ago, having a long tradition of degrading application and hiring procedures of their own.
and bullshit questions like "what is your greatest weakness".
+1 Insightful. If you don't want me to play your interview like a game, then don't make it a game.
-1 Missing The Point. A question like this isn't intended to force you to bullshit. What it does is force the candidate to (hopefully) be honest and own up to a weakness about themselves. A good answer to this question indicates 1) honesty (duh), and 2) self-awareness. The value of the first quality is, I think, self-explanatory. The second should be pretty obvious, too: someone who is self-aware is capable of improving themselves.
What this question is NOT meant to do is force you to eliminate yourself from the running. I, as an interviewer, don't intend to use your answer as a direct reason to eliminate you. Rather, your answer will help to assess your character (is this person willing to own up to their inadequacies? Are they self-aware enough to understand what their flaws are? Do they have a desire to improve themselves? etc).
Maybe life is telling you that it does not want you to do what you thought you were training for. I could train my whole life to be a prima ballerina, and still couldn't be one -- I don't have the skill. Furthermore, I could train my whole life to be a salesman and couldn't be one, because I don't care.
College is not a guarantee of employment nor is it proof to employers that you know what you're doing. I spent 4 years of college learning how to communicate and process information (we called it a literature and rhetoric program) and now I write software. Not because I was trained for it, but because I was good at it and had a passion for it (and thus was willing to start at a lower salary). At the same time, most of the cats I hung out with were majoring in CS, and spent most of their time talking about all the money they were going to make in CS.
Guess what? Most of the guys who wanted to get rich didn't (at least not in software). Most of the guys who actually wanted to write software are doing so (some are rich).
Moral of the story is this: if you are sending our resumes, hoping for some hring angel to heed your prayers and install you at IBM like a fax machine, you'll go wanting. But if you're going to get out there and work with computers, whether you're getting paid or not, you'll find yourself getting money for it. Just like anything else, it's about PASSION, not education. The parent article is TRYING to tell people to treat their job applications like something they expect to get, and not like a chance in a million -- and if you do this, you have a chance that is orders of magnitude higher than if you act like a sycophantic salaryman. Hell, I've got a friend who after only a year on the scene is working as a journalist. Nobody is or was hiring -- hell, freelancers are fighting for their lives and newsroom staff are getting cut left and right -- but the Powers Tha' Be realized that he was a passionate writer. He got courted by two competing national newspaper groups and an independent.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
It works in other fields as well.
It's not just the trite "it's not what you know, it's who you know" philosophy... it goes deeper than that.
What can distinguish you from the clamoring masses, all wanting the same job or position? Personal recommendation... all the way. This is partially how I got a residency slot I wanted, and my current medical job.
I was offered a residency slot based on my qualifications, but also because a department chairman at my medical school was personal friends with the department chairman at the residency site. A letter of recommendation and a phone call later, and the residency site chairman personally came to my interview, asked for me by name out of a room full of faceless medical students (talk about some envious glances... competition can be cutthroat in medicine), thanked me for applying, and told me to thanks his buddy for calling ahead (I knew about the letter, but that was the first I knew of the phone call).
My current job was offered to me long after I applied... my current director approached a mutual acquaintance from my residency program, and asked him about me. His response? "pure gold... you should hire him yesterday." (I don't know about that "pure gold" part... he may have oversold me a bit...).
The point remains... you can be qualified and never be hired if you get lost in the resume` shuffle... but that networking, word-of-mouth contact is money in the bank.
Also, the employer is understandably hedging his bets by not hiring someone sight-unseen, who may or may not play well with others, who may or may not be dishonest, etc, etc... personal confirmation of a person's claimed credentials/ability is key. And for those of you who think this is somehow wrong, we're talking about a good word from a friend, not someone's daddy getting him a job that he's totally unqualified to do. I despise nepotism as much as anyone.
Never, never underestimate the value of a friend...
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
If he sees your resume for three positions he's posted and then gets it from four headhunters, he's going to see desperation and round-file you.
No. I was taking it as rent that you don't apply for three positions at one company. Or ten, or even two. Apply for one.
Employers are looking for employees who have a genuine interest in the position, work, and company business. They don't want to hire someone who is going to jump ship at the first sign of a higher paying job or someone who's just interested in doing the minimum necessary to get by.
Applying for lots of jobs doesn't really seem to indicate that you'll jump ship or that you're just interested in the minimum to get by. Not to me. It indicates that you're not sitting around collecting unemployment and watching Oprah or playing CS at 3am. It means you're committed to finding a new position. It means that you realize it's a tough market, this isn't 3 or 4 years ago, and you have to WORK to find a job. I'm good, but I'm just not that GOOD, or not egotistical enough to think I'm that good. I'm good enough to get a great job done and apply myself and learn quickly and do a bang-up job.
You do that. I'll carefully research the firms that I apply to and only submit resumes and carefully crafted cover letters for those positions where I have a genuine interest. While I'm interviewing, you can be running off another 300 resumes at Kinko's.
Never been to a Kinko's in my life, thanks. But while you're carefully researching the firms you apply to, and submitting carefully crafted cover letters, I'll be enjoying the multitude of phone calls from all of the places I applied to. And no, It's not hyperbole. I applied (the last time a company closure bit me) to ALL of the 36 positions that I felt I could accept in the greater Portland area. These were all positions that I was comfortable accepting, and that didn't require relocation, which is unacceptable to my wife and kids at this point. I paid very close attention to each position and the company behind it, I not only modified my cover letter, but also my resume (which I'm always told is WAY too long @ 5 pages). That way, I could give more relevant information where it was needed. Yes, it took awhile. It took me about 2 weeks of hard work to get these all out. Know what? I got 34 calls for interview. Yes, I kept track. No, I'm not THAT good. I have great references, but I would never presume that anyone would have the "privelage to have the opportunity to hire" me. I would presume that I apply for jobs I'm qualified for, and I know what I'm talking about when I go to an interview. I interviewed at the three best places, and accepted two of the three jobs. (One was a contract for 3 months and has since expired).
Your prospective employer thinks that that you should be a highly-respected professional with a network of professional contacts that are eager to have you work for their firms or are recommending you to other firms. The prospective employer thinks that you should be someone who is in-demand and that it's a privilege to have the opportunity to hire you. If that's not you, then expect a long job search ending in a dead-end job and substandard pay.
No, again. Maybe, for some high paying or very lead-oriented or important positions, your employer expects these things, but in most cases, not. Lots of people just want to program at a better-than-entry-level position or QA at a more-than-analyst level. They don't want to pay more than 6 figures for a "highly-respected professional with a network of professional contacts that are eager to have you work for their firms". In a select few, YES. That's what they want, but I think the majority of the hundreds of positions out there want someone well-qualified with good knowledge and good recommendations.
Your prospective employer thinks that that you should be a highly-respected professional with a network of professional contacts that are eager to have you work for
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
I suspect that Mr. Spolsky might have poorly stated his case. Applying for dozens or hundreds of different jobs at the same large employer does look bad--or at least really, really desperate. Your resume is going to get binned becuase they figure if you're too lazy to figure out which positions at a company might be appropriate for you, they're certainly not going to do it for you.
If he did mean to suggest one should only apply for three or four jobs total at a time...yes, that's poor advice for most of us. If you're extremely senior or have very specialized skills that are genuinely in demand then you can afford to be picky--shotgunning resumes looks very unprofessional, even desperate. Besides, someone who is looking for work at that high a level probably shouldn't be doing it without professional help. Wannabe CEOs/CIOs/CFOs don't usually send a form letter out to hundreds of companies.
Still, it's certainly good form to appear to only be sending out a few resumes. Creating the appearance of confidence is good. A custom cover letter for each job at each employer can help tremendously, if only by drawing attention to the key points of your standard resume. Be short, sweet, and to the point. Construct it out out of a pool of boilerplate sentences if you like, but at least change more than the company name at the top. This is particularly important if you apply to more than one job at the same employer--identical cover letters for different jobs is poor packaging. It looks rather lazy if the same HR department screens both resumes.
The great-grandparent poster complained that his experiences have "led me to believe that spending a great deal of time on each application/resume/cover letter I send out for Yet Another Job Opening would consume an amount of time equivelent to a full-time job". Well, yes. Finding a job is a job! You have to work at it. It's a skillset that (hopefully) you don't use very often, so you have to work harder at it than you think! When you get a job, you're going to spend the bulk of your waking hours at it--why aren't you willing to invest the time in getting noticed by a worthwhile employer? Spending half an hour a day browsing Monster.com is a luxury to be enjoyed by the employed.
~Idarubicin
I like questions like "What is your greatest weakness." They are a chance to find out what the employer is looking for.
;).
I am incredibly honest when asked this question. I say "my greatest weakness is estimating time, because I never feel that software is 'done,' like an egg is done. It's more done like an essay is done, in that it does what it has to in the overview, has no grammatical errors, and has as many details as you can fit. Therefore, I generally pick an arbitrary date, and make sure things are 'done enough' by that date." You can tell right away who you are talking to by this answer. An engineering-oriented manager will nod his head knowingly. A sales-oriented manager will cringe like you just punched him in the breadbasket. Good thing, you don't want to work under him anyway
As for "why do I have to fill out an application"...many states force all employers to keep "applications" on file for a period of time in case they get sued for discrimination. The information varies from state to state and employer to employer. I have actually filled out applications after I'd already GOTTEN the job, when I had applied directly through the employment manager or through Monster, etc.
High School, college are included on the off chance that you lied about being a graduate, so they have a paper trail to can you with cause. They don't usually check them, but they have to take the information anyway.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
If you look at any career book, most notably What Color is Your Parachute, they always tell you that mailing resumes is much, much more successful than sending them electronically, all tracking mechanisms aside. I would think that mailing a resume would show your potential employer that you're expending more effort as you have to get off your ass to go to the post office as well as spending your own money to buy stamps.
According to What Color is Your Parachute, online services (in a a targeted fashion) have a 4% success rate while mailing out resumes (in a random fashion) has a 7% success rate.
Every book I've read says that the best way to get a job is to be PERSISTENT. That means not necessarily following the directions. Joel wrote that from the perspective of the employer - he wants to make it easy to screen you out. You, as the job hunter, want to make it as difficult for them to screen you out. This means getting as much of their attention as humanly possible.
It's always a good idea to get creative with your abilities on your resume, particularly now. Since it's an employer's market, generally employers will list unreasonable requirements for a given position just to cut down on the resume flood. I've seen tech support jobs requiring 5 years of experience, a bachelor's degree, php, cold fusion, asp, visual basic, 2 years of c++ and flash, all for $10 an hour. It's totally ridiculous, but, if you're clever, you can add all that stuff and fake your way through it if you get the job.
From my experience (both hiring and being hired), nobody and I mean NOBODY knows everything they say they do in an interview. Some people are sharper than others but 90% of the time, you or whoever you hire will be faking their way through it for the first three weeks or so. Also keep in mind that most managers that will be interviewing you don't know the minutae of what you will be doing at your new job and that also makes faking it easier.
So here's some advice: if you see a job you're pretty close to matching, go for it. Don't walk in there with Taco Bell burrito making skills and expect to land a SAP admin job, but if you're missing 1 or 2 things they're looking for and are confident in your ability to learn quickly, go for it.
I think that one needs to be careful to be extremely precise when making such statements. A statement like, say, "men are better at math than women" is often taken to mean any of:
Etc., etc.; some of these versions are more or less true (or, more importantly, more or less testable) than others. It's in the slipping between all of these than I think people often unknowningly cover up what is essentially sexist thinking. So I think it's important to make sure you say precisely what you mean.
--Bruce Fields
[Re: "What's your greatest weakness?"]
... with all due respect, perhaps the reason you've heard this question "billions of times" (i.e., you've been to a lot of interviews, i.e., you tend to get rejected for a lot of jobs) is because you lie, and simply regurgitate a stock answer.
It's a stupid question because all your doing is testing the ability of someone to lie on the spot. The rest of us who've heard this question a billion times will just give the stock answer we've given in every other interview.
Uhm,
Has it occurred to you to be honest?
When I first started attending career counseling, they warned me about this question, and our homework was to prepare an answer. We all compared in class, and came up with the "good" answers ("I work too hard," "I'm a perfectionist," yada yada yada), and sure enough, on my interviews, I heard the question. So I spat back the "perfectionist" line, they quietly noted my response and showed no reaction. Why should they? They'd asked the question a hundred times before, and they'd heard my answer a hundred times before.
Eventually, I got sick of it. So the next time I was asked, I answered honestly. "I can sometimes have narrow vision. That is, I'm type-A and can focus all my energies on one thing. This often yeilds stellar results for that task, but at the expense of other important things that I may have neglected. However, I'm aware that I have this tendency and am working to improve my multi-tasking abilities."
I got the job. They even commented that they admired my honesty and self-deprecating candor.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
While you are very right, I think that the author of the article makes a good point, you don't want to LOOK like you're applying for hundreds of jobs.
In other words, the cover letter (and even the resume) you send to each employer should be at least somewhat customized for the job. If your cover letter looks like you've just filled in a new name and job title for each position you apply for, chanes are it won't get far.
Also, I don't think that people shoudl worry TOO much about being completely qualified for the job. Now obviously if the job asks for a business major with plenty of sales experience in a specific field and you're a programmer with zero sales in any field, you're SOL. However almost every job I've ever seen asks for people with more skills and experience than they really need, often asking for experience in a half-dozen or more different fields when very few people work in any one of them, let alone all of them. I've seen dozens of job postings asking for 5+ years of experience, comp. sci degree, MCSE and A+ certification for a first-line telephone tech support jobs. Of course, the funniest are the jobs where they ask for things like 10 years of experience with some technology that didn't exist more than 5 years ago. For these jobs they OBVIOUSLY are not going to get what they claim to be looking for, so if you've got 3 or 4 years of experience you're probably as good a choice as anyone else.
A lot of it comes down to trying to match your cover letter to whoever is likely to be reading the cover letters. Chances are that if the job description is filled with buzzwords and HR-speak, your cover letter better be filled with the same or it will get tossed. If it's very to the point and contains specific technical references, your cover letter should do the same.
Sure - a well formatted and grammatically correct resume catches attention. I, for once, am flooded with those everyday and have to then look for substance under that fluff... I mostly interview techies, and I dont care much about punctuation and English usage - as much as the projects and the tech skills that are on the resume. For me, the most important pointers: 1. DO NOT LIE. 2. DO NOT LIE. 3. MAKE IT SHORT AND READABLE (not interested in how long you spend troubleshooting that drvice driver problem).
You are totally correct on the qualification issue. I just (as in today) got a job that I wasn't 100% of what they were looking for. I am qualified to do it, no question, but I don't have ALL the experience they want. Specifically, I've never touched any of the engineering applications they use. No problem, I have the technical and eprsonal skills to do the job, and the willingness to learn. So they hired me.
So, don't pass up a job just because you don't quite meet what they are asking for. Read over it and ask yourself what they REALLY need. If they are asking for 5 years experience with VB, C#, C++, ASP, and such what they are REALLY asking for is a Windows programmer, specifically one that uses the MS tools. Is that you? Then go ahead and apply.
The ones not to apply for are ones that are clearly out of your field of experience. Like if you have done nothing but Windows support and administration, and they are looking for a Linux programmer, don't bother.
A lot of computer science departments realize that the language that is in style changes, so they teach a good amount of theory, rather than specific languages. What this means is that their students can basically pick up a new language by grabbing and book and be useful in a day or two
You won't be "useful in a day or two" in C or C++ if you have never dealt with pointers or manual memory management before. But even if you have, C and C++ have enough pitfalls and obscure corners that you really have to spend years learning them.
And the same is true about many other languages. And, in addition to the languages themselves, you have to know their APIs in order to be productive.
A CS degree gives you CS skills. CS skills are not the same as commercial programming skills, much as you may not want to believe that.
Really, by the time a position makes it to advertising in common places, it IS a lottery. Joel is lucky in that he's not HR full time for a large firm advertising in high visibility areas. A good rule of thumb in these scenarios is that they'll spend about 30 seconds looking at your application/resume/cover letter. Often applications for a position number in the thousands,so there's good reason for it. As you point out, the people screening these teaming masses may not understand speciific aspects of the job themselves. A resume and cover letters are tools to get an interview. You want to demonstrate that you can communicate quickly and be crystal clear.
The requirements thing is iffy. Some things you can get away with waving away, either because nobody has the specific skill set or because you show elsewhere that you have quickly picked up skills in the past and still can. Other requirements, like interviewing in NYC, aren't likely to be waived, and maybe even asking for them to be is ample justification for roundfiling. This is of course assuming the skillset wasn't tailored to the guy the hiring manager has in mind but has to jump through corporate hoops to hire. Often solicitation for applications is occuring while they begin interviewing candidates from within the company and from employee recommendations.
You're right though, in a way. Just because you've won the lottery doesn't mean you should be prepared to kowtow. If you've won the lottery, there's an expectation that you are in demand. One time in an interview I was asked if I had any other outstanding job offers or interviews. I wasn't sure whether to be offended, to tell the truth or lie. On one hand, telling them you have a job offer may serve as reinforcing their opinion, but on the other it may serve as an excuse to find someone else, who is less likely to jump to a competitor, having been introduced to the market and trained on their dime.
The real lesson here is networking. Toastmasters is a concept that has grown beyond its means, but there's plenty of other ways to find connected friends. Attend Linux User Groups if that's your bag. Keep in touch with college friends and remind them from time to time if you're looking for breadmoney. People on the inside of a job opening have a HUGE advantage; applying before the masses do with the endorsement of a current employee almost makes interviews formalities.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Ummm. This all would imply that you have friends. Isn't that contrary to pale, locked-in-a-basement, geek coder?
Seriously though, I took my Dad's advice early on and it has helped me immensely: "Don't burn your bridges." No matter how much you think someone is an a-hole or a moron, be careful what you say to them, you might bump into them at your next job interview.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
C++ added what - 4 more keywords than C?
:-) )
and, using an array of silly little casting tricks, you can emulate every feature of C++ in C... (though, i have a sneaky feeling you knew that already
look - the thing about C/C++ is that they are mature languages that havent changed all that much in decades. you can find people who know tricks and techniques that maximize the language.
"Younger" languages, such as Java and VB have not had time to mature in order to truly take advantage that comes with experience. Your tools need to stay the same in order to gain true proficiency with them.
I think that the educational background can have more to do with this type of a hiring decision than job experience. if you get a candidate that has an engineering-school background who has been using VB in his work life, I think that you should definitely consider him, as he probably had sufficient exposure to "real" programming.
However, if you get an IT-background person, their techniques simply wont transfer into a more rigorous programming environment.
i've worked in both environments (system engineering now), and can tell you that the movement from an IT->Engineering organization is not a step that the average IT programmer is capable of.
... hi bingo
A BA in History (or any other liberal arts domain) does not invalidate your skills as a problem solver. Nor does a degree in Computer Science cement these skills. All a degree shows is that you've completed a series of tasks and tests that illustrate a base knowledge of the theory and method underlying a particular field. Which, for many tasks, is "enough"...if you don't have time to test every single applicant to gain confidence in their skills, stamping a "degree in related field or equivalent experience" sticker on your job listing is a good way to weed out the most unconfident of idiots. It does NOT, however, guarantee skill, and I'm sure any of us can atest to that.
In some cases, reading a nice, thick, well written book on a subject is unfathomably more useful than obtaining a university degree. I know that the introduction to O'Reilly's "Java in a Nutshell" taught me more than a semester of Data Structures in Java. Of course, having already taken Data Structures in Pascal, and again in C++, is what gave me the analytical basis to understand said introduction without banging my head...
But then again, when you say you're "entirely self taught," you invoke in most hiring manager's minds the image of some wild, cowboy programmer, bootstrapping his way along. It's your job as that wild talent to prove your skills...and the best way to do that is to maintain a glowing resume.
Mine's, uh, offline at the moment, due to wild, cowboy Linux administration bootstaps...
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I got asked -- and I'm still not quite sure why this bothered me so much -- "Tell me of a time when you exceeded expectations." I can still picture the phony-smiling HR witch now.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
You can either sit around and bitch about the way you think the world should work, or deal with it and advance your life.
If putting on a suit and tie once in a while goes against your personal beliefs, I have two words for you. Lighten up.
if more people than he need are already jumping over it? Why should he lower the bar only to present and even larger crowd to weed through? Yes there might be some good people stuck down there but there are in all probably also some good people in the list of people who didn't make classic blunders.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The even more real problem is lazy personnell agencies the employers use to recruit staff.
Here I am, unemployed, using all that I can to find a job. This includes buying the newspaper and going through the situations vacant section.
One personnell agent / agency advertised three jobs, all with the exact same word for word job description and salary. I only knew it was three different jobs because they were based in different places. All three jobs are not to far away from home for me so I could, should and did apply for all three. One one e-mail. I mean why should I take the time to write an original cover letter for each post if the agent could not even be bothered to write three original ads.
In fact it is pretty difficult to write a decent cover letter when they barely give you any information about the job, barring the obligitory 'must be proficient in MS Office' bit - which bit exactly? I can draw up the sweetest spreadsheets that would make you weep at their simplicity, but maybe spreadsheets are the domain of the accounts department and I would just be a threat. Case in point, a friend of mine had the opportunity to find himself in the accounts department of one of his clients. The dear lady responsible for his cheque was carefully adding up figures in a spreadsheet on her trusty solar powered desk calculator. Maybe she got the job because her auntie is department head - would said auntie want me around when I am so obviously going to make her niece look incompetent?
Right, where was I? Oh yeah, if they want to know what I can and can't do and want a brilliant and original covering letter, then 'they' have to give me something to work with, make me want to work for them.
"I'm going to worry like hell and that's not an easy job, believe me" - Lu-Tze "Thief of Time"