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Feature:Geek Jobs
The following was written by Slashdot Reader Joseph Walsh
Getting a Geek JobA few days ago, I was enjoying the hum of the half dozen servers in my office when I decided to do a quick check of the online job search engines. I wanted to know whether there were any worthwhile jobs listed. So I went to one of the larger job search sites, and typed in Linux. No luck. Java? Nope, not without a whole lotta web site design skills. C? Not unless I was willing to master a half dozen semi-dead languages before applying. Sigh.
So I plugged in my current position's buzzwords -- Novell NetWare, WordPerfect, GroupWise, Windows 95, Paradox. Plink! A job description popped up that fit me pretty darned well. They were looking for someone to run a Novell NetWare LAN who also knew WordPerfect and Paradox. And they were willing to pay at least 20% more than my current employer!
After pressing the "submit resume" button, up popped an email. Ah, okay. They wanted an email. So I composed a nice cover letter (pointing out the strong correlation between my skills and the job requirements) and attached a copy of my resume. Of course, the attachment was in WordPerfect format, which made sense to me in light of the fact that WordPerfect was listed as a required skill. (Those of you who are more familiar with this process are no doubt groaning at my nievete'.) I didn't expect to hear anything back, but I thought I might as well give it a shot, right?
A couple of days passed, and I essentially forgot about the whole thing. But last night, what should arrive in my in box but a response to my submission! I opened it up, expecting the standard "thank you for your resume; we'll keep it on file blah blah blah" letter. After all, I have a degree in Human Resources Management, so I have some idea how this stuff works.
Which is why I was rather surprised to find that, instead of a standard acknowledgement letter, I got a one-liner which read in its entirety:
doc or rtf
The brevity of this missive puzzled me. What did this person mean? Is it some sort of garbled language, or a dialect with which I am not familiar? I made my living as a freelance writer for a while, so I pride myself on being able to figure out the written word. But this had me stumped.
Then I remembered my attachment. It was in WordPerfect format, and this person seemed to want it to be in either Microsoft Word or Rich Text Format. When I realized that the file format of my resume was the cause of this brief email, I admit I became a little angry. But when I understood the whole situation, I was furious.
The situation is this: I submitted my resume in WordPerfect format to what turns out to be a temporary and permanent employment agency (as opposed to the actual prospective employer). As anyone who has changed jobs in the last decade knows, these agencies are becoming the gatekeepers of all jobs. Soon, no one who changes jobs will be able to do so without going through an agency of one sort or another.
That's all fine and dandy, except that the people who are employed as gatekeepers rarely have the knowledge required to accurately judge people in highly skilled professions, such as the computer field. So, this "doc or rtf" person, who can't figure out how to import a WordPerfect file into Word, who can't even write a civil and intelligible email, is deciding whether a prospective employer will ever see my resume. That frightens me.
From conversations with colleagues, my experience is not at all uncommon. It's necessary to please these functionaries in order to get a job. And on top of that, there is often a Human Resources Information System at some point in the process (I should know; I implemented the one at my current place of employment). That HRIS will likely be used to automatically scan resumes, then only those which are buzzword compliant will be looked at by humans. The rest will be summarily thrown in the bit bucket. So if the HR person at the company to which you have applied is looking for someone who has "JDBC" on their resume, while you have "Java Database Connectivity" or even "Java Data Base Connectivity", you're out of luck. No human will ever see your resume.
And even if a human did see it, he or she probably won't be someone who is qualified to judge you or your accomplishments. It will almost certainly be a functionary who can barely operate a computer, who might have a list of buzzwords and terms given to them by some pointy haired boss. If those terms aren't on your resume, forget about getting a job at that particular company.
Once all of the above had gone through my head, I got a wee bit depressed. I started to question whether I wanted to continue in this industry. How else should a sane person feel when confronted with sheer insanity? Should he embrace it, or run away from it?
But, before I give up, I'd like to make a solid try at fixing this system. There just has to be a better, more reliable way for geeks to find jobs. Does one already exist? If not, can we invent and enforce one?
How do we get ourselves out of this idiotic morass?
no comment.
the suits still have the geeks by the nads, even though the geeks are making good money now. Until that changes, none of the things in this article will change.
GEEK REVOLUTION!
I totally agree with you... I often had this kind of problems... I got refused for job which were literally made for me.. just cause I had the wrong key words I know this because I knew people inside the company. They told me the guy hired was an idiot and lost his job two weeks later... And most of them knew I was the right person for the job.. even after lots of pressure from them... it took a long time before I get the job...
Anyway... I think recruiting in high tech should definetely need a little more human interaction...
Your points are well taken - and this has been the situation in many tech areas for years. The only way to find and get the good jobs is through contacts with real people inside the company of interest. That's a primary reason for attending the myriad of computer-related meetings/shows held almost daily around the country - meet your next employer. Going through on-line employment services or searches is one step above (perhaps) the old employment line.
The future is about your "Certification" and the validity of the certifying agency...
the "Ivy league" mentality will invade technical jobs as it has all the other high priced employement areas.
I tought I was fairly standard and that I made it easier for everyone when I sent my resume in .PDF format...
I was so very wrong... They don't have a clue what to do with it... Depressing man depressing...
I am presently going through something similiar. Where I presently work, I am underpaid and overworked (surprising, I know). I do not mind the hard work, but the company I work for is infamous for paying below the industrial average. I feel I have enough experience where I can start getting more $$$$$. I put my information up on dice.com, where i put specific things in (like what state i want to work, what type of work). For the past week, my inbox and voice mail has been overloaded with so much worthless offers like "I have a perfect position for you! A permanent position for you doing PERL/NT in Idaho with a large financial company!". Which is great, but on my dice hot sheet i put down i want to do work for a consulting company in NJ doing Unix C/C++, but I do have PERL and NT on my resume, because I do have experience with them. The only interview a had so far is through someone I know, not through an agency. I know that I will try not ever again waste my time going these type of channels again. It reminds me of directed spam, where they throw so much in your face, you just ignore all of it....
:)
anybody need a Unix C/C++ programmer with 3 years experience in the NJ area to work for a consulting company?
What is nice about Texas is that it is a right-to-work state. You can, if you try really, really hard, write a non-compete contract that will hold in Texas, but it is expensive, and the agencies are cheap, so they don't do their homework, and people routinely change agencies here and stay in the same job. Heh.
It is nice to screw the pimps for a change.
And with this job market, they can't afford to be difficult with you.
What they deserve, as opposed to what they have been getting for years, is to be paid according to skill level and effort -- minimum wage would be appropriate.
I think everyone supports long file names now right? So why not name your resumé "Joe_Bloe's_Resume_(wordperfect).doc" or whatever. That would seem to make things clearer for everyone. Or hell... even "Joe_Bloe's_Resume_(wordperfect_but_can_be_opened_ in_word_if_you_want).doc" Well, maybe that's a bit too long. But you get the idea.
Regards,
--
n/t
Amen. If you can't follow the first simple instruction from a potential employer, what makes you think they're going to want to hire you? If you're going to bitch from the outset about something so trivial, you wouldn't be a good employee in the first place. Grow up.
I beg to differ. I got an MBA from a pretty good school (17th in the US), and I had to deal with the headhunters all the way through becuase I did not want to do the typical corporate thing. Getting an MBA is good if you want to do the standard MBA stuff ($75,000 and a desk and paid parking -- where? That doesn't matter, as it is all alike, whether you are positioning salty packaged snack foods or looking at manufacturing efficiency...). I wanted to do systems work AND management, and it was an incredible pain in the ass getting a job. I was offered data entry postions (no, I didn't know that they were still around either), network tech jobs, and help desk jobs. The MBA was either ignored or caused me to drop from consideration. This is what worked for me:
I liked the big iron. I liked warm weather (I grew up in LA), but I wanted out of LA. So, I looked at where IBM sold mainframes and big AIX boxes (asked a few IBM reps that I had worked with -- they hemmed and hawed and finally allowed me to look at an internal IBM breakdown of what sold where, so I could cross Arkansas off right away, for instance). Arizona was too damned hot and the pay out there is a little odd -- like $45k for MBAs. I had no real interest in the Atlantic coast. Nothing in New Mexico. No interest in Las Vegas.
That left something on the Gulf or close. Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas.
No work in Louisiana, Florida was expensive and not really my kind of place. Looked hard at two positions in Mississippi, but finally went to Houston. Like it, get paid a lot, cheapest place I have ever lived.
The lesson here is that this took me six months after graduation despite starting my job search in the Spring of my first year. It took me 18 months to find a job that didn't suck.
So please don't tell me about how easy it is if you get an MBA.
My trusty sidekick of 2 1/2 years quit, and we needed a replacement quick. We went through an agency to avoid what we have come to call "The Parade of Losers". Put an ad in the local paper and get 100 resumes of every one who says they are a network specialist because they too some Win95\NT classes. We chose to let the agency filter the resumes, and we interviewed candidates from that stack.
And temp-to-perm protects us. You can easily hire a loser and be stuck with it, but temp-to-perms can be replaced very easily.
This company and agency are getting negative publicity on a widely-read online service. They won't get qualified applicants if they continue their hiring practices; if they don't get qualified applicants their product will suffer; if their product suffers, the stockholders will lose money. Should be easy to understand.
Your so right it isn't even funny. I started my hunt in March, by looking on the net and emailing about 50 places. Not one response at all.
I knew someone at Nortel Networks, so I sent them a resume. A manager liked it and thought I would be good for a position. So he requested a copy of my transcript. I sent in the transcript with a nice letter and never heard a word back, not even a thank-you. Now maybe some don't consider that kind of rude, but I believe its a bad idea to "alienate" the young tech job searcher, I am now forced to carry a grudge against that company.
So that was my email experience, now in the last few weeks I faxed about five places that advertised for a UNIX/Winblows job and have heard back from 4. I now have two interviews scheduled.
So in closing FAX, FAX, FAX, FAX. Don't ask why just FAX, FAX, FAX....
sety (forgot pass once again.)
You saw the downside of the process. Frankly, the person that responded to you was a jerk and not fit for the sales/service position that they are in. I would not bother with that agency.
I was in a pretty dead end tech-support job and was "recruited" by an agency, I ended up getting a 40% boost in my pay when I left the old company and I worked as a contractor for them for a year and a half. Then the company that I was working at "bought me" and I saw another 20% raise in pay! Not to mention the fact that I have a job that is far easier and more fun!
I don't plan on leaving this job for some time but when I do, if the dynamics are still the same as they are today, I will do the very same thing all over again.
The only tip that I can give, is ask for everything up front when dealing with those people, you are not likely to get much after the fact. That is pretty much the case anywhere though!
I recently was looking for employment and came up against the same problem and so I started sending my CV in Word97 RTF and ASCII. Imagine my surprise when I had a reply stating that they cant read ASCII files (what a dim wit!), It is a totally frustrating thing to have to do to put your future in the hands of people who are as thick as pigshit!
Uh, hello? Forest? Trees? You think the guy's complaining about having to submit in Word, but he's not. (And it wasn't an instruction from the employer either, but the intermediary agency). The point of his essay was that these intermediaries are pretty clueless and that he's worried that if someone who can't even deal with a WP document is the one who decides who sees his resume, they probably aren't able to judge his qualifications either and forward them to an appropriate employer.
Well, yes, they are sort of morons, but perhaps more to be pitied than scorned...from what I've seen, many of them have worse working conditions than us geeks. I can't imagine what inspires anyone to go into that field, so the money must be OK, but it still looks pretty dull. And yes, all they do is scan for keywords. Putting "Javascript" on your resume tends to get you a lot of hits from idiots asking you, "So, you know Java?" On the other hand, you can put "5 years experience with Apache, Roxen Challenger, IIS, CGI, Java, Javascript", and still have a moron calling you and asking, "Do you know...uh...web...servers?" I actually once had a guy tell me about a position that involved migrating servers "from Solaris to Unix". I called him on that, made him stutter a bit...
I don't think "exploit" is quite the right word, though. They're absolutely dependent on techies for their living; techies can still get jobs without going through agents, although it's sometimes a little harder. Once they get you a job, they're hooked more than you are - you're their lifeline, their habit, and you can seriously jerk them around. A while back, I begged and pleaded for a raise from $15/hr to $16/hr, to which they agreed...after six weeks with no raise, they then denied they'd ever agreed to it, and grudgingly gave me $15.50/hr. A couple months later, I threatened to quit, and suddenly my pay shot up to $20/hr within 24 hours. So my advice to you, geeks, is: don't be afraid to be an asshole. They need you more than you need them, and since your chances of getting more than one job through a single agency are minimal anyway, and you don't actually have to work side by side with these people, you are free to be a royal jerk if it helps you get what you want, with virtually no repercussions. It's kind of a shame it has to be that way, but hey, we're all looking out for number one, no?
Oh, and about the phone number thing...so screen your calls with an answering machine. You don't actually have to talk to all the morons, just listen to a few seconds of their pitch and delete it if it isn't interesting.
Basically, yeah, you have to be careful about your attitude if your skills aren't good enough. But if your are highly skilled, attitude actually helps in many cases. You aren't going to get a good job if you tell them you "think" you are good enough. You might get it if you say you always do a good job, but you need to know whether or not they will pay you enough for it to be interesting.
Thats how I go about getting work. I've jumped up about 30.000 USD in the last year alone.
(note: I didn't write the post you replied to, so you might be right about him, I don't know :-)
I dare say nothing at all like that was said, considering they didn't provide any instructions on what formats they accept, clear or otherwise.
Sheesh. Do what works. What doesn't work is fussing around with the pipeline. Do that, and you get the next job to pop out of the inbox.
Find out where you want to be and by God infiltrate the place until they realize they need you to be in the job you want. Make sure it's their idea, just keep after them until they give in. This works!
Stay young, and keep in touch --Bill Nelson
It is your moral duty to put gum-chewing HR bubbleheads out of a job. HR people are nothing more than the system infiltrators discussed by John Gall in his work "Systemantics" - if you haven't read this, Gall says systems create little interstices where deadwood can collect, and it's just a fact of life. The deadwood goes by different names in different eras but there is a constant fraction of infiltrators. Fifty years ago these were clerks, twenty years ago they were management consultants, ten years ago they were "re-engineering" personnel, now they are HR. These people are only dangerous if you play by their rules, so don't.
>The best ways to send a resume online:
>
> 1. Plain text in an email message
From personal experience I`d doubt if most recruiters could cope with this!!
> 2. URL where the resume is posted online
I must admit that this is a more foolproof idea.
p.s. whats
wrong
with my
document formatting skills !!
HR people are usually not Unix geeks even if they work at a Unix shop. That means that they probably use Windows, they probably use Word, they quite possibly do not have a PostScript printer (probably regular HP instead), and are probably not aware that it's even possible to print directly to a printer let alone how to do it.
The author pointed out that they did not specify the format. Read first, idiot.
As with any job.
If you know someone at another firm and if they
know you it is a lot easier to get integrated
than through anonymous, computerized job shops.
And how do you build connections? College classmates, continuing education classmates,
internet communities, computer clubs, knowing
your customers and suppliers, professional
societies, and so on. Hide in your cubical,
you wither and die, no matter how good a gnurd
you are.
If there were a unionization of tech people there wouldn't be this problem.
"Instead of blaming the problem on the "suits," why not come out of our geek comfort zone and be sociable?" Why? Why do I have to do things the way YOU want me too? Why do I have to do things the SUIT way to be successful? This is all horsecrap. The geek/engineers come up with an idea, the suits steal it and sell it. Sure some geeks have gotten rich here lately. But for the most part, most haven't. Just benefiting a little from a tight job market. Listen, when push comes to shove, your job, technical merit, good ideas, or great attitude mean zero compared to some VP of Marketing's stock options. You will lose EVERY time.
I used to be very anti-union, but I've seen people get rich off the sweat of the geeks brow and I'm about f@#$$%~~$% tired of it.
Remember, no code, no product (in our world.) Be it MS or anyone else.
Without getting into the whole resume format issue, I would advise you to not give up on agencies in Austin. I live and work there, too, and have had excellent luck with them. I have found that a good relationship with a good agency can get you all sorts of good leads and chances you might not otherwise get; you get to leverage (to use management-ese) your reputation and expertise with theirs. Of course, this is just my personal experience, and I have heard horror stories. I would get recommendations on agencies and work from there.
we don't! That's the beauty of it.
They are idiots!
'A fool and his money are soon parted'.
avast, maties....
thanks for relating you experience.
I was considering enroling in an MBA program as a way to get out of the technical field (I don't really see myself writing code 15 years from now), but your experience will make me think a little more about the whole thing before jumping into an MBA.
One question: are you working in a technical position right now or are you just doing management stuff?
thanks in advance.
joe L.
A little over a year ago, I quit my industrial job, looking for greener pastures in the "computer industry"
I went through the want ads in the paper, used the student classifieds and jobs office at school, monsterboard, texas.jobs, and Usent jobs. I got lucky, and one reply was from the actual company that needed a C++ contractor.
Total time on the job search - three days. Total time pounding the pavement - zero. "Wow, this is great!" I thought. As I said, I was lucky.
That contract ended, and I have had to go through every %^%#! recruitment office in the state, just to get into a first interview. I went on a lot of interviews. Even had a second and third interview at places that required travel.
You know how I got THIS job (technical writing just up the road from home)? I gave my homemade business cards (color - printed on glossy paper and hand trimmed - they look nice) to my wife, and asked her to pass them around if she knew anyone who needed technical skills.
One of the guys at her church contacted me. In two weeks of phone calls, honing my resume, and making sure that my skillset was listed ACCURATELY, they hired me. I found one of the few really good recruiters.
Located in Arlington, Texas, and only a couple miles up the road from me! Yay!
I STILL had to go through a recruiter to get the job, but at least I didn't have to deal with the many idiots who DID contact me.
Where ARE the direct to job-hunter listings? I want to know too. I'm getting paid well, but it would be nice not send a percentage into someone else's pockets.
Mark Edwards
The resume might have had a lot of attantion paid to it if it had been called "zipped_files.exe" or "happy99.exe".
This is someone who has gotten all his jobs from word of mouth or connections, not resumes. It works for me! Perhaps companies with HR departments don't want me, but that's been my experience.
The answer is simple. Employers and employees need to start using the many job listing sites and communicate with prospective employees directly via the Internet. Just as the Internet can cut out the middlemen in product sales, it can do the same for job listings.
... Shut up.
Not only was it not an instruction form the employer, it wasn't an instruction at all.
Not only was it not an instruction, it wasn't what he was complaining about.
With reading comprehension skills like this, you wouldn't make a good employee to anyone, so you obviously know how to kiss ass real well.
Idiots like you make this site really hard to bare some days.
I graduated from a top 25 college with a computer science degree and thought I would be entering a haven for jobs. However, so far all I have found has been a lot of recruiters who dont care about what you want to do, but rather what they want you to do.
If computer companies would just advertise their jobs, they cold save money.
- still unemployed.
My approach at the moment is to find potential jobs on the JobServer, then ring the contact to discuss the position and find out what format they want my CV in. My preferences are to either send it to them in WP format (with a .doc extension!) or to fax it to them.
Well, I would say don't trade free pop for any money -- you can buy Big Red and a fridge for the cube and have money left over. I have friends that have done the startup thing and well after they should all have been making a better income (post IPO and all) they weren't and management (now worth a lot of money) defended it because, well, they were treated so well. The free pop and all.
;), you will want to retire someday. You don't retire on free pop.
At the end of the day (as the accountants say)(and I have really gotten to like those guys -- there are more potential bofhs in accounting than anywhere else I have ever seen
Of course, you don't need to work in a hellhole either, but there is rarely a need to compromise -- just look around for longer. It may take a few years to get a decent job.
Yeah, I do that myself, but I put a CGI in front of it that requests some info before you get to see it.
r esume.pl
Check it out:
http://www.cloud9.net/~hennessy/cgi-bin/resume/
I figure it's only fair that before someone gets to see my private info, I should know who's looking... And anyone not serious enough to fill in the small amount of mandatory info isn't serious enough in my book... If you want a copy of the code, mail to the address listed on the page.
Cheers,
- Matt
Hmmm. First you say job seekers should do "whatever it takes" to get through the HR firewall, then you bitch about resumes being nothing but lists of buzzwords. Well, do you really expect clueless HR people to be able to tell the good candidates from the crap? Face it, they use a formula to decide who is worthy of an interview and who helps to fill the recycle bin. It sounds like your company is keen on buzzwords when it comes to applicants. Bitch at your HR dept before you bitch about the applicants.
I personally have had good luck with html format resumes, almost everyone knows what an html file is and how to open them. Also if people dont have a web browser at work almost all word processing programs (ms-word, word perfect, etc) will format and view html.
cable
(behind a firewall no one can hear you scream)
Clue: "If you are a geek in need of a geek, don't use HR as the gatekeeper." Rather naive advice. Firstly, our R&D department has no input on our hiring policies. Management says that we have an HR department and that hiring must come through there. Furthermore, we need an HR department to go out scouring for people. We're in a fairly remote location and it's hard to find new people.
Clue: I'm clearly part of the moron crowd?? With witty comments like "bwahahahaha", are there really any doubts what crowd you belong to? In point of fact, quite a few businesses and certainly most HR departments have no PostScript printers. They're pure HP PCL all the way, and they certainly don't have PostScript print filters. They don't need them; everyone uses Word.
There are plenty of good technical recruiters out there. Finding one and staying with them is probably the best way to swim around in the job market. The most difficult thing for me was when I wanted to move to a particular city just cause I wanted to live there. It took a little longer than usual, but I finally got there.
:)
Through the whole ordeal, I think I only had one recruiter that was like the one described here. He had the IQ of a grape. It wasn't that bad, cause he was pimping me to a company I really didn't want to work for anyway (I won't mention Dell's name). I emailed his agency and told him I didn't want him representing me to anyone anymore and I never heard from him.
I've dealt with several other recruiters and that was really the only case where I had a bad one. Also, one good web site I found that got me more prospects than any other was www.scguild.com. It requires a subscription fee, but it was worth it.
I am a java programmer and linux geek. Java was what I was looking for first and foremost and I found a ton of it. Not as much in the town I wanted to move to as I would have liked, but I eventually did find something there.
And BTW, after watching others try to find jobs in different industries, this one is a hell of a lot easier, and the dress code is better, and most companies have free beer/munchies/soda, so what more could a geek ask for besides oodles of stock options?
Face it, when company X loses employee Y who did tasks A, B, C, D, E and F. They place a job ad (with a paper, the net, or their favorite agency) for applicants required to know A, B, C, D, E, and F. Well, I've learned that no two employees are alike in their skill set. I got tired of seeing which bizarre skills mold I could contort myself into. I started applying to ALL software development jobs in my area that I came across. (This was before there were many jobs advertised on the net). I mailed out hundreds of resumes over a 1 month period. Sure I collected a lot of form letters (theny you for your resume we will keep it on file, blah blah) but I also got interested replies from jobs that I never thought I fit the bill for. The rule is, ignore the requirements. It's not like they're gonna come out and whomp your ass for applying for a job without the desired skills. No matter how many jobs you apply to, you're only going to end up taking one, right? So what if you get 10 interested replies from 500 mailings. One is all you need. My job is nothing like what the ad said. I got a job that hadn't been advertised yet. So mass mail, it can't hurt.
Gee, I wonder WHY Slashdot killed "FascDot's" previous use...
Exploitation is where recruiters make serious money. Not all agencies are exploitive, but I know several that are. The exploitive ones will tend to use attractive women as their recruiters and talk down an employees skills to them while talking them up to the employer and paying the employee a small fraction of take. I know several people who were seriously exploited while making the transition from junior nobody to experienced senior person. They had a couple of years of experience and little confidence, so the agencies talked them down and payed them a little bit more than what they started at while billing as if they were senior people.
I've done a lot of work for agencies and I now refuse to work for companies that won't tell me what they're billing the client or that mark me up more than 35-40%. I've dealt with several agencies that have no qualms about marking people up more than 500%. (Guy with no college and 5 years of experience as a computer operator, much of that doing his boss's job was shopped out to the client as a senior Unix administrator and was getting paid $18/hour by the agency. The client was getting billed $150/hour and reportedly was happy with the service they were getting. [the guy was sharp and flexible and willing to work off-hours and under deadline stress.])
Of course, when he found out he promptly quit, but the amount of money they made off of him no doubt encouraged them to continue the practice.
Dell opens a new installation here in Nashville, and what happens? They interview a bunch of folks, and reject 96.5% of the 7,000 applicants that came in the first 3 weeks. I was fortunate enough to get an interview, but I was rejected anyway.
The wierd part was the interview itself. I was a shade early, well-attired, and relaxed. (After all, I *do* still have a regular day job!) The two kids interviewing me were maybe 23 or 25 years old. I don't mind that -- I've gotten used to communicating with gatekeepers who are 5 to 10 years younger than I -- and they didn't seem to mind me, either. There was a black guy and a white guy. The black guy was really impressed with my experience as a datacom tester at NASA, my Electrical Engineering degrees, and my A+ certified PC tech background with 10 years of fixing everything from DOS & Windoze to OS/2 Warp.
The white guy kept asking antsy questions in an attempt to disqualify me. "You didn't do any testing at NASA, did you?" I replied, "I certainly did. I designed, built, and ran the verifications on my own project, hardware & software. When it was done, we used that piece of equipment to test the new FAA switching system." He was *genuinely disappointed* that I had a background that so closely matched their requirements for a testing engineer. Both fellows were a touch disappointed that I already made as much as $12 an hour. They were apparently looking for a flunkie earning single-digit hourlies so a $10 or $11 an hour management position would be a real "step up."
These DELLies are apparently out to recruit cheap flunkies for their high-skill, low-wage sweatshop. Maybe it's a good thing they don't want to hire smart people.
Visit http://www.osh2q.com/ for more "Warped Perspectives."
You're a halfwit. People who get ahead by kissing ass do so because they're not capable of doing anything useful or productive. And you brag about this? Clue time, kiddo: The guy in the corner office certainly played some politics on the way there, but if he doesn't know what the fuck he's doing and if he isn't committed to doing it well, he's not going to last long. He also didn't get there by being a yes-man; yes-men aren't capable of being in charge, because all they can do is agree with the guy who is in charge. If there weren't anybody above them, they'd have to start kissing their subordinates' asses, and that just wouldn't do.
The people who "get what they deserve" are:
A) You, working in Dilbert-land, playing office politics all day for a 5% raise every year;
B) The morons who hired you because the only quality they value is a mindless enthusiasm for obeying arbitrary orders -- the same morons who did not hire anybody with any creativity or initiative, and certainly (god forbid!) not anybody interested in doing the job.
I have no doubt that you keep your chair nice and warm and kiss all the right asses. To each his own; I prefer doing interesting work at informal startups. It's fun, they don't care how you dress, you get to work on interesting projects, and they don't get obsessive about trivia like which word processor you use (I always submit resumes in 7-bit ascii). The money is not the most important thing, but that's nice too. The important thing is being valued for one's competence, and not treated as a Disposable Work Unit. The last startup I was at turned ugly as it grew; it began to mutate into the sort of environment where you'd be comfortable. I bailed out, and I'm a lot happier now. As for the company, well, most of the other competent people bailed out around the same time I did. Now the parasites (people like you) are eating what's left as the company dies, and they're all congratulating themselves on getting rid of the "bad apples" (the people who created the wealth they're pissing away). Fuck it, I got my share and got out. They're welcome to the leavings. At least they're not collecting welfare. When it all crashes they'll be in trouble, because idiots like that live beyond their means and they'll be in debt with no job. Tough shit, really. I guess that's another instance of "people getting what they deserve".
I can see that you heartily despise everybody who doesn't live in the same cramped, dark little box as you. That's okay. You enjoy kissing ass? That's okay. They're your lips; get 'em as dirty as you like. Then again, maybe you have just enough self-respect to hate yourself for kissing ass, but you do it anyway because you don't have the balls or the brains to get a real job. That's okay, too. It's a free country, but you should remember that your opinion is not as important as you think.
I have used it primarily to defend not taking a ahalf-assed approach to stuff like backups, records storage, disk space, time to do full tests of new stuff before moving it into production, pointing out why Windows is a bad idea long run, and so on.
Mostly finance issues, risk analysis, and lots of math.
If you are staying in a non-strategy area, you should be fine without it.
*To protect the guilty, the company shall remain nameless (but starts with an M).
The company was offering a bounty to employees for a new hire, and I stumbled across somebody's resume on the web. I contacted them, and had to apologetically explain that they had to FAX their resume, as the HR director could not figure out how to read or print their resume on the web. The applicant thought we were idiots and never sent it.
The dilbert comic of the last day or two hits on our current topic: the risky business of online resume submissions and the messy deal with headhunter.
Times have to be changed. Let's rule the suits out of their socks!
Yesterday I responded to an add:
C++ / Object-Oriented Developers in Cleveland, Ohio.
The agency had called by the time I got home - guess what? They specialize in the East coast and had no such job. He "apologized" for being misleading, saying it was new marketing to get better prospects. Now that I think about it, this is not the ethics of people I want representing me. So, think about the location before responding to an ad from the Brixton Group of North Carolina.
Damn right there.
As for employment equity: everyone should get an equal chance but still have to prove themselves. Sure, cut some slack to the person who couldn't afford a gold-plated education -- provide learning materials (they're relatively cheap), but it they can't learn PDQ, dump em.
But picking up other people's work isn't only about unqualified minorities hired to fill a quota -- it applies to all the buzzword fools out there. Avoid companies that hire drones -- if you're good you will be expected to pick up their slack, and worse, be criticized for not "teaching" the unlearnable.
Re 6: Look, I have a family. But, they gotta eat. Sometimes that means the job comes first. I have no sympathy for those who leave early for "family" reasons, when there is work to finish. At best, "family oriented" should mean flexible hours, so one can leave (and return to make the time up) when an unexpected emergency occurs.
I'll add another item: the "Teamwork" buzzword. Watch out for companies that reward teams instead of individuals -- get stuck working with a team heavy with unmotivated types, or incompetents, and you'll end up working your ass off to try to save the day, and usually getting no credit because the "team" slipped on a deliverable despite your best efforts. OR, if you succeed and pull off a miracle, you'll have to share any reward with coattail-riders.
im sure that you used to be one of those
10$/hour flunkies many years ago. they are probably
looking to snag people like you while they are 'up and coming'
not while they are already 'up' because obviously
its cheaper to catch someone good who is unknown.
its alot like john sayles was talking about how he hires
actors for his movies.. he said the best situation is to find good
people who arent famous yet, coz theyre cheap and their good.
give me a break.
Hah, you moron. If you're going to flame, do it right, and don't have typos.
Idiots like you make this site really hard to bare some days.
An intelligent person would of course, realize that it is "hard to bear, not bare. As in your bare display of stupidity. As far as employee material goes, you rank lower than anyone else posting here.
Granted, a mechanical engineer wouldn't be designing new fancy stuff without your software. But it's the Electrical/Mechanical engineers that make life as you know it possible.
-Dop
dop@uiuc.edu | www.nomadlinux.com
Since when were HR people less smart than people hiring? I too have been on both sides, and HR people are only as knowledgeable as a hiring manager makes them. Outside of that, why even quality intelligence?
People like you, including most HR departments, STILL haven't figured out that the labor market in the IT industry is a seller's marker (seller==laborer in this case). Companies with traditional approaches to HR are just going to see the collective talent of their employees gradually decline as their good people get lured to startups and their recruiting leads them to morons.
Good point there. If everybody on both side of the wall-o-'droids knows the score, surely one of them can think out of the box enough to fold their resume'/requirements list into a paper airplane and toss it over the wall.
(The throwee needs to provide suitable distraction to the droids so they don't catch on that they're being end-run and get pouty....people like to think they're relevant even when they're not)
"How can there not exist an option to filter out all those nasty recruitment agencies? "
"How can there not exist an option to filter out all those nasty recruitment agencies? "
If there are job fairs, take an afternoon or evening and visit -- sometimes you'll actually talk to some of the people who do the job. Most of the time the booths are staffed by semi-clueful HR people and/or managers who can tell you a lot more about the position and company.
The Monster Board (www.monster.com) is pretty good too. I put my resume out there and got a lot of calls; 90% were crap, but 10% were actually interesting. I had plenty of time to look (my job was secure, but I was unhappy) so I didn't mind turning things down and waiting until the "perfect" job came along (it did).
Me Too
I also constantly have geek jobs open. Right now I even have one C++/Java/UNIX position open which will evolve into a team leadership role. Can't fill it.
I have two other roles (C++/UNIX/Windows and C++/Java/Windows) that I've opened for filling in any of our three major offices (London, Minneapolis, Sydney) just so I can open up the field a touch.
If there were a Slashdot jobs, I'd use it. Tried BrainPower, and they proceeded to spam me, so when they started charging I told them to shove off.
What I think is really needed is a system where all the skills exist already in a database, and candidates/employers check off what thay have/need, together with the skillsets. Don't give people the opportunity to put in arbitrary terms for something - if they have to pick from a list the terms remain consistant across the board.
That says it all..
http://www.tenspeed.com/
yeah, but caving in, means encouraging the system,
passing on the job, on other hand still does not
discourage the system. From what I have seen,
the companies that do the thing, aren't experienced with hiring outside personell, and go
to those retarted dumbfucks. I happend to face some. Finding a computer job is not hard, finding
a good computer job is HARD...
The guy is right, the hiring of full time personnel, is very intrecate task, and incopetency
and ignorance of middle man does not help....
so for the companies, I would reccomend to look themselves, if they want to create a wonderful
team, not a bunch of drones to do chores.
... as with me, I found work thru my buddies, friends, etc, and very happy with it.
l8r
Yeah, many of us can do well without bending over
and greasing up:-)
I am working for a middle sized company and love it. Don't have to suck up at all.
:-)
l8r
Why not scour UT and TexAM for people? You know, take prospective graduates out for trips and give them some tuition money to boot. Why wade through piles of nobodies (who really might be desperate and sitting by the phone day after day) who might damage your rep?
It is all about money. ROI. and the great you don't make the cut effect? It's all about money changing hands, accounts, promises, contracts, and casual encounters, what if you were born in Bangladesh? You would probably be dead of course. Money, money, money, money. Gotta be proud, we geeks and all.
--Capitalism spawned recruiters, yet recruiters are consumed by capitalism.
Get me in the door you dummies!!!!!!!!!
I don't give a crap about your knowledge.
>Of course, there's potential for truly awful resumes, replete with japascript, BLINK tags, annoying animated GIFs, etc. Stick to basic HTML, though
....... };->
>and you should do fine.
You could also embed a trojan horse virus into the code so if you don`t get the job
Easy - you have a box that says "add a new skill", and somebody inteligent reviews these and either approves or denies the addition.
Fiddly things like this should be easy to cope with.
This guy's hilarious, click on his user info and check out some of his other posts. There's about 80 of them and in almost every one he's calling someone a moron or a retard.
Yeah, you just chew up those programmers don't you?
A couple weeks and they're gone right?
I wonder why.
It's better that way, I guess. The quicker you chew up those punks, the quicker you can get back to your all important life's work of calling people morons on a geek news bulletin board. The world's a better place because of heroes like you, sir.
But I guess I probably was lucky - I've had my share of bad experiences with agencies too. My suggestion is that once you find an agency that treat you well, and that actually get you a job, get back to them directly when you want to switch jobs again. Tell them what type of job you want, and how much pay you require before you're willing to consider changing jobs.
As long as your demands are within reach, and the agency is good, they will get back to you when they find a suitable client. And as long as you find an agency that get a percentage of what the client pay you (not out of your pay check of course), they will be more than happy if you indicate how much you want, and will tell you if you go lower than you should.
As long as your skills are interesting, visiting a few agencies in person and request an interview, and present yourself, and your resume, can be worthwhile. Tell them what kinds of job you want, how much money you want, and ask them to get back to you if they have anything suitable. Make them understand that you have talked to other agencies too.
Since you asked:
.5% of salary for an average coder -- not cool, not a "benefit"). Everyone has these at this point -- if they do not, watch out. It is on purpose.
1. the 401k: how much do they match? Is it up to the legal max, 1:1? It should be. Beware of really long times to vest (that is the point at which the money that they contributed becomes yours) -- places with high turnover tend to push the vesting as far forward as they can to pay out as little as they can, and this is a sign that the company sucks so hard that people are leaving like rats off of a sinking ship. Also, beware of matching in stock -- cash is king, unless you work for a company like Dell (and sometimes even if you do).
2. employee stock purchase plans and/or bonus plans/profit sharing: Normally one or the other (stock purchase if the company is public, profit sharing if private). Both, if you are lucky OR both plans are so small that you cannot hope to get any additional money out of it (a bonus of $200 at the end of a year would be less than
3. raises: How much, when, and based on what. A yearly raise that is less than inflation is worthless -- note how much it is after inflation. Similarly, look at whether or not the raise depends upon a perfect score on evals, and then ask how often do people get those perfect scores -- they should have a solid number. If they do not or get squirelly, then the
perfect eval" deal is what they use to give no one a raise (i.e., there will always be "something" that keeps the score from being perfect, so sadly no raise).
4. really aggressive employee empowerment/sexual harassment programs: If they care that much, then something is very wrong already and they are setting up these programs instead of fixing the problems (psychotic/grabby bosses; instead of firing them, they "empower" the employees). Don't do it -- it will be a snakepit.
5. really aggressive EOE/affirmative action programs: This doesn't work with programming. Either you can or can't. You will be picking up someone else's slack if you can and they can't (but were hired to fill a quota). These places also tend to be as paranoid as #4. Not worth your time. Really and seriously. And, if you are a minority (Mexican, naturalized, and a woman, like me, for instance), this will make you bitter because you will discover the wonderful feeling of being watched by everyone all the time to see if you can actually do the work.
6. "family-oriented" companies: Look, I like kids, but I dislike doing other peoples' work. I have friends at companies who also have no kids and they are doing damned near all the work after 17:00 because everyone with kids has split, with the blessings of the company, without finishing the work. Guess who gets to stay? Right. Those of us without kids.
Basically, look for a no-BS kind of place. Trust your first impressions. Always ask to see the floor or the machine room -- do people look angry or tired or paranoid? And expect that you might take a while to get it right.
Well, staying AC for a number of reasons, I am doing a lot pf project management and I am setting up disaster and site recovery policies. I have also been able to do a lot of hiring myself. I have specced out probably $20,000,000 of hardware in the last year and am the lord and master of a small part of a large data center (there are much larger lords, but I am king over here behind the s/70s).
/.ed, or I would ask for resumes). Talk to people who know what you want -- and that isn't HR.
I would get the MBA. It helped me. Here is why:
I spent about ten years wondering why management was so clueless. I knew (and was proven right over and over again) what I was doing. My mangers didn't. Either they were technical and really in need of being put out to pasture or they were non-technical and entirely too suceptible to the blandishments of salespeople.
After a while, it occurred to me that an MBA was the way to become someone at the level above me who made those decisions.
My grades were pretty good, I did well on the GRE (and GMAT too, I think; I know I should remember, but I don't). I got into a few MBA programs and picked the best of the lot.
I am now in the position to do The Right Thing all the time and I know how to justify it in financial terms and risk management terms thanks to the MBA. You have no idea how incredibly satisfying that it. I feel like I am on the side of the angels and I get to work early every day. I am being paid to Do It Right The First Time, and I love it.
The MBA was of questionable utility, but some of the classes (the entrepreneur stuff, the finance and risk management, and the accounting) was just so key. I wish that I had had it a few years ago.
And I don't dislike people. I just like my kind of people (quiet, efficient introverts). Happily, I have about twenty of them right now and we get along well. In fact, I have people trying to get transfered into my group all the time. It just isn't that hard to treat adult like adult.
I would do the MBA just for the satisfaction of having replaced a pointy-haired boss.
What I would not do:
1. Do not do one of those "Techno-MBA" programs. I am not from Texas, but The University of Texas at Austin apparently has been pushing this hard. Locally they are well-loved. But the "Techno-MBA" people are not technical and also have far fewer MBA skills. We don't hire them. I don't know who would. Stanfors (I think) is doing something similar. I don't see the point. If you have the technical background, do not take a single "technical" course in the MBA program. You have this. You are here for the stuff you don't have.
2. Do speak to the data center managers directly. I have helped get hired two people who called me directly, with MBAs. I had to walk their applications through HR, but I got them hired them. I am not the director (and I am not sure about getting HR here
3. Do start the job search early -- it took me 18 months, and I would have been hungry for six of those if I had been counting on a job right out of school (I wasn't, and had saved accordingly).
4. Do assume that the MBA will cost twice as much as you think and assume that you won't be able to get loans. I saw lots of people get blindsided by the cost of books, the inaccessibility of financial aid, and the cost of clothes, cabs, and so on.
5. Do think about where you want to be. An MBA is not a substitute for carreer planning and a lot of people make that mistake.
It was annoying and long, but I think it was worth it. It lets you finally do what you wanted to all along. If that is magic for you, then do it. If not, look at why you thought it was good and see if you really wanted something else.
Damned if everyone, and I mean everyone can't read documents in HTML format. Since it's a given that any secretary or headhuster runs word, and therefore runs windoze, you can bet they'll have a web browser. It's built into the OS right? Heck, they're probably using outlook or netscape to read email to start with. Having your resume in HTML format means they can *SKIP* the step of inmorting your resume into word. That makes you stand out right away.
Of course, there's potential for truly awful resumes, replete with japascript, BLINK tags, annoying animated GIFs, etc. Stick to basic HTML, though and you should do fine.
Hire me pleeeeeeeease!
resume goes here.
read... this... quickly... between... blinks... or... it... won't... make... sense...
If... you... hire... me... I'll... tell... you... how... to... stop... this... accursed... blinking... muhahah.... hahahahaha.....hahahah!!!!
As an owner of Scientific Placement (www.scientific.com) I've been in the high tech recruitment business for quite some time. There are a few points that I'd like to make:
- Recruiting firms are as different as restaurants in terms of approach, market focus, caliber of employees, contract or permanent, local or national (or international), etc. A bad experience at The Olive Tree doesn't suggest that you should swear off restaurants or that you'll get a bad steak at the Outback Steakhouse. A lousy hamburger at a drive-in restaurant doesn't mean you'll get a poor meal at Emeril's.
- It is a priority for our recruiters to understand as much about the technology as they can. We have them organized into technology focused specialty groups with that in mind. However, many geek resumes are loaded with acronyms and terminology specific to an application or product (so it isn't always easy). A young recruiter in our Windows group would recognize terms like MFC and C++ but might not have a clue about a resume with terms like MVS or Algol.
- Recruiters aren't the best way to go for everyone. For example, there is a posting here about someone looking for a specialized position in a small town in rural Mississippi. I wouldn't expect a national recruiting firm to spend a lot of time digging out that sort of job. Recruiters are not well suited for entry level recruitment because the college placement offices offer a competing free service to the employers.
- Before sending your resume to a recruiter you might check them out a bit. Their web site might be a good place to start. How long have they been in business? How many employees do they have (note: if they have 2,000 job postings on DICE and Usenet but only 3 employees that might be a clue). Do they have a focus on the type of techology you're experienced with? Are they contract or perm? Are they going to place you themselves or put you into a multiple-list style resume sharing pool used by many recruiters? Do they do much in your skill category (eg: If you're a tech writer you should look for a recruiter that places tech writers).
One thing you can't do by email is assess their style. Are they pushy sales types or more laid back with a service orientation. You might get a hint from their web site and a phone call could be a good idea. They're going to ask you a lot of questions. Why not ask them a few of your own before turning over your resume? What does their resume look like?
If you do get hooked up with a good recruiter they should be able to give an idea as to your marketability and whether your objectives are attainable (salary, location, job category and responsibilities). A good recruiter should be able to critique your resume and make suggestions for improvements. A larger firm will be exposed to actual data on salary offers and should have a feel for what's possible. A good firm should also be able to help you sort out companies. If they work in a specialty niche market they should have a feel for employer reputations (eg: sweatshop, frequent layoffs, good stock options, lots of young guys in managements, flextime, whatever).
My main point here is that it is a big world out there with more companies than you can count. It wouldn't be possible to interview all of them. Sure you can find them on your own but will you have the time and energy to sort them out. If one of them is known for low salary offers do you want to find that out the hard way?
We've got 50 employees and have a tough time keeping on top of the high tech world (it is huge and changes constantly). We make an effort to hire really good career type employees and to train them in the technology but they're not engineers and they have a steep learning curve. One way we deal with the complexities is by specialization -- focusing on niche markets. We're into the R&D segment -- commercial shrink wrap software companies, computer companies, peripherals and network products companies --- mainly software engineers and hardware design engineers ---mainly permanent as opposed to contract.
Whew!
David A. Small, President
Scientific Placement, Inc., 800 Tully, Suite 200, Houston, TX 77079
281-496-6100 Fax: 281-496-0373
eMail: das@scientific.com
http://www.scientific.com
I've been job hunting myself for almost 3 months. I'm a software developer and have plenty of marketable skills; my last 2 job hunts started and finished within a week. This time I decided to look for jobs exclusively online; monster, net-temps, etc, etc. I must have submitted my resume to 25 places via email and got 2-3 replies. Then I started faxing the resumes instead of emailing them. Enquiries! Interviews! Progress!
I have had some stunning replies from Customer Service departments of major corporations that would have gotten someone fired if they'd sent it on hard copy. So many companies are still getting used to email as an internal communications tool and they don't realize that it should be a legitimate external communications tool also.
I just quit my job Friday, so this is right up my alley. My experience from the last few weeks of browsing Monster.com, Dice.com, Headhunter.net, etc is that you can't get a Unix Admin job without 10 years experience in every flavor of Unix under the sun, expert in Notes/Word/Novell/NT/etc. To top it off, they'll pay a hefty $30k for someone with all that.
:)
Sure I'm exaggerating (I really saw one post that would pay $30k for an expert in everything), but it's the basic scheme. I've spent some time resetting people's passwords in Windows and the like, and now I'm mighty ready for something more interesting. Even for lowly Jr Admin jobs I get passed over by someone with 5 years experience (I'd think after 5 years you'd be at least mid-level?). The recruiters that post on the job web sites (do any direct hire companies post jobs there?) get the list of buzzwords and number years experience from a company (to replace me, my boss requested someone with 10 years NT experience), then do a search and send a form letter to the matches. Very few of them have actually looked at my resume on the board; instead just spit an email saying "Send me your resume in Word format." Then they call (or I call them), they find I haven't done squat professionally in Unix and hang up, err put me "on file." Lather, rinse, repeat.
Ah well, I've got to see a couple contracting firms this afternoon. Hopefully I'll be able to woo one of them into believing that I am damned intelligent.
I've had recruiters say, "Send it to me in Word. Text is too plain." The lack of eye candy (bold/italics/etc) loses their concentration.
My position comes from the fact that I'm currently leaving a position at one of those 'recruiting companies' and the fact that I left by getting a job through one of those recruiting companies, so I think I have a fairly balanced view of these things.
.wpf that's perfectly reasonable, but understand that the recruiter is not neccessarily a computer genius.
.wpf format is trash. After all, if you end up placing that candidate, it might mean a couple thousand bucks in your pocket (or more if they're GOOD)
Advice for you:
- Use whatever format they request, if they didn't request a particular format, the job was for WordPerfect, and you submitted a
If you've ever worked help desk, or known somebody who did, I'm certain you understand that.
- Remember that a recruiter works for you, not vice versa. If you don't feel comfortable with them, get a new one. There are thousands of choices, I personally went through three until I found a recruiter I felt comfortable trusting the future of my career with.
- Remember there are lots of jobs. I mean, LOTS of jobs. Don't focus on the fact that you're losing this job with a juicy raise due to the fact you won't work this recruiting firm, focus on finding a new recruiting firm, you'll be much happier in the end.
Advice for the recruiters:
- You'll do the best long-term by making people happy and remembering that without those placements, you don't get any commissions. Despite the fact that 80% of all resumes are trash, don't assume that the one that came in
- Learn how to open WordPerfect documents with word. If you can't do that, compose a polite form letter explaining the situation and ask for a DOC, RTF or a Fax.
- Basically no dress code
- Free soda fountain
- Monthly company-sponsored TGI Friday's parties with free beer and food
Are there any other perks I should look out for in an employer?Alex Bischoff
---
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
> I'd love to start a website like
> www.techjobsdirect.com, where smart
> people could bypass all this broker/agency
> nonsense.
Hmmmmm.... wouldn't your website then be the
source of the middleman/broker/agency nonsense?
All I needed to know in life I learned from
Hmmm. When I first entered the job market, this is exactly how it worked. Problem with it was, you were on the hook for 10% - 15% of your first year's salary the day you accepted the job. So the recruiters had no problem lying through their teeth about what the job entailed, working conditions, etc. If you found out after starting that things were not what you were led to expect, oh well.
This is a book I must recommend to anyone considering changing jobs. It's updated yearly, and my last one was '93, but it had a lot of good information I've used since.
For example:
1) Go directly to the person responsible for hiring
2) Ask said person for 5 minutes of their time. Give your 5 minute spiel, then say "I see my 5 minutes is up, thank you for your time". (I used this and it worked).
3) Networking networking networking (people that is). It's probably very hard at the 20-25 yr old age, but it works.
Plus there were chapters on why you want to change, finding the best job for you, negotating salary and benefits, etc.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
If you are a geek in need of a geek, don't use HR as the gatekeeper.
BTW, clearly you are one of the moron crowd: "do not have a PostScript printer (probably regular HP instead)". Bwahahahahaha
---
Put Hemos through English 101!
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Since I don't have Word or even WP running on my Linux machine, I coded up my resume straight in PostScript. I sent it out to people saying "This file is suitable to be sent directly to most laser printers..."
Every single response back to me said things like "Can't open your file" (don't then, just send it to the printer) or "Please submit in Word format" (for a Unix job?).
I knew there would be some idiots; I actually counted on it as a filter for people I wouldn't want to work for. What I didn't count on was that EVERY SINGLE HIRING PERSON OUT THERE is a moron.
---
Put Hemos through English 101!
Posted by badacid:
Looking for qualified workers is the hardest task facing companies in the high-tech field. Unfortunately, as a manager, I can only spend a short amount of time going through resumes because most of my time is spent doing my job. That is why we use recruiters. And most recruiters suck. I have received resumes that have had so many spelling mistakes and grammatical errors that I have posted them on the office bulletin board for everyone to laugh at. And these have come via a recruiter. The best source for finding new employees is internally. Train people up to fill the more demanding positions. Then use word-of-mouth referrals, at least that way you can be fairly sure that the potential new hire isn't psycho.
When I have applied for jobs I tend to try and fax my resume. It may cut down on the number of places I can apply to, but at least I know that the person can read it. In the Bay area check out the listfoundation.org web for really good leads ( I found a couple of jobs from it when I lived in California). Is there an equivalent to it in New York City?
The best companies to work for are the ones that have good internal HR departments, they probably also pay on time and don't drop the ball when it come to insurance, 401K etc.
The professor for a college writing course I took was a consultant for Novell, sorting out which people they should interview. The number one thing he looked for: proper format of the resume. Novell figured anyone who wasn't smart enough to find out what the expectations were before doing something wasn't worth hiring (not a bad point). So he first threw out any resumes on unusual paper, too many pages, etc. Then he checked for the needed sections of the resume (too many people sent incomplete info). Lastly, he scanned the resumes for "power words" which applied to the job (C, Java, Netware, etc.). Thus a non-computer user had full control over who did and didn't get interviewed. And every company has different requirements for resumes, which, in the case of a large company, are very clearly defined.
How can we get around this? Easy answer: find out what's expected! The best way would be to hire someone who reviews resumes to help write one for us. If I were to apply to work at Novell (I'm not going to) I would pay that professor to write my resume.
Posted by Mary CW:
I completely agree with the previous comment: use your people networks to get jobs. Don't waste your time sending in resumes to online job postings. Better, post your resume (with the right key words) and let them come to you.
Here in Silicon Valley, where you think the companies would have a clue -- none of my friends (or myself) who has responded to an online job listing has ever gotten any response other than (sometimes) an email form letter. I sent in applications to Cisco, HP, 3COM and didn't get so much as an email back. Companies don't realize that it actually pisses people off worse, to have online job listings that imply responsiveness, only to discover you've totally wasted your time trying to follow their stupid mandated application process. I found my new job through personal connections, and I'll never waste my time applying online again unless I already have an "in."
Posted by fling93:
And I don't mean in the geek sense. People are simply more likely to hire people they know, or that their friend or colleague knows. In fact, most companies pay employees a pretty decent referral bonus.
Posted by Dahakbert:
... :)
This is great for college students, but if you're working, I highly suggest putting your resume up, but WITHOUT any phone numbers. Most recruiters I've dealt with have been annoying as hell, calling me at work, telling the front desk that they are "returning my call" even though I've never talked to them, so they will be passed through. But since I revised my resume, put only my home address and NO phone numbers, only an e-mail address for contact, it is much more managable. Here are a few tips I would suggest for people who want to put their resume's up and NOT be annoyed:
1) don't put any phone numbers on there. Only e-mail addresses. That way, you can easily return messages and have it take up less time
2) if they call you at work, and you never put up a work phone number, DO NOT TALK TO THEM. Here's what they did, they looked at your resume, got your current employment's number from directory service, and are xcontacting you a way you did not ask for. This should always be highly discouraged.
3) if the recruiter tells you they heard about you from someone who highly recommended you, 9.9 times out of 10, they are lying. Recruiters usually say things like this to make you believe that they are really interested in you... if you ask who refered you and they refuse to tell you, guess what...?
4) do NOT answer any questions about your current business, how many employees are working there, what they do, etc. Tell them if they are that interested in your company, you can refer them to a sales person, tell them you do not want to answer too many questions about your business which can get you introuble for non-disclosure. Trust me, they have no qualms about being unnecessarily nosy. Most likely, they are probing you for info so they can decide to target other employees at the company who you work with for recruitment as well.
5) if they want a resume submitted to them by fax or mail, that is ok... however, tell them you want to know who they are recruiting for if you give them that. If they refuse, they are wasting your time. The best recruiters I've dealt with told me whom they are recuiting for and what the job is within one or two e-mails to them.
6) Always have an enemy or a wate-of-time's e-mail address or contact information infront of you, so if you get a recruiter who just annoys the hell out of you, you can say, "I am not at all interested, but let me give you the contact information for someone who might be." In one case, I explained to someone I wasn't interested, and they proceeded to tell me how I really was and I just didn't know it, so I explained it to them a little more forcefully, and highly suggested they contact the career center at my previous university. I knew this would be a waste of time for them, so
All in all, from my experience I still think the best way to find your dream jobn is the old fashioned way --- either know someone, or send in a resume to a company directly using newspaper adds or with a job fair. Most of the time, recruiters are going to be a waste of your time and energy.
-- Dahakbert
Something like "Slashdot Jobs" works just fine until the unwashed masses of tech recruiters realize it's there. Once that happens, you can kiss any hope of eliteness goodbye. The only way you can really guarantee that competent people are searching your site is to communicate with them ahead of time--lots of resources.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
So anyway, to filter out similarly unaware companies, I put my resume online as a HTML page and then gave myself the firm rule that all I would ever send to people, on paper or e-mail is the URL that points at it. Any place that either (1) didn't have the ability to figure out what to do with it, or (2) didn't have the time to have a human read a resume before rejecting it, would be somewhere I wouldn't enjoy working. It worked. Now I found a job I actually like and have been here for 2-3 years with no intention of leaving soon.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Recruiters invite you to mail them your CV without any instructions on what formats they accept, in my experience. I contacted them to ask and they didn't even understand the question.
The answer is that they all expect Doc or RTF. I tried to suggest PDF as a portable, cross-platform alternative and they hadn't even heard of it.
--
Employ me! Unix,Linux,crypto/security,Perl,C/C++,distance work. Edinburgh UK.
Xenu loves you!
I tried to solve this problem by putting my CV on my web site in four different formats (ASCII, HTML, PDF, Postscript) and sending the URL to recruiters along with a brief summary, so they could download the one they wanted. I got the reply "please email me your CV", naturally with no indicator of what format they could accept.
I eventually found out that their corporate firewall prevented them from viewing external websites.
Stupid, or stupid?
--
Employ me! Unix,Linux,crypto/security,Perl,C/C++,distance work. Edinburgh UK.
Xenu loves you!
I was looking for a new job only the other week and encountered exactly these problems. It struck me that a Hacker Recruitment Agency, which handled only the highest caliber people but understood hackish quirks, could totally clean up the high end of the recruitment market. Just follow the instructions on the Clue Train: http://www.cluetrain.org/ and try doing the job as humans rather than as robots.
--
Employ me! Unix,Linux,crypto/security,Perl,C/C++,distance work. Edinburgh UK.
Xenu loves you!
The spec of PDF is published, and there are Open Source viewers for it.
--
Employ me! Unix,Linux,crypto/security,Perl,C/C++,distance work. Edinburgh UK.
Xenu loves you!
Yep. They don't want to have to convert formats. I like to go text only unless someone specifically asks for Word. But it's the specificity of the buzzword searches that I find more objectionable. It has be likened to ordering pizza with the exact combination of toppings. Employers are shooting themselves in the foot with this practice.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
and you no longer have to deal with the idiots.
Of course, I have always had the luxury of ignoring agencies and talking directly to my prospective boss. I'm not planning on changing these habits in the near future.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
I'm sorry but sending a WordPerfect file is really
like asking them to throw your resume in the
wastebasket.
I've had to sort through piles of incoming resumes
and this is how it goes on the receiving end:
1. Garbled attachments (delete)
2. BinHex'd attachments (damn Mac users - delete)
3. doc files (I don't have Word and I'm not
impressed by you doc formatting skills - delete)
4. WordPerfect attachments (are you kidding me? - delete)
5. doc files with macro virus (oh why thank you,
get a virus scanner you friggin' putz! DELETE)
The best ways to send a resume online:
1. Plain text in an email message
2. URL where the resume is posted online
If there's one thing I've learned about Slashdot it's that the average poster is just that... average. There's nothing special about the communication skills of the geeks coming and posting to this site.
--
I've been unemployed now for over 8 months, and in that amount of time I've probably fired off well over 1000 resumes. They keywords seem to be okay, but the HR gods seem to enjoy tormenting me as each interview is always conducted by some halfwit who still finds ball point pens to be much too advanced.
:P
The agencies I've dealt with, and it always seems to be the same three or four agencies here in MN, just can't find people who know what they're dealing with. That simple fact has made my life hell over the last year. Of course I applied at Red Hat, Penguin, and VA just for kicks and didn't get a response either. So maybe I just suck.
Those are the exceptions, not the rule. Most suits can't find their way around a computer with both hands, a compass and a sherpas guide.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
A close relative of mine is making 6 figures as a contract technical recruiter. There are placement services that pay administrative assistants $30k a year or less to filter resumes but they will not serve you well. As L1zard K1n6 says, they play the game and have their choice of geeks, but we also have a choice, don't submit to just one placement agency and don't rely on or recommend those that don't serve your needs. The market is a double edged sword, use it to your advantage.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
So, now, in order to get a job in Unix (any flavor), I need to pay the MS tax? When in reality, an employer (as opposed to a head hunter) who wants a Unix person should be happy that the applicant uses Unix at home?
Linux is cheap, they should install that over Windows for the admins (or *BSD). In the places I've worked, my machine was for my use, and so whatever I wanted on it was fine. My preference is Linux. I also use it at home.
It seems odd to me that any company would want their Unix admins on anything but Unix!
I'm a similar situation here myself. I've kept half an eye on the job market, as I know that pretty much any job would pay me better than where I work now (I work for a K-12 school district). I applied recently for a job that ended up being just a few miles down the road from where I live. From what the recruiter told me, I was able to piece together what company he was talking about (there is only one company near me that would have an Internet product for four years). The job was for a UNIX admin position but I also happened to know that this company uses Macs for their product, which is something I am also very familiar with, working in an educational environment. The recruiter insisted he have my resume right away so I came in on a Saturday and typed up an updated resume and sent it to him. That was about a month ago. I never heard anything back. Never an acknowledgement, never a "We don't want you". Nothing. I had half a notion to just bypass the stupid recruiter and submit my resume directly but I wasn't totally gung ho about the job. However, whats frightening to me is the trend that there now is a middleman involved in the whole employment process - the geek headhunter. My experience has been there are those who are good and are knowledgeable but they are dwarfed in number by the droids who simply put a bunch of keywords into a database to search on and if your resume matches, you're in for an interview. I dealt with a recruiting firm in Pittsburgh where the person would call me about UNIX jobs because that was what was on my resume. They continually assured me the jobs fit me and I would later see them posted on a jobs website and they were way off base with what I am familiar with. I guess the old tried and true method of who you know still works best. People networking will probably more often land you the better job.
Personally, I see this as just another situation where the potential employee who knows what "works" on his resume will get the job. Resume classes offered by governmental HR agencies used to say "Keep it to 1 page, use this heading, bold here...", yadda yadda. In the near future, they'll have to say "Use the most common abbreviation or catchword for your language or skill", etc.
Just think of your resume as a document that has to be parsed by a particularly dumb and unforgiving filter (the agency) before going to the destination system (the employers desk), and adjust your document accordingly.
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
I've seen $8.50/hr data entry clerks who understand the basic concept of document importation.
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
He complains that they didn't accept his document format; I dare say the head hunter said to his buddies, "here's some dude who ignored our clear instructions on what formats we accept".
The state of the average recruiters database is such that, for the majority of positions, they will have hundreds of vague matches, and a few good ones - without computers to sift them (after all, this is what computers are good at) they wouldn't be able to do their jobs.
Of course, the recruitter with the best database searching technology is the one who'll get most of the commissions, so expect to see them set better, quickly. I wonder if any of them can afford to implement Autonomy?
As the end of the spring semester neared and I was looking at a bleak and cashless summer, I still hadn't heard from any of the companies to whom I'd submitted my resume in person. The best I'd recieved was "we'll put it in our database and see if it matches anything". I had just subscribed to the local novalug mailing list and figured "hey, what the heck" and submitted my resume (in RTF, considering the group I was talking to) attached to an e-mail. Within three days I'd gotten four replies and a request for an interview. I'm now working with an excellent company with some EXTREMELY good/fascinating/intelligent/patient people, and I'm enjoying it immensely. you CAN get hired in a "high tech" manner and still have a person on the other end.
You see, without that little doohicky, the universe stops.
http://propheteer.org
How do I avoid the bozos altogether when the company won't let me hire anybody without going through HR? I'm speaking as a senior programmer and team leader, not the president of the freaking company, so I don't exactly have the ability to change company policy when it doesn't suit me.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
The point is that the HR people have something you want, a job. They are likely to have to screen a few hundred resumes for every job they are hiring for, and they are probably hiring for several at the same time. So their top priority is finding ways of trimming the pile of resumes down, preferably without having to read the resume in detail. Don't give them an excuse to throw yours away. They will throw a resume away because it's not formatted right, because it's too long, too short, badly written, badly spelled, etc.
I've been working for 15 years, some of it contract, some of it full time. I've changed jobs about 9 times in that 15 years. Believe me, I know how the game is played.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
You seem to be acting under the misaprehension that a incompetent person cares whether they hire inferior employees or not. They don't. And if you don't do what it takes to get past the HR firewall, you'll never get a chance to talk to the clued person who wants to hire you.
I've been on both sides, the job hunter and the employer, and believe me, when you see the unqualified bozos that HR sends your way, you wish that more supposedly smart people knew how to play the HR game.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
I went through this when I decided to become a contractor here in the UK. I didn't have a PC at the time (just my trusty old Amiga, sold on now), so I figured it would be OK to use the (as I considered it) de-facto standard multi-platform document standard: PDF. So I created my CV in PDF format and sent it out to the agencies.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
Hardly any (I can't recall 1) accepted it, and instead wanted "Word 95". Bah. So I complied. I complained, but I complied. I even wrote to a contractor magazine to say how ridiculous it was to apply for hi-tech jobs and have PDF be turned down. "Surely there are Unix sysadmins out there with no way to create a Word 95 document" I thought. But even the letter to the magazine got flamed by an old-timer for me to just "deal with it".
Well now I send out my CV in HTML, or point them to my web site. It's funny - Microsoft has actually done me a service there - with either Word or IE (or Netscape) they can always open my CV. Fine. But it's not the ultimate solution to the CV problem.
My CV is actually stored in XML. The resulting HTML is dynamically generated each time you view it (by a perl script called xmerge which does XSL-T template style operations). What I really want to be able to do is submit my CV in XML. This way both the client and the agent can extract much more detailed information that they want, or ignore that detail. Then we need some sort of search engine that can match CV's up to job postings - also created in XML. That's coming. It's the work of the XML-HR (now HRMML) group at http://www.structuredmethods.com/ to bring us that technology. Note that my CV XML DTD isn't the one used by HRMML, but one I invented myself, because it's simpler and more appropriate for contracting (IMHO). Ultimately I may merge my work with HRMML.
For more info, see my CV stuff on sergeant.org. Or mail me direct at matt@sergeant.org for more info, and details of how to post a web page providing your CV in XML and have the HTML output produced by my script off my server.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Recent experience with recruiter:
I attached a text file and emailed it in.
"Sorry, that file you sent is all garbled up, I can't read it. Please send it in Word format next time."
I attached a text file, selected a different encoding method, and emailed it in.
No response.
A few days later, "Are you going to resend your resume, or should I conclude you're not interested?" They apparently managed to completely lose the email.
I attached a text file copy of my resume, *and* pasted the entire contents of the resume into the email itself.
No response. They apparently managed to lose this email as well.
"I'm still waiting for your resume, are you going to send it?"
I send the resume. Again. In plain old ASCII text format. And I paste the resume into the body of the email. Again.
"I got the email you sent me, but it is still all garbled up when I try to open it in Word, just like the first time. Just send me a Word file, please."
This person apparently does not know what a scroll bar is, has never heard of plain-text documents, and likely would not believe me if I told her about them. So I reply that I don't have Word and can't send that format, and would something else - say, HTML or PDF - be acceptable?
"No, just send me it in Word format."
At this point I decide that an employment agency which expects me to spend $500 on software I don't need in order to spare them the effort of learning how to open a plain-text file is just plain not worth dealing with.
-Mars
Recently, I've found that no matter what, they'll ask for your resume in Word
Memo to the DOJ:
"Hey, did you know that I have to pay Microsoft to get a job?"
I've noticed that the head hunters that I've dealt with recently seem to have much more of a clue than the ones I was dealing with even a couple of years ago... The last one I talked to could even follow me when I talked about the various types of Unix that I've been an admin on in the past. As a matter of fact, he even made a vaguely positive comment when I mentioned something about Linux. Perhaps I've just been getting lucky, but it does seem like at least the Unix admin head hunters are realizing that you can't get any respect from geeks if you can't even talk to them.
Also, while I'm sure a *lot* of companies out there have lame hiring practices, at least the Large Multi-national Corporation I'm now working for doesn't... The person who had the final decision in hiring me was a techie recently enough that he could appreciate my background. (The job I'm in is almost all HP-UX, and I'd never touched HP-UX before my first day on the job. I did have experience with Linux, Solaris, SCO (@#%$!), etc. though.) He also didn't make a decision without letting the people I now work with see my resume and later talk to me, so they could have some input on what they thought of my skills and attitude. Overall, it seemed like an excellent way to hire somebody. I'm incredibly happy with my job (and the people I work with) because of it.
(Now, if only I didn't have to drive 72 miles one way to work, my life would be perfect...)
It's a shame that hasn't worked around here (yet). I've been running a Linux users group for 5 years, and I have yet to work a Linux-only (or even Linux-centric) job, other than when I was doing independent consulting.
;-)
Of course, if somebody would like to make an offer...
Joseph,
I too have had very similar experiences, the last one just yesterday. Your submittal is quite timely.
Should you get out? hell no.
Personally, I am just going to work on making my resumes more buzzword compliant, as well as dumb down the details.
My recent experience came from my repeated use of aparently obscure tech terms like "Perl", "CGI", "Apache" in my resume. Despite applying for a specifically Perl/Apache/CGI web position, the "gatekeeper" had to ask me:
"do you know CGI web programming"
I expect your story will induce some to submit their own tricks for getting resumes past the barely-qualified "gatekeepers". I know I could use a few tips.
good luck!
I wouldn't go that far, but I will say I haven't had luck with them. I moved down here to Mississippi to marry a sweetheart who was finishing a PhD. I tried headhunters and mass mailing my resume. The companies that headhunters returned were quite a drive or what friends told me were sweatshops. Resumes just got headhunters refering me to out of state jobs that seemed to require frequent traveling.
I gave up on the suit and tie resume job hunting shit and went to the local state employment center here. After a few weeks of checking in with them, she finally picked up the phone to call someone, "I think I have the person you are looking for." They got me what seemed like a decent job at a local manufacturing plant. I interviewed with an engineer, took the employment test and heard back a month later they wanted me to start the next day. I kept getting reviews and rewards every few months until my 40 hrs/week salary matched those of my engineering degree holding buddies.
I enjoy the hell out of my job. My resume didn't get me here, but the usual approach that any normal worker tries. I would say showing up unemployed at the employment center got me a good job. The job I have gives me 100% vesting, all the paid overtime I want, paid vacations, insurance, and job security. Its a good feeling working with older, more mature people as they don't quit, but retire or die.
My current project, the MEMS Exchange, is looking for good developers, and placement services aren't much help, because the people we've interviewed often seem to be clueless. (Write me if you'd be interested -- we're in the DC area, and are a research-oriented non-profit.) We've had horrifying experiences where a candidate's CV looked good, but it all fell apart at the interview, where we found they couldn't write pseudocode for reading a file line-by-line. If we knew a person could at least design and code reasonably, because we knew they'd maintained a non-trivial software package, that would be a good foot in the door. Similarly, a while back Digital Creations got a bunch of new employees, hiring practically everyone who had done a significant project using Zope. This is another good reason to hack on free software; it can earn you a reputation, and that reputations can lead to better offers and more interesting jobs.
Didn't you read the article? The point isn't that some poor geek is forced to use Word to get a job (he wasn't--they accepted .rtf). The point is that there's something wrong with the whole architecture of the employment agency-driven job market: Namely that you have a clueful employer on one end, a clueful potential employee on the other, and a wall of cluelessness in the middle.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Actually,
there is one that's been set up, that you can find from UserFriendly, called Geek Finder.
It could certainly use more jobs, (i'm hoping to relo to the east coast myself) but it does exist, so might see if they'd like to combine....
I got lucky in that my current employer (whom I've been working for for the last month) saw my plaintext resume on Headhunter.net and was impressed enough to contact me. It also helps that this is a mostly UNIX house and so they were more than happy to view my complete resume (which I keep in HTML format) without the assistance of Microsoft products. :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
I spoke to three recruiters in the six years I spent (pretty happily) at my old company. Names of the guilty will be withheld - Lynx was the good one (up in Lexington MA).
First of all, my old position was running the network at an ad agency south of Boston. I liked it there a lot, but it was a family business, so I had no real chance of moving into real management (that's been my goal for a long time) and, though it was fun, the hours were grinding (10-12 hour days and more were the norm) and the commute was horrible (I live on the North Shore of Boston - the commute was 1-2 hours each way on a good day). Anyhow, I supported Macs, NT servers, a few PCs, and about 100 users, and I had a support guy and a web/database guy working for me.
The first agency I spoke to was a specialist in Mac skills and "creative" types. They seemed like decent sorts who understood my desire to move into a more management-related permanent job that was closer to home. Well, all they ever called me for were hourly jobs as a NT Administrator. The insulting part, of course, was that they wanted me to move to contracting for less $$, when I explicitly told them I was only interested in a permanent position. But I guess that contracting is more lucrative for them so they try to push as many bodies as possible that way.
So I mentally killfiled them (Ironically, almost two years later, I just got an email from a person there. Guess what they wanted to know if I was interested in... At least this one was permanent!) and tried a different agency - one of the biggest ones up here in Boston who handles tech jobs in general along with contract and other office work jobs. They were marginally more helpful, and I went on two actual interviews that were reasonably close fits to my needs. One of them was even in my town, though a little farther off base than what I really wanted. The problem I saw is that they pigeonholed me as a "Mac Guy", where I saw my Mac skills as just a piece of the puzzle. I lost interest in them after about 4 months - they were losing interest in me, too by then.
Finally, in early 1998, I talked to one more recruiter Lynx, as I mentioned earlier). I felt very comfortable with the recruiter I was meeting with, and he promised up and down that he wouldn't bug me with junk. I told him about my previous experiences with recruiters, and was assured that this would be better.
Yeah right, I thought...
Well, about two months went by without a peep - so I figured they were useless, but at least they weren't bugging me with junk the way the other two had. Then, at the end of March, he finally called me with:
A job managing the network group at a decent-sized company (bigger than my old one, but not too big) in my town! After a busy Easter weekend of interviews and debate, the deal was done - a better job, more responsibility, a nice salary bump, and the commute I craved. And I'm there now and quite happy to boot.
Now that was a good experience with a recruiter. No B.S., and the only call I got from them was for the right job. The key, I think, is to try and find one who specializes in tech work and to interview them as much as they interview you. If you don't feel they know what they're doing, tell them not to bother with you, you'll take your business elsewhere. They don't have to know how to do CGI programming, but they do have to know what it is. Remember, the good ones want to make the right matches - they get paid for it if they're any good. And they need you a lot more than you need them.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Networking doesn't do you much if you are relocating pretty far away from where they are now.
Networking helps open doors or find other opportunities besides the wantads, placement agencies or Monster.com's. But someone still will want your resume/CV/portfolio and to talk to you before they just give you a job. Networking doesn't help much there now, does it?
Most companies are having a real hard time hiring people. They have given up and relegated the responsibility to other people, namely their own engineers and headhunters.
Both get money for finding you. Headhunters get a lot more. But, the engineers typically get from one to five THOUSAND dollars for every person they find that gets hired.
I've had the best luck by contacting engineers at the company I want to work for. Do some searching. Look through USENET and Slashdot for the company name. Look at the company directory. Find the name of an engineer.
Call the company and request that engineer. Tell him/her that you are thinking about applying to the company and want to know more about it. Offer to buy the engineer lunch. Most of the time, this will end up giving you your first informal interview.
Go to the lunch with your resume. If you like the engineer, give your resume to him/her. If you don't like the engineer, find another company and repeat. You don't want to work with people you don't get along with.
Once the engineer has your resume, he/she is now responsible for dealing with it. Generally this works out well because they have a couple thousand dollars invested in getting this resume to the proper person.
You end up with a good chance of getting seen, the engineer gets the bonus, the company doesn't have to pay a headhunter. Everyone's happy except the headhunters.
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
Recruiters, almost always, are paid by the placement. They deal in hundreds of resumes a week trying to find one or two placements so they can get paid. As a result, lots of stuff slips through.
My advice: put EVERYTHING on the resume. Acronyms and expanded names, alternate names for technologies, every project you've ever worked on and every technology you've ever seen in the last 10 years. Make sure it's all on there somewhere. The rule about fitting your resume on a page (or two) is utter bullshit. You will not get hired by anybody with a brief resume, no matter how much depth is behind it.
Details!
When building that resume, with everything on it, make sure you quantify your experience. If you've had exposure to a technology, make sure you mention that it's just exposure. If you completely grok a technology, note that too. When it comes time for the technical interview, or your first employer interview at the first hint that you do not live up to your resume--you'll be dropped and never looked at again. Nobody has time for apologies or helping you quantify your experience. Having exposure to UNIX means one thing, simply putting an unqualified "used UNIX" on your resume can mean quite another. Don't tell anyone you're a "UNIX System Admin" either--that doesn't mean jack squat by itself. Mention it, but tell them what you did.
The cost of getting rid of an employee far exceeds the cost of not having one to begin with. Employers are cautious, and recruiters don't want to get burned--they might not ever place with that employer again.
Typically, your resume is reformatted by a non-technical drone, and may be reformatted for each kind of prospective employer they send it to. By putting everything down your chances of getting the right information in front of the right employers increases dramatically.
[For the curious, the website listed above has my resume under the "business" section. It's gotten me lots of jobs without an interview, and has been pretty effective. And no, I'm not looking.]
Get off my lawn.
I support a small recruiting company. Yes, they use word. Yes, we have a constant problem with viruses which I cannot keep up with (niether can nai).
The problem for us is not that we want them in doc format, but that everyone sends that to us. The format is utterly irrelevant to us, all the recruits formatting is wiped out anyway in most cases. Plain text would be better.
Because of file format problems, we must maintain a "doc" version and an ascii version of every resume we get. At 25,000 - 30,000 resumes, the docs take up a lot of space, about 30 times what the text files take up. What a waste.
support gun control: take guns from cops
This issue is far more tricky than some of you believe. I've worked through agents, and they are best described here .
The point is that it is not feasible for companies to have someone who understands the tech and thus necessarily costing too much money, perusing the thousands of CV's that come in. Most don't even come close. So to cut down the load, they use cheap buzzword searches. Now you know it, put the buzzwords in! Don't be shy! Have a Skills section thats full of the buzzwords. My current position is the result of a successful buzzword hit.
There may be far more jobs than _suitable_ applicants, but remember that there are always way more applications than jobs. Like everything, you need to learn to play the game
You know, when I was hired at my present place of work, it wasn't because I was the most qualified technically for the job. In fact, I was actually near the bottom of the list of "qualified" applicants. No, I got the job because, during the interview, I sat there with my soon-to-be boss and just talked about stuff with him.
From what I've seen, today's world generally demands that geeks not spend their lives in a cubicle answering Email and existing as just an email address to the Suits they despise so much. The fact of the matter is, I spend a good portion of my week (maybe 5-10 hours) meeting with DBA's, application managers, and upper management, discussing things that are going on in our department.
It's not easy, and it's not fun for a lot of geeks to sit down with a bunch of people that they can't talk about how cool this piece of code they wrote is because it makes all of these other functions perform 5 times better (because they really don't care about that level of detail), but you really need to learn how to hold your own with the Suits or you will be stuck at the bottom of the food chain pimping yourself on the latest consulting job for as much money as you can get. I don't plan on moving up to management myself, but I sure as hell will try to make myswelf invaluable to the management suits as a resource they can't do without; and without being able to talk to them, they'll never know if you're that resource.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
doc or rtf They also mention rtf, so relax, you don't -HAVE TO- use word. Enough MS bashing guys.
If anyone is interested, I recorded how I got my first job in computing a couple of years ago at http://www.andrewcooke.fre e-online.co.uk/andrew/job.html (Preview seems to add a space in the middle of that, but the link works...)
Andrew
http://www.acooke.org
I have recently goten to jobs of the net. Both were email to my LUG mailing list and aparently I'm the only one to respond (First one was tech-editing second was Sysadmin). Funnily enough the first one was what drew the next one to me.
I found that having a diverse resume helps. I took a job a technical editor at a large pay cut from my normal rates however it is one of the big resons I got the interviews I'm currently going through.
I also list my weekend only ski instructor job... it appeals to the marketing drones!
"There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
"SPOOOOOOOOON!" - The Tick, The Tick
My experience has been that if you're dealing with an HR person, you've _already_ lost the battle. They'll always be more interested in buzzwords than in skills, because they're hiring for things they don't understand.
Unless you're talking to someone in engineering or smarter, the person you're talking to isn't in the market for a real geek.
--G
> There are placement services that
>pay administrative assistants $30k a year or less to filter resumes but they will not serve you well.
Reminds me of one of my first encounters with a recruiter, a few years back. I was studying the Want Ads, & saw a well-known national temp agency was recruiting for people at Sequent. They listed a position that was equivalent to entry-level to mid-level Unix admin, something I was interested in, so I went over on my day off to turn a resume.
After a few misadventures with the receptionist, I got to talk with the recruiter, who looked over my resume, then pulled the list of posiitons Sequent wanted them to fill from his inbox & began to go down them.
``They are looking for an Administrative Assistant," he said in a hopeful voice.
I indicated that this was not the line of work I was interested in.
``Well, I don't know," he said uncertainly, ``we send them resumes for this position, & they don't like any of them. I don't know what they are looking for in their candidates."
Needless to say, they failed *MY* initial interview. I understand that Sequent eventually felt they weren't working out & sought their technical talent from another source.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
Heh, as an interesting note to this story. I always send my resume to companies and recruiters as text in the message. Usually that works out allright for companies HR departments, but the recruiters are a different story.
Numerous times I've been requested to re-send as a word document so they can "Print it out." These people being incapable of printing out an e-mail, or even copying and pasting. I've also had at least on recruiter that, unable to copy and paste, printed the resume out (Thank god they could do that) and typed it by hand back into Word.
I think my other most amusing story was reformatting my resume into a headhunters 'style' for them. Because they weren't able to figure out how to include the actual needed information that was on my resume in their style.
Roogna
In the long run applying for a job should be a process of filling out an online questionnaire, chock full of check boxes and radio buttons summarizing your experience. The HR department on the other end can then compare resumes in the same format without resorting to OCR.
Of course there will be brand new annoyances with this procedure. For instance messages like "Your application is not complete. Please press the back button on your browser and complete the following items: Current Salary"
A good use of this technique would sort through candidates efficiently and notify them automatically that their applications had been received. Hopefully there would also be a few areas to actually type something about yourself that a person might actually read, but the added convenience of technology makes everything convenient, including screwing things up.
HTML, it's small, it's versatile, it's universally read/write, and it's free...
You'd think that, wouldn't you? Every document that I write, that needs something that isn't handled by straight text (usually Latin-1), I write in HTML, for exactly those reasons.
I recently got a call from someone who saw me listed at Brainpower, and asked me to e-mail him a copy of my resume.
`I have it in HTML--is that alright?' I ask'd.
`Oh, no--no! Word or RTF, please!', he said.
I still find it very strange that he can't view HTML documents, especially if he found me through a web site....
-rozzin.
I've been doing this dance for a few weeks now. While I agree with the individual points made, let's understand the REAL problem: If anyone in the HR field knew enough about OUR field, they would've LEFT the HR field a long time ago and would be among the geek ranks! This applies to a lot of areas if you twist the situation a bit. Pretend YOU'RE a recruiter looking for women's fashion designers for a client firm. Not knowing anything substantive of the industry I have no idea how to evaluate their resumes, etc.
Solution: Turn the tables on them. Make direct contact with the HR weenie and take charge from your end. After all, they don't get their commission if they don't place you.
+-+-+-+-+-+-+ "I don't know what's wrong with you, but I'm quite sure it's hard to pronounce."
Simple. Smart people should not apply through those joboids. After a while of getting only the dumb people left through the process, employers will likely wise-up...
-- ----------------------------------------------
Vive le logiciel... Libre!!!
I have heard that if you contact a agency, and they send your resume to an employer, you _can't_ contact them directly. If you do, the company wont hire you. The hiring company usualy is contractually bound NOT to hire you by agreement with the agency. Thats how they get paid.
The net effect is that most companies do not take time to evaluate on merrit, but trust the agency to get a paper qualified person.
I hate to say it, but I got my job the old fashoned way, I saw it in the classifieds. I was chosen from a field of 20, because I was the only one who had a clue about linux. I also maintain windoze clients. My only official certification was A+. I got in because I knew windoze REALY well, and could also maintiain their servers. It has been 4 months now, and I have been to chicago, NYC, ct, and michigan to fix their stuff, and soon I will be maintaining the e-comerce end of the business.
Small companes are the best, because they will take the time to make sure that the person fits the organization, and will take time to see if the person is a qick learner, which is a bigger asset to them than a harvard wanna-be.
"Fear is the mind-killer...fear is the little death."
Who throws his shoe anyway...I mean realy.
One aspect of the problem that you didn't identify is that the recruitment agent is alway really the employer's agent even when you are a contractor talking about 'your' agent. The worker effectively has no representation, no-one to protect his interests. The obvious solution is to eliminate these parasites.
IMO we geeks need to set up our own CV databases on the net, accessible to employers. These sites should be slick and user friendly and use a uniform style and interface.
All we need to do is get a team together to design and implement the site with the CV database and all the CGI stuff to sit on top of apache. When designed it can be released as a freeware package. CV database sites can then be set up by anyone who is interested.
Result: geek-friendly recruitment agencies run by geeks. It's up to the person/organisation running each site if they want to allow agencies to use the CV's they find on the site, and if they do, whether they want to demand half the agency finder's fee. Some sites may become fully-fledged agencies themselves. Some may even sell out. But the tools will remain available so hopefully some geek-run sites will persist.
What do you think? If there is enough interest maybe we should set up a mailing list to chew it over.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You think it's going to get better all by itself? Don't you believe it. IT recruitment has been this way in the UK for at least the past ten years and if anything the dominance of the market by know-nothing IT recruitment agents is still increasing.
The only way this is going to improve is if the geeks take their business elsewhere. We need to set up our own CV databases and let them come looking for us.
How do I know this will work? First-hand experience.
There is already a web IT recruitment service in the UK at www.jobserve.co.uk. It works two ways: (a) they mail you a daily list of new jobs matching your chosem criteria; (2) you send in your CV and agencies, HR departments etc. who subscribe can search this big database of CV's. Don't forget to put in all those fashionable (buzz)keywords in acronym form and in full!
In the period of time for which I used the service I got more calls deriving from the CV I left on the database than I got from emailing my CV in response to particular jobserve ads.
Though if we some of us geeks were to set up something like this ourselves I strongly suggest that the home page says "NO AGENCIES" in large type.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
It should when I don't have a copy of Word available to me.
pooptruck
Heh.. maybe that's WHY they need someone with WordPerfect skills ... to read the resumes sent to them ;>
Delphis
Yes, there is a better way. It's been around for at least 25 years and talked about in books like "What Color is Your Parachute?" A great current resource is Ask the Headhunter web site.
Here's the first paragraph from the welcome page:
Forget luck. Forget what "human resources experts" have taught you. It's all bureaucratic bunk. No one wins (or fills) a job by following "the steps" dictated by America's defunct Employment System. Rather, they succeed by beating the System: by knowing the best way to handle a few make-or-break situations, thereby setting themselves above their competition.
His approach is then outlined in five steps. The method takes some work. But it has worked for me -- how else do you go from a Bachelors degree in Fine Arts Photograpy to a network engineering position?
There's more to it than this.
In smileyy's defense when applying for a job over the internet the perspective employer should indicate what format the resume should be sent in. If an employer is asking for Word Perfect skills and does not specify resume format, I'm going to send them a Word Perfect file. It makes sense.
Although they rely on generic resources, they look for common skills. A well rounded worker, who would fit a position at one of these companies, knows how to play the game. (Well rounded does not imply technically brilliant, just someone with tech and buerocratic skills.) In an anonymous corporate atmosphere, you rarely get rewarded for sheer brilliance. You get rewarded by expanding your skill set. Not solely your technological one, but also your business and social ones. That means, you have to make your actions visible, and sometimes the only way is by throwing around buzzwords.
Then again, how many of us mind being high-tech prostitutes for corporate America? Look at smaller companies for an individual touch, but rarely as large a signing bonus.
In early '97, i was out of work and running out of money fast. I visited a number of job sites and found nothing useful. Frustrated, I went to dfw.jobs (I didn't want to relocate). The .jobs groups have zillions of postings, and i lacked either qualifications or interest for most of them. Still, after a couple of weeks of so much volume, I found a posting that:
a) I was qualified for
b) looked interesting
c) was being offered directly rather than through a recruiter.
It was a ton of tedious wading, but well worth it in the end.
I sent my nicely-formatted resume to the headhunter I was working with. It was a clear, concise, single page. After I got hired I saw my resume on my new boss's desk. What a piece of trash! The headhunter had completely mangled it, padded some of my prose (inadvertently altering my meaning) and expanded some of my acronyms (incorrectly, of course). It's a wonder I ever got hired. If I ever use a headhunter's services again, I'm going to be sure to demand final approval on the resume he actually sends out!
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
You raise a lot of quite valid issues, and it's silly that the person who replied to you couldn't write complete sentences. But I hope you at least learned one thing: you should never use a proprietary file format for general interchange. Both WordPerfect and Word formats would have been the wrong thing to send, because there's just no way of knowing whether or not the person on the other end will be able to read them. Either plain ASCII or RTF would be better.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Heh, you seem to think that it's a buyer's market and that us geeks aren't the prime movers. That just isn't the case. If a company hire incompetent people for HR, then they are going to lose opportunities and end up hiring (on everage) inferior employees. HR better learn to kiss my ass, not the other way around. And they better smile politely when I chant "Windoze sucks" too, because there's plenty of other places to work.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
No, I turned pro 13 years ago. I'm at a small company and a significant portion of the company's revenue is derived from the billing of my time. The boss signs the paychecks, but without my services, everyone's paychecks would be bouncing.
Every once in a while, we try to hire more programmers. It never works out -- I guess they were the punks that your engineering group chews up for fun. After a while, I came to the conclusion that most resumes are just made up lists of buzzwords and good help really is hard to find. The last thing I would want is for my company to lose the one-in-a-hundred good applicant because we scared him away by requiring a Word resume.
HR cluelessness may be one of (the many) reasons the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Perhaps many companies have idiots in HR because their HR departments are full of people who were hired by HR. ;-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
When presenting search results, they should sort by salary. It's unlikely that the keyword correlation is going to be a good metric so you'll be sifting through tons of crap anyway. Might as well put the best paying jobs at the top so the first few you find that really match are the highest paying.
> All software is broken.
i filled out a form for some headhunter that was looking for a linux sysadmin... i sent the resume
as a plain text attachment. i figured linux job, text is same. the hunter replied, and actually said that they would need it in word format, as they couldn't open the format i had sent it in.
!?!?!?
brian
I have used agencies in the past, dumped off a resume and forgot about them. Have got a few leads and my first contract that way.
After a little while in the industry I find that contacts such as former employers, fellow geeks and friends provide all the work I need. And at much better rates.
An agency is just a small part of the job hunt equation and a good place to start, but one does not have to end up there for the next n years.
ciao,
-rob
Good idea re: using XML for a cv - I am impressed by your examples! (Currently I have several versions of my resume: RTF, Word, plain text, HTML and CSS-enhanced HTML.)
... but unfortunately I just can't see the majority of HR departments moving to something this innovative and efficient ...
I hope that eventually we can routinely use XML in this way
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
- American Banker
- Americas Job Bank
- Black Enterprise
- Business Week
- Career Pulse
- CareerBuilder*
- CareerCity
- CareerExchange
- CareerMosaic
- Caree rPath
- CareerWeb
- CareerFuture
- CitySearch
- CNET
- Dallas Morning News
- DICE
- EDN
- Hispanic Online
- HotJobs
- Internet.com
- JobOptions
- Monster
- MSBET
- NationJob
- Phillips
- QuestLink
- SelectJobs
- Test and Measurement World
- USAToday
- WETA
- WomenConnect
- Yahoo
* - my employer and a damn fine place to work (-plug -plug)Excellent! This is precisely the resolution I was talking about - higher quality applicants (and higher quality companies) migrate to services like these, the agencies are stuck with the Dilberts and the PHB's. :)
This situation bothered me a bit, as well, during a recent job search. Then I realized something: Organizations that rely on such "generic" HR resources to select new employees are going to get employees that match their efforts: people who throw around buzzwords in attempts to impress management types, not people who actually know what's going on. Eventually, these organizations will be at a competitive disadvantage as the highly skilled information workers end up other companies - their engineering efforts and products will suffer, and their more highly skilled competitors will move into dominant positions.
Yes, it's frustrating now - the environment is changing and the situation has not yet evolved to meet the new environment. This is an annoyance, yes, but a temporary one - the history of the world is driven by the resolution of such evolutionary tension.
He didn't sound particularly new to the working world, just to these "job search engines". Hell, most of the freaking world uses Word.
Wait until you try on office politics - its not who you know, its who you blow, kiddo.
These cute little cliches posing as witticisms bug me. Unless you're a White House Intern, it's not about blowing, it's about networking.Sorry y'all, the only IP that I'm talking about comes after your 3 Martini lunch. This is a lesson we can learn from the suits... there's tremendous power in meeting other people and expanding the circle of people that you know/have met. Which do you think is more likely to get you a meaningful interview: Spamming a job search site or a new contact you met at your local IEEE meeting who you beamed your info to his Palm Pilot and oh-yeah-by-the-way-do-you-know-any-perl-because-a- friend-of-mine-is-putting-together-a-web -team-and-he-needs-a-perl-hacker? This will also help you keep tabs on what the latest in-demand buzzwords are, too.
Pick up a resume book, especially one that's printed this year and that targets IT. They talk about using keyword blocks, the HRIS equivalent of META tags. Apparently that's good enough to get you through round one of the draft... just make a little keyword block at the end and throw in all of the relevant buzzwords and acronyms you can think of. That way the computer (if there is one) gets everything that it needs and if it's a person then they'll ignore it because it's at the end anyway. Much more likely that it's a machine, though. I've never done this, having gotten all of my jobs through people who know people, but if you are going to start spamming companies it never hurts to talk to the machine directly. After all, you're an engineer, right? That's what you do...
--GPThis seems to be the problem . If they use word they should tell you to submit your resume in word format . If not they should have the skills to import the document. It is this kind of keep your head in the sand attitude that is work with Buisness world.
"That wasn't an attack. It was preemptive retaliation!"
He complains that they didn't accept his document format; I dare say the head hunter said to his buddies, "here's some dude who ignored our clear instructions on what formats we accept".
Yup. Complaining about customers is a typical non-professional behavior, and this outfit he dealt with was clearly unprofessional. Furthermore, they either don't know English very well or they don't know how to type.
(this is similar to The Mad Hawk's posting with a similar title.) However, instead of focusing upon the evolutionary pressure exerted upon the employer at the end of the HR pipeline, I'd like to focus upon the recruiters. In the original article, the headhunter was obviously a moron. given a choice between two headhunters, one competent and the other incompetent, who is the applicant and the employer going to go with?
If it turns out that moronic headhunters who can't effectively sort out buzzwords (e.g. JDBC) predominate, a niche in the hiring ecosystem will form for headhunters who are NOT moronic. non-moronic headhunters will place better fitting candidates and thus get more business. as quick as you can say Darwin Award, the moronic ones will either grow a brain or start selling Amway
frankly, the best gigs i've gotten have come word-of-mouth. that's the real motivation for a programmer to work on open source projects. with a good reputation, a lot of the channel noise from headhunters gets bypassed.
Please remember that recruiter is concerned with the best interest of their client, the company -- not the engineer. Why don't medical doctors have to deal with this? Probably because of HMOs and the fact that their salaries/rates are well-established. Be rude to the recruiters who treat you like meat!
BTW, clearly you are one of the moron crowd: "do not have a PostScript printer(probably regular HP instead)". Bwahahahahaha
Go ahead and laugh, monkey boy. HP printers default (ie, bottom end of each line) to being PCL only, which is just fine for Windows users. As a rule only the HP *M (for Macintosh) or built-in networking machines support PostScript, not the regular HPs.
-- Alastair
I am a developer working part-time on a Masters in Computer Science. Down the line, I'm interested in becoming a 'dev lead', managing both people and projects, mostly from the development side. Are MBAs only appropriate for "middle managers" and above? All managers must know how their projects and decisions affect the company's bottom line, but at what level does MBA knowledge become necessary?
cpeterso
All the tech jobs I've ever had have been as
a result of personal contacts. The last one
took five months to land, involved following
up with someone who I had last talked to something
like eight years previous, and was never
advertised at all internally or externally.
The classic study of how people find jobs is
Mark Granovetter's PhD thesis, "Getting a Job".
Some ridiculous number of people get jobs
through personal contacts. People who you don't
know very well are paradoxically much better
sources of tips for work, since they give you
access to information about parts of the world
you don't have much idea about.
Ed
A comment from the peanut gallery...
I work for a consulting firm, and most of these comments don't really surprise me. I once had a gem of a conversation with a recruiter at another agency who didn't know what ERP Software was who was calling me(a company who specialized in ERP implementations) trying to get work. One of the gems:[no kidding] "ERP--Whatever that is."
So, instead of defending recruiters, I have a few suggestions that will make your life easier, should you decide to work with one.
1. If a company doesn't specify what format they want your resume in, send it in a way that's convenient for you. If they can't use it, and they're worth your while, they'll send you a note back nicely asking for another format. If they can't show you the consideration of using semi-complete sentences in their reply, then they probably won't be too accomodating with the job search either, so drop them.
2. It is possible to find agencies who employ people who know what they're talking about. In fact, there are agencies out there who, when they hire recruiters, look for people with technical backgrounds over sales/recruiting backgrounds. I do think this is important. After all, if they don't understand what you do, how are they going to find you a job that suits you?
3. Look for a place that gives you a response to your interest, even if they just tell you they'll keep you on file. The places I've been have always required a response to every resume submitted.
4. Tell the person you talk to what you want in a job, and be honest with them if you have objections or concerns to what they suggest. If you're not comfortable in a certain working environment, or if your wife's 8 months pregnant and you're going to need time off, let them know that. It's their job to make you happy, and if they put you in a position that you're unhappy in, this will not benefit them. (They may see some money out of it, but end clients have this funny way of not using companies with unhappy contractors.)If you want to work for a certain company, and haven't found an in yourself, always, always, always mention this. Also, see if they're willing to forward-market you. (Meaning, they'll call clients who don't have hard requirements and see if they can get you in anyway.)A company with an established client base won't have a problem calling one of their clients if you say you're interested in the technology they use, or in that specific company.
5. Request a salary/hourly rate you feel is reasonable. Do a little research on this. One thing, though--Never ask for less than you're currently making unless you're changing skill sets or your industry's slow. Believe it or not, this is a turn off. As far as asking what the bill rate is, some companies will not tell you this no matter what you do. My thoughts on this are simple: If they find you a job you really like, and give you a salary you feel (after research) is reasonable, let it go. However, if you have doubts or you feel you're being jacked around, ask. One of my clients requires that we tell them what we're paying our consultants and what benefits we give them to avoid some of this problem. If you do need to know what you're being billed at, also ask what your employment costs are. If you're being billed at $200 an hour, and you make $100 an hour, the company you're working through (unless you have your own company) is not making $100 off you, especially if you have benefits through them. Find out what these benefits are worth, and then figure out the difference. Simple benefits (meaning medical) in addition to employer taxes can mean 15% or more in some states. Other benefits such as 401k, day care, and paid bench time can add quite a bit more onto what you're getting.
6. If they're going to send your resume anywhere, make sure they ask you first, and they tell you who the client is. Many recruiters will be hesitant to tell you who the client is before they really talk with you. This is because other recruiters will call them, pretend to be candidates, and try to worm client information out of them. However, if you talk with them a little, and they figure out that you're to be trusted, they should tell you what you need to know. If they won't, don't work with them. I've seen situations where companies sent resumes in for candidates they hadn't even talked to, and this ended up hurting the candidate's chances for working for the client company in the future.
Anyway, I hope this helps.
"Stupid Patty and stupid Selma!"
Now that I've gotten that metaphor out of my system...
Ask anybody who's ever done any hiring, or who's been in the industry more than 5 years. The worst resumes are the ones that go through the agencies. The best resumes are the ones that are hand-carried in by your existing team members.
The reason is simple. Every time a team member recommends somebody to you, s/he's putting reputation on the line. Nobody wants to be the person who got the team stuck with a bozo. If you recommend unqualified people who are your friends, word gets around fast. Contrariwise, if you are known to have a good network, it reflects well on you. If all of Joe's friends are fast and smart, what does that say about Joe?
More than once, I've seen people get form rejection letters and job offers from the same company, within the week. The reason? One resume was walked in by a friend, the other was sent to the box number in a job ad. The anonymous resume got eaten by the gatekeeper; the personal resume reached the people with the authority to make a hiring decision.
So screw www.clueless.com. Let your friends know you're available. If you don't have any friends elsewhere, let the search engines (I'm talking Google, not Goodjobs) hunt up actual companies desperate for your skills.
Out of my last four jobs, I got two through recommendations from former co-workers. The other two came from searching for "object-oriented" and "writer", then mailing my resume to motivated first-party employers who could recognize what I had to offer. None of the leads I got through agencies were worth pursuing.
This day in age, technical people in technical jobs are more like actors working in movies than the old-fashioned "start at a company, retire in thirty years" mentaility. What we need are agents who take care of finding jobs FOR us!
Imagine working on a large programming assignment, or a network install, and you realize it's almost done. What do you do next? Probably administer the network or maintain the source. Something you may or may not want to do. At this point, call your agent and say "Hey, I'm ready for the next job, what do you have lined up for me?"
Meanwhile, someone else will call their agent and say "okay, I feel like administering a network for a while or bugfixing code, do you see any openings?" Fwoomp! They'll move in and pick up where you left off in a job they like, while you'll get to move on to a job you want to do. Everyone's skill level is satisfied, and the employers get the stuff they need done.
-Chris
Oh, nonsense. 95% of all people at agencies are the morons the author describes. I encounter this situation everytime I change jobs, which is often. And I *do* have a copy of Word, which I never use - least of all to do a headhunter's work for him. You know what I tell the headhunter-droids? Simple: screw you. Do it yourself. Thats' *your* job.
The issue is how you view the employment agencies. Some people I know have (IMO) a very skewed view of the role of these agencies. They actually assign them some importance, or at least some kind of respect. Their attitudes range from fearful ("Oh, PLEASE, Mr. Pointy-Haired Agency Person, PLEASE look at my resume and get me a job, I'll send it in Chinese CP/M format if you want!") to resigned ("Oh, well, whatever, I'll send it in their stupid format, grumble). Both are silly, as silly as going into an auto showroom and begging them to sell you a car.
I think these folks have the relationship between "us" and "them" (the agencies) all backwards. *They* need *us* to make a living, since they actually have no real skills and must parasite off those who do. Agencies are people *we* (or potential employers) hire, not people we need to kowtow to. It sickens me when someone goes groveling to an agency for a job. They are effectively our employees who we have hired to find us jobs, not the other way around.
*Some* agencies are OK. *Some* of them have clueful people who know what they're doing. But *most* don't. For the most part, they are a bunch of do-nothing vampires who have found a niche they are exploiting today - only because no one has fully realized that this business is yet another one that's directly in the way of the oncoming Internet bulldozer. There's no more need for headhunters these days than there is for record companies.
*They* should be begging *us* for our business. After all, they have a pretty good racket, getting a hefty percentage of a large salary for doing pretty much no more than hooking up employers and employees and doing some paperwork. After the initial contact is made, they do essentially zero for their cut. And they get it from both sides: they charge the employer for their services, and they (sometimes) take a nice chunk of your paycheck, depending on the contract. If they don't, you can be sure they are screwing the employer for some outrageous fee.
And they do need us more than we need them - they just don't like to admit it. Everyone knows employment agencies engage in "fishing expeditions", putting ads in papers and online for jobs which sound great but are entirely fictitious, just so they can collect our names, resumes, phone numbers, salary ranges, and so on. They are worse than spammers, making us take our valuable time to do their market research for them for free.
95% of all headhunter/employment agencies are S-C-U-M *SCUM*. Treat them that way. I know, a lot of people will respond saying I'm immature, or incorrect, or mistaken, or whatever. But that's not the case. I'm right. They are simply taking advantage of our cultural conditioning to act as if anyone who has a job we might want is some kind of super-authority figure whom we must kneel before. And it's just not that way. If they want their fancy suits and Rolex watches, they need to make *us* happy, not the other way around.
So my advice is to not deal with these bastards at all, if possible. If it isn't possible, don't bend over for them. Tell them you'll send your resume in whatever damn format you want, and it's *their* responsibility to convert it if they choose. You don't have to be rude or abusive, but be firm and make clear from the beginning what the relationship is - YOU, an experienced IT person, are a rare and valuable commodity. THEY - a dime-a-dozen, rinky-dink operation that survives by leeching onto those who do actual work - are entirely disposable to you. If you don't like one, just pick up the phone book and choose any one of the 100 other agencies. Again, you don't have to be rude or obnoxious, just be firm and confident.
I'm a UNIX sysadmin. I'm looking for all-UNIX jobs. I only apply for all-UNIX jobs. I don't use M$ for anything other than games. I tell employment agencies and potential employers: "Don't ask me to do Microsoft. I won't. Period. That's the way I want it, that's the way I like it, and that's the way it's going to be." Sometimes people laugh at me and call me a stubborn dinosaur, that I will be "crushed by NT". Sometimes people look down their noses at me as if I'm am immature or naive child. Fine with me. I've got ten years experience, and I laugh right back at them because I have even more job offers than ever, people beating down my door, and huge salary increases. Not only does the UNIX job market not seem to be drying up, it seems to be expanding rapidly. All those people who are saying "UNIX will be crushed by NT" are the ones living in a dream world.
And you know what? Since I went to my "NO Microsoft at all!" policy, my stress level at works has gone down by at least 50%. IT is a much better career when there's no MS involved at all. And maybe then employers will stop saying "there aren't enough UNIX people!". Seriously, try this. You will find that not only does it not significantly decrease your job propspects (assuming you do UNIX for a living), but you will enjoy the jobs you get a lot more.
Soon, the job market will be like any other commodity market. It will be completely online, and "buyers" and "sellers" can contact each other diretly, and use will be ubiquitious enough so that you don't need agencies at all. Until then, keep headhunters in their place, make sure they know that you understand the true nature of the relationship between you, and send those resumes in plain ASCII format. Make *them* do some work for once, and the next time you get a call or email saying "wee need your resume in format", just say "Earn your fees for one and do it yourselves, you lazy bastards!"
I once submitted a resume to Netscape. This wasn't today's AOL/Netscape but back in the heady days of yor when folks like JWZ were proud to work there.
I submitted it in HTML (to a Netscape HR person mind you, not a 3rd party) and they sent it back asking he to send it in ascii.
People at Netscape couldn't read HTML?!?!?
Discusted, I did not resubmit it.
The problem with a system of checkboxes and pre-packaged terms is, who gets to add and remove these words and phrases? What if someone decided not to include Fortran (because it's an old language and unlikely to come up), but a company needed a Fortran programmer to fix or replace some of their old and failing software (Y2K comes to mind, dated as the concept is)?
I think the solution, if there is to be one, must come from the top down. Those of us in a position to hire someone have to be careful when choosing a recruiter - or decide to not use one at all.
We have to make sure that the recruiting agency does more than just scan the resume through their buzzword filter. Interview the recruiter as it were, to find out what their weeding-out process is. If you *are* going to rely heavily on buzzwords, make sure you include spelled-out versions in addition to the acronyms. The pain of this process is starting to approach that of doing all the hiring 'manually' so it may be as good or better to circumvent the headhunters altogether.
Another idea is to rely more heavily on resumes on the web (everybody can read html) - especially if a programmer is what you're looking for. A programmer can show off his skills with the resume itself and can also use it to point to projects he has worked on, etc.
g
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
I had good and bad experiences with job agencies when looking for my last job. I found it convenient to search for jobs on the net. Its much easier than searching a paper. I only met one I would consider bad. She asked me to bring in a hard copy of my resume since she couldn't get her computer going and she seemed to be really unorganised. I managed to get an interveiw with a company that was hiring without going through job agencies. It wasn't a good experience. They asked me a couple of questions over the phone to see if I knew my stuff. Then they brought me in for an interview. I wore a suit and was interview by four programmers who basically tested my knowledge. After answering all their questions they seemed impressed, and started showing me around the office. Then they suddenly realised they'd have to wait for their boss to come back from holiday since only he had the power to make the decision. They rang me up when I got home and told me I'd have to have to meet the boss for a final interview but told me I'd basically gotten the job. However when the boss met me he didn't like me and I didn't get the job. Some of the job agencies are really good. The best one I encountered helped me by running me through a practice interview before the real one. They ran me through questions I would probably be asked and gave me a lot of confidence.
As somebody who's still a high school student I wonder where I can get a job. As somebody who's still going to an educational institution that has none but the most basic of computer courses I have no certification or anything. I've taught myself C, html, Linux, W95, & some GTK, but not much evidence to show & no easy way to get good networking experience (& I'm not getting any at all until my friend gives me that ethernet card that works w/ Linux). I'm sure there are a lot of us out there who would be willing to work for little pay and mostly just the experience and a complementary letter, but how do we get jobs working in IT?
Incidentally, if you'd be interested in hiring me in the Philadelphia/Montgomery county area, send an e-mail my way).
We should all get together in one place like Navada, and start our own geek society. Our own geek town/city. We could control the internet. We could kick out MS. We could be the world leader in technology.
Or, we could just have cool stuff to play with.
(dont forget to import chicks)
The above is not worth reading.
The sad fact is that this will not change - no matter how skilled the person is who is receiving CVs, if they have a stack a yard high to look at they will take shortcuts to filter them. Agencies are just a way for potential employers to push the filtering out to people who don't have better things to do (such as programming, for instance).
Fortunately there are decent agencies out there, and good employers will develop sound relationships with them to ensure that people who really do fit the job description will get through.
I would say that if that employer has hired an agency with such a mindless attitude to CV submissions, they don't care enough about recruitment to be worth working for. Alternatively, you might want to contact the company concerned to tell them what their representatives are doing, and to say that this will put off candidates they will want to speak to.
--
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
- Accept that they know nothing about computers. They know how much geeks earn. If they knew computers, would they be agents?
- Try to get recommendations from people about the best ones to use. There is a massive difference between the best and the worst.
- The agency wants you to get the job. Then they get the commission. A good agent won't submit you for something that you don't know, since it damages their relationship with the client though.
In my opinion, you have more to fear from HR. They have a profile of the "best" induvidual to hire -- Good school, great academic results, top university, year off spent delivering medicenes to remote hill tribes, outgoing -- which is often not suited to the job that's on offer.I feel I can tell a lot about an organization by how my interview process goes. After a decade of being on the Internet, I've had people who would have trouble de-gaussing their monitor that I don't have enough experience. I also see ads in the newspaper asking for people with 10 years of
Linux experience and nonsense like that. All good companies I've seen so far will either have a competent technician interview you or at least be one of the people interviewing you. You don't want to work somewhere where they don't have a clue. I remember one interview at a financial company where the person in charge of getting online trading off the ground was particularly disdainful, my resume wasn't good enough according to him, even though they were paying below what I would've taken, and he was just a middle manager who knew nothing about technology. Leaving the office I saw boards with a systems map, including one that marked where the Ultrix was (this was just 2 years ago). Several months later I heard that the whole project was scrapped. I generally go by the theory that if they drag you all the way to an interview, and a tech person doesn't size you up at least decently, you probably don't want to work there. You'd be amazed how nice life at a company with a good HR department can be - it might not be the best way to spend money, but it's not your money anyway, right?
Did the company you thought you were applying to give a name? Contact them directly. Find someone who works there who can tell you who actually wants to hire, and go direct. Sure, that person will have to go through HR, but by that point you already have an insider fighting on your side. It couldn't hurt. You've also demonstrated persistence and a bit of creativity, not to mention the much-touted "people skills" that it takes to gain such intelligence. And you've shown that you're serious, and not just "kicking tires" as one interviewer put it.
Ok, my team just lost one of its senior guys to a startup opportunity. Despite the fact that we expect him to return in 3 months :), we need a new body. Hey, JavaONE was last week, and we need a java programmer!
So the problem exists from both sides. Yes, we use recruiters, but we much prefer to hear from individuals. The few times we get good old fashioned cover letters, they get shown around the team - "Hey, look! A cover letter! Let's get this person in here!" We run ads in the local paper -- yes, it's the old fashioned way, but it still works strangely enough.
I'm torn over whether I should do this...oh, what the heck, I'll just use hotmail. If you're a fairly senior geek (5+ years experience in the biz preferably), and have some project experience with server-side Java, preferably with an e-commerce slant, and are in the Boston area and looking for a job (and don't mind working with people who speak in run on sentences :)), let me know. duane_morin@hotmail.com. A degree is not required, but it certainly helps. My boss actually prefers people who've got a degree in something other than CS (he likes em well rounded). We don't pay relocation (that I know of), so please don't write me from Florida if you don't plan on moving anyway. We do lots of Sybase here, so if you've got some of that, tell us. None of the above is written in stone (is it ever?) so if you're close, it can't hurt to write. But I'll tell ya, if you think you're good, but have got absolutely nothing to prove it, you can't really expect us to hire you.
Disclaimer: This ain't no startup, and I ain't even close to CTO, so I don't do the hiring. I just bring in the bodies.
d
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
I've had my resume online since I had web space (about 3-4 years). Only recently I had to take it offline because I was getting too damned many calls (about 2 a day). However, when a friend of mine exhausted her real-world resources, I put her resume on my page, and within 2 days Microsoft called her (she didn't go, of course :)).
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
We get literally hundreds of resumes each week, by snail-mail, fax, and email. We probably ask for about 10-20 of those from potential candidates. The rest are unsolicited. Most are not for a specific position, just for "anything that fits my background". Most of the resumes are from unqualified people -- certainly over 80% of them are garbage.
Our Web site tells people exactly how to send resumes (plain text in the body of the email), yet we still get dozens of attachments in all formats -- Word, Word Perfect, PDF, HTML, even TIFFs of scanned resumes.
Given the following facts: (1) these resumes are unsolicted, (2) there's an 80% chance that they're trash, (3) the submitter can't follow directions, and (4) we have a couple hundred other resumes to process this week, we generally delete such resumes without even replying. We feel the chances are low that we're losing any good candidates this way.
On the other hand, the thread that says headhunters are morons has some truth, too. Their job is to do a buzzword-level screening of a large pool of candidates and bring a few to the client for in-depth interviews. They need to bring good candidates, but not necessarily the best ones. So if they can do that without the clerical overhead of doing a lot of document conversion, you can bet that's the route they'll take.
If you're applying for a job that's being filled through a search firm, here's what you need to do:
It's far easier, quicker and convenient to bang out an email and send it off. A two minute job, compared with carefully composing a letter, printing it, addressing it, posting it (in an envelope, naturally :)). Email is great for flicking notes back and forth, informal messages.
However, when it comes to sending email to someone you don't know, someone you're asking for a job, whatever, take the same care as you would with a letter. Address it, sign it, use proper spelling and grammer (most email progs do have spell-checkers), punctuation. An email is the same as a letter in this respect, and people should treat it properly.
"rtf or doc"
What the hell is that? They wouldn't have written you a letter like that, or even made a phone call (which can be more informal than a letter), so why create such an unprofessional image?
On a happier note, I recently used an agency and I've got a great job to go to in a couple of weeks, so they're not all bad (although I am in the UK, so it may differ in the US).
~ Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity ~
The way to deal with it is to send plain text. If the headhunter can't deal with with that, well, that's one commission they won't be getting.
OR
If you really want the job, go ahead and cave. Once/if you've got the job, let your employer know what you think of the agency, and let the agency know that you've expressed those feelings to your employer.
Nobody really trusts headhunters, and they know it.
They may not care what that the meesly job-seeker thinks of them, but they certainly care what their big corporate clients think.
They don't care if you actually fit the description of the job being filled, even if they do know what it is. One recruiter interviewed me for a "development" position, and when I discussed my programming skills, I was told "this isn't a programming job, it's a development job." My dumfounded reaction probably lost me points, too.
Personally, I think the whole job recruitment market is entirely upside down. I'm a recent college graduate trying desperately to find a decent job (i.e. something more educational than "Unix Schmuck," which is what a lot of available sysadm jobs ought to be called), and having a hard time.
The way recruitment works now is that these middlemen approach companies who have openings and then wrench a placement commission from the company when they fill the position. Which makes no sense to me. With the way my search is going, I'd be entirely willing to PAY a recruiter MYSELF to find just the type of job I want. If it were really the right job, I'd give them a percentage of my paycheck for my whole term of employment and then some. Why jerk around with companies that won't even call you back after an interview and recruiters, quite a lot of whom are freelance only trying to make a buck for themselves with no interest in actually making the employee OR the employer happy -- when I'm willing to hire someone myself to find a great job that really fits me?
Regards,
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Baseball players have a union - I don't think that baseball teams have much trouble getting rid of players who aren't helping the team. Actors have a union - you don't see that many actors getting paid based on seniority.
Please, *think* before you hit the send button, every union isn't the UAW.
Shaun
LOL
I've occasionally considered adding unrelated or useless items while filling out those online resume/job application, just for fun. Under `other skills' I once put `forklift operation'.
From my personal experience, doing the long hard job search, this article is absolutly correct - the morons control the masses of computer geeks. My current contracting company doesn't even have a computer person on staff ... they have another company come in and do it for them. This concerns me greatly, but because of contractual clauses etc, I can't leave without losing lots of potential jobs. Damn Legalese. todd - post of firstage
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
Hell, I'm nearly always hiring networking engineers for the company I work for, and we are getting nothing useful out of our own HR department in terms of candidates -- our web-based jobs database funnels all applicants through them, and as far as I can tell they toss all applicants in the bit bucket. So, we interview and hire based on word-of-mouth and networking.
If there was a web page here on Slashdot, I'd certainly post a few jobs that would probably be of interest to some folks.
--doug
With all this "anonymous" service available, how long until someone applies to their own company by mistake? Check out the Dilbert website to see what I mean.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
After 25+ years in this business and comparing notes from others in this and other business, my conclusions are: the worst jobs are in the newspaper, especially if an agency or bodyshop, headhunters have the middle level jobs, the best jobs are at cocktail parties (adjust for your region, my wife tells me it is beer and BBQ here in Texas) or via word of mouth. This last part is called networking by the buzzword-compliant.
The best job I have had was gotten by going to a pizza and soda mixer for students and industry at a local university. I made a couple of comments in the question and answer period and one of the presenters tracked me down. The other top job came via rumor/gossiping with a colleague about a company I had traded business and favors with during a earlier period of self-employment.
Nothing is more effective than talking to the people who do or supervise the work. Inflation in resumes has become frequent enough that face to face has much more credibility than a resume. Some jobs require you fill out the application on the spot so they know you are literate, can spell, and possibly have legible handwriting.
I have been programming for 15 years. Perhaps that was my downfall. Had I been fresh out of school, I might have remembered the textbook definitions rather than what the terms *really* mean. The story has a happy ending though. I eventually landed an even better freelance consulting position. :-)
Thad
The Bolachek Journals
Ironic, isn't it, that the Internet is supposed to get rid of the middleman which provides marginal services (such as the RIAA), yet this particular group is thriving. And I can say that they provide little value, other than advertising, to the candidate or the company.
From the side of the company, no matter how many ways we tell them we want someone competent at the enterprise level, they throw all sorts of near-entry level resumes at us. Misfits, rejects. People who you might want to change tapes for you. Our own technical interviews are far more enlightening.
From the side of the prospective employee, the recruiters get in the way. I recently visited a large jobs site to find some interesting jobs, but I couldn't get even a SIMPLE description of the job or the details without handing over the resume -- which means getting forever hounded.
I could do a lot better job of selling myself than these headhunters could. And even with them, it is difficult to sell yourself as a "signal" in a sea of "noise". They just don't know how to evaluate people. All they are interested in is pushing bodies through to get a commision... and I doubt that they have my true best interests at heart.
As for the company, they need to step up to the plate and have their own HR departments be more active in advertising and evaluation. These recruiting firms only thrive because HR isn't doing their job, so lower level managers have to work around the system.
The funny thing is that the headhunter/recruiting firms actually work AGAINST the companies that they find employees for. They recruit individuals away from their existing jobs. And once you are in the system, they'll be giving you a call back a year or two later, trying to move you somewhere else. And while they bring a new employee into the shop, they're talking to your other IT guys!
The value of headhunters, in most cases, isn't marginal. It is negative. They thrive on churn. They cost money. They provide poor service. The tight labor market and a poor HR department are the only two things that keep them afloat.
and vi. If you know how to write and format a resume this actually isn't offensive. If you've got the skills, most "professional" headhunters/placement agencies format your resume for you anyway. You know, they actually make an effort to get you a job because that is how they make money. Isn't that novel? If you just throw your resume into a pool of other resume's on the internet I would say your not to motivated or just have the time to wait for lady luck... Get a professional with contacts, trust me they work wonders. And all you have to do is call them.
;-)
I have been contracting for about 7 years (in the UK) and have used agencies for the entire time.
They are a pain but - much like estate agents - a requirement if your going to 'play the game'.
In my opinion it is much better to find an agency, go and see them, get to know them and keep in touch with them. That is the tactic I use and so far it has not let me down.
I know people will have different horror stories about agencies - I have heard many of them. I can only think that if we didn't have a way of finding all of the jobs that are available (even if it is just an agency) we would invent one.
Flame away.........
Linux - the ultimate Windows NT service pack
get involved with a Linux User Group (LUG), sometimes employers send scouts to them...
also IMHO we need to talk to people in the industry, and help them understand us, etc. LUG's seem to be were to do this.
nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
For software developers, this is still the best way to get a job. Companies use recruiters to avoid having to screen applicants themselves, and typically pay 15-20% of the positions salary to the recruiter for there services. If the recruiter thinks your suited for a position, then you're very likely to get an interview.
From my own experience and circle of friends, job search sites do not seem to be a main-stream or common way to find a job - in fact I don't know *anyone* who has got a job this way. Most software jobs in my geographic area (NY/CT) are never advertized in the paper or internet, and are *only* available thru headhunters.
Ive been a UNIX Admin for 5 years, and not ONCE have I ever had a unix workstation to work in front of...its always ssh or exceed into the box over the network.
so either you are really lucky and your company buys the unix admins all workstations, or you havent really joined the real world where the only unix boxes are in the datacenters.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Taking a course in programming seems to be a pretty standard requirement for getting a degree in Mechanical/Electrical engineering. Ironically, that's how I wound up as a CS major, I took a course in C while working on my MechE degree, and realized I'd forgotten how much I liked coding. But most of the older people in the field didn't graduate under those requirements. Some of my engineering profs are still struggling with Excel. But I find the derogatory attitude of programmers to engineers and vice-versa really annoying. They are both trained to be specialists. He has as much reason to understand network architecture as you do to design circut boards.
Geek-grrl in training
To truly understand recursion, you must first truly understand recursion.
Read your own post there, sparky. The average poster on Slashdot is quite average. This is why my comment threshold is set to 2. People posting jobs here, on the other hand, would assumably read Slashdot, and know who they were posting to. This could, of course, be wishful thinking on my part, but despite evidence to the contrary, I enjoy engaging in optimism from time to time.
DoktorMel
-- The Sage does nothing, and nothing is left undone. --Lao Tzu
It strikes me that we basically have a solution to this sitting in front of us. After all, if these idiot agencies can manage a website _with_ middlemen, certainly Slashdot could provide something _without_ them. What I'm thinking of here is a service to allow companies to post searchable job listings which Slashdot users could then apply to, emailing a resume to a contact person at that company. Naturally, people advertising jobs on Slashdot will be of the highest quality (better monkeys) and be capable of understanding the resumes of technical people.
Not to say this must be done, mind you, only that it would be nice. We have to look out for ourselves because the job sites are too busy filling asst. manager positions at insurance agencies (and are, as has been stated, staffed with people too deeply ignorant of what it is that we do) to bother to give the technical community the kind of service it needs.
+--------+
The sage does nothing, and nothing is left undone.
+--------+
DoktorMel
-- The Sage does nothing, and nothing is left undone. --Lao Tzu
This story couldn't have come at a better time. I'm going through all this hassle _right now_ :( !! I've been in contact with about 3 different headhunters in the past week, only one of which sounds like he knows what the hell nis+ or dhcp means.
;), and I still can't land a decent job in Boston yet!!?? what the .. ?! Dealing with middle-(wo)men is almost driving me nuts :\.
;). Asking on /. might not be the most appropriate forum .. but hey, what the heck, might as well. -- joel
It's more than frustrating... I've just graduated from college with a BS in CS, tons of experience, a stellar personality (trust me on this one
Well anyways, if anyone in the Boston area is reading this and has any decent paying positions for a unix geek/web designer/web programmer let me know
The place I work has a pretty good way out of
the idiotic morass:
1. We go to Linux user group meetings and announce
that we're hiring.
2. We buy beer for free software authors and ask
them to come work for us.
So if you want a good geek
job, go to those user group meetings, or just
start a user group and invite employers to
announce jobs.
-- Real free software sites don't use GIFs.
...if you can't even figure out how to route around the idiocy of the agencies.
If you trust your fate to the junior-college dropout who scans keywords, you get what you deserve. Try showing a little initiative.
If you really want the job, than the fact that the recruiter uses Word shouldn't bother you too much. I mean, come on, deal with it.
The working world is full of comprimises that are going to befuddle those new to it. Wait until you try on office politics - its not who you know, its who you blow, kiddo.
Ellison, Gates, etc. - all started as programmers.
Then they realized that hacking code for 20 years is a hard luck post, and a game for the young.
- The "Used-car salesman" mentality that seems to dominate their phone calls. "Well, I need an NT-Unix tech support person. What will it take to get you to take this job today?" "Nothing. I'm burnt out on support."
- For the most part, there is a severe lack of clue smongst these people. More so than HR people at companies. They should at least have a "C-Net Central" level of knowledge about the job market. Sheesh!
- Of the good ones that you get, they're not very good about following up with you. I'm always the one who has to call and get status after my resume's been submitted.
I'd love to start a website like www.techjobsdirect.com, where smart people could bypass all this broker/agency nonsense. -EricWar!!!
On second thought, I am currently going through the trugdery of finding the right company to work for. Yes, everyone says I should just NOT use a recruiter, but I differ with most of you here.
I have put my resume out on Monster, HeadHunters, America Talent bank and so on. Yes I have gotten about 29M calls from "typical" head-hunters/resume pushers, but I received a call from a REAL recruiter, that takes his job seriously, does an awful lot of ground work for the companies he searches for, basically he screens all of his candidates before sending them to the company.
Now, there is a difference, Gary Markell is his name, and this man has single handedly changed my opinion about recruiters. He is considerate, thorough, sincere, open-minded and most of all HONEST and ETHICAL. I think most of us are of the opinion that most head-hunters are similar to snake-oil salesman...Well, Gary is not one of them.
He has been able to match myself and a company that works the way I do, and present me in such a way that my strengths are amplified, and my weaknesses are reduced/explained as a part of a "results oriented"/Direct person. Believe me, I am very Direct nad very results oriented.
Anyone that doesn't know what I am talking about, I feel for you, as my experience with one of the "TRUE" I.S. recruiters in the country is worth any time or effort to get things done.
FYI, URL = Management Recruiters® of North Oakland County, a place to really make sure you get lined up with a great job, that really fits you.
BTW, I am not advertising here, just my own personal experience I am trying to share here.
As Always!greg, REMEMBER ED CURRY!!!
So true in most cases, however not all recruiters are morons.
But there are a couple of firms that seem to employ only the ones rejected by other firms.
I put my resume out on a job website at two different times in my life with two different phone numbers (one home, one cell). I never get calls on the later one (cell phone) and still get calls at my home phone (posted when still in college, 3 years ago!).
Interesting tidbit, I think the good agencies never call you. The two I've worked through I went to and inquired both in person and submitting an internet resume through their own website, not through these websites. Why would the good ones be wasting their time surfing the web anyway, shouldn't they be working for *ME* ???
-m
I have also found that these "services" will match you up with a job interview that is not related to what you thougt you where applying for
If i get one more call for a help desk job !!!!!!
oll whell I gess if thay knew this stuff thay would not be looking to hire someone
... the agencies want to *edit* your resume, not
read it!!
So no PDF, HTML, or even plain text.
They're npot even going to re-type it, they want
at least cut and paste, into a new version with
AGENCY NAME - Not for redistribuition, (c))
plastered all over it.
Also then they can pad it with crap.
Fun. Huh!
Death to bodyshoppers.
(R)ule in Hell or (S)erve in Heaven [R]?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I was recently looking for a job. I got tired of waiting, so along with hunting myself, I had the aid of about 5 headhunters. There was a lady in particular that I just wanted to get rid of. She was nice and everything, and was supposed to be from a "technology staffing" company, but she did not have a clue what I had on my resume.
Having recently graduated from college, I wanted to start out with an entry-level programming job. I informed her that I would like to do "Internet Devlopment" work (not HTML and graphics, but CGI and server side stuff). After I was done explaining to her what CGI and server-side meant, she informed me that "Making a company website is not a full time job, and most companies just have someone who is already an employee do it." At this point, I realized she did not have a clue. For the next few weeks, she found me jobs over and over again that were support-oriented, and I kindly informed her after each one that I would like to program. I eventually gave her a salary range, and I started to hear from her less and less.
Until she found a job in that salary range. It was a job administering an NT network, working on Exchange servers, and mostly support stuff. Having used NT solely in my last job, I knew it pretty well, but I also knew how much I despised it.
I informed her for the last time that this was a support/admin job, and I wanted to program. I guess she was fed up, because all she said was "Uh! Well, I don't see any programming skills on your resume!" To which I said "Okay, thanks," and hung up. On my resume, there is a while bulleted list of all 10 languages I know under the heading of "Programming Languages."
+--
Given infinite time, 100 monkeys could type out the complete works of Shakespeare.
+-- (Score:-1, Moderator on Power Trip)
You have the programming skills, but you haven't yet learned how to deal with all the other aspects of working. Devote yourself to developing some skills hacking the work-sphere, and you will find your professional life much easier.
:-)
I have been working as a contract employee for a great many years now. I started in a permanent job right out of school, which was nice and comfortable, but eventually I got burned out and followed my friends into the contracting world. The first couple of contracts I thought were nice, they paid better and I had some freedom at the end of the contracts to take a long vacation and spend the money.
But after a while I realised the best contracts were eluding me, the contracts that started at $75/hour and went way higher (last job was $2500/day). So I got to be friends with a recruiter and used her as a mentor to learn what other recruiters were looking for.
Recruiters only put up a candidate for key jobs after they personally know that person and have a successfully placed them at least once. The good recruiters have a reputation to keep up, especially with the high-paying clients, so they will never take a risk on those jobs. One bad placement and the phone never rings again, so its better not to place someone if you don't have them.
There are recruiters who don't care about the client or you, and I have been burned by a couple of those. Getting to know the recruiter will help you avoid bad situations. It takes an investment of your time and energy to search out the good recruiters and get them interested in you. Its the difference between an OK job and a fantastic job (and $10-$50/hour more
If I were a recruiter right now, I would have dismissed you as an inexperienced geek without any proper job skills. Sure you can program, but that is only about 50% of what it takes to be a good employee. You have to know how to fit into a company, how to deal with human resources, how to charm the MIS department to get more RAM, how to create weekly status reports for the project lead without being asked. If you know all that, the client will ask (beg!) for you to come back for another contract when you finish your current job. That is what a recruiter is looking for.
been there, done that
the AntiCypher
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
I was just going over my resume and realised that all but two jobs were the results of personal contacts that directed me to the job.
In almost every case I learned about the job from a friend or a co-worker or a family member or a recruiter I knew personally.
The two jobs I took completely blind were both hell, and neither of them lasted more than 2 months. But each of them introduced me into a new crowd of people who got me follow-on jobs.
And if you can make friends with a recruiter who has a big list of jobs, you can just sit in her office some afternoon (bring chocolate:-), and browse through all the best jobs. Then you can say "I can do this one" and off you go to the interview.
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Ok, So I can say I've had similar experiences. All the net job listings are through Headhunters, and I've met many who are idiots. My last job I dealt with 5 different placement companies, rainging from complete idiots to having some idea. However, there wasn't much that panned out, and I took what I thought was a "decent" job.
This job was the pits, and after 2 months I figured it was either bail out now or be stuck another year or two. So, this time I tried going through temp companies. I called a few and got lots of good responses.
HERE'S THE KICKER -- MANY of them had contract-to-hire jobs!!! Most companies go through the recruters, get sickened and can't find a employee they want, and then instead hire a temp as a "try-before-you-buy" idea. I had 5-6 offers and within 2 weeks was working at a place that is paying nearly double what I was working and will pay more when they hire me on. I still get calls from temp companies saying if this doesn't pan out they have good contract-to-hire positions.
I have found this is the way to go, and I'd reccomend it to anyone over going through "placement" companies. Most of the "placement" companies I dealt with are just now getting into the IT field, and figure it's the same as placing a manager. It isn't.. Even when I was going through the recruters the first time I had talked to some consulting companies and they gave me better leads then the "placement" companies.
Consulting companies have to know the business to survive, while "placement" companies try to put a square peg in a round hole (or "any IT person for any position" theorem).
The states aren't much better. I seem to have better luck with paper ads (where companies themselves advertise).
Monster Board used to be good. I found my last two jobs there but I've hit a brick wall for the last 3 months. I get what I call "Database Fillers." Agencies that employ their agents to fill a database with interviews. They don't care if the job gets filled, just that they meet their quota.
I'm sure to get spammed here, but these jerks are really getting on my nerves. If any IT managers are reading, heed this call:
Do not hire from agencies! They are sloppily run, and care nothing for your company and certainly not for the people they interview. Only you can stop this scam and get yourselves the best techs possible.
This concludes my rant. We now return you to your regularly scheduled surfing.
Don't just game, Dungeoneer
I just went on an online job hunt and found that it was hard going, at first. Email sent in, no reply or only an automated reply. After a few whirls at this I changed my game plan. I reformulated my plan around a few facts. First, I was looking for a geek job and knew that managers that tended to hire geeks didn't worry so much about what jobs they have req's for. If they find a good person, they hire them one way or the other. The second fact was that submitting resumes to the HR department is useless. Instead, I sent the email directly to the person in charge of hiring. In small companies (the only type I was looking at) the Director of Engineering is usually listed on the web site so figuring up who to send the email to is easy. (See below for how to guess email addresses from people's names.)
.doc) and the other as straight text, copy-and-pasted into my email. My general goal was to get their attention, do a quick sell of myself and then tell them I wouldn't be stalking them if they didn't decide to hire me on the spot. It seemed pretty effective. I got a couple of phone interviews and a job out of the strategy. I've included an editted version of such a cover letter below.
With this in mind, I picked the companies I was most interseted in and wrote a cover letter and included two copies of my resume with it. One as an HTML attachment (just say no to MS and
Neil
PS: A last detail to mention is that once you know who to send the email to guessing their email is usually simple. "John Doe" almost certainly has an email of jdoe, johnd, john.doe, or john_doe. You should send the resume to each one and wait to see if it bounces because some companies give individuals multiple email addresses and you don't want to bombard someone with 4 copies of your resume by guessing all 4 at once and having them all go through.
=========== Sample cover letter ============
John,
I am a senior engineer/architect/project lead who has recently become very excited about the possibility of working for XYZ. I'm concerned that if I just send a resume in via the web it is likely to get lost in HR so I thought I'd try this more direct approach.
There are several reasons I'm so attracted to XYZ. First, and most importantly, I'm looking to work in a dynamic, high paced, exciting environment with bright individuals. I was told that XYZ meets these by a director at ABC. (I think the quote was "Those people at XYZ seem to know what they are doing." which I considered to be a high complement considering the source.) Second, I've been doing web applications (both applets and servlets) for the last 18 months and want to continue working on web related projects. I'm quite excited by the challenges and excitement of working on the new technologies. Third, my 2 1/2+ years of Java programming have made me a real Java fan and I want to continue working with the language. Lastly, I'm looking for a small company where I can make a difference. I want a to work at a company that could be my home for years to come. I'm hoping that XYZ might be such a company.
I'd love a chance to talk with you or someone else at XYZ about a job opportunity. Even if you do not have something that seems appropriate for me now but might sometime in the future I hope you'll contact me so we can discuss it. I won't send you any further unsolicited emails so if you are not interested, this can be the end of our contact.
Hoping to hear from you,
Joe
Neil Smithline http://www.neilsmithline.com
I must say that it is far too easy to 'give up' on those silly marketing bunch who are capable of only using a search engine to look for possible canidates for a specific position. But lets be honest ladies and gentlemen: As fellow geeks would you not do the same thing to save yourself some trouble?
...don't make critical comments like this. This does absolutely NOTHING for you at this point in the game.
And certainly, you'll have to believe me here, many computer types can bring excellent computing skills to the job, but they certainly lack fundamental social skills. If you get the opportunity to talk to one of these knobs on the fone, I'm affraid you are going to have to bring the conversation down to THEIR level. Trying to impress them by using "techie-speak" and fancy acronyms is usually only going to make the matter worse.
Ask general questions like: "What are my key responsibilities?"
"How long has your client been in the industry?"
"What city is it in?"
"What are the communities like in this city."
These are all facts that the Head-hunter has in front of his face. Since I'm sure he KNOWS who his client is, and has probably placed other people with them.
The trick is this. Don't treat the HH like the hiring manager; This is wrong! Ask lots of simple questions that make you sound interested in the job. This will help you get 'your foot in the door' - so to speak.
Follow all directions closely. Don't ask silly questions or make silly comments until AFTER you are in a position to do so. (This usually requires you to be asking someone who knows the answer, and keep in mind the head-hunter has the computer knowledge of a small vole.) Don't ask "but why can't you just convert it to html?"
Practice your social skills!
Far too often I see people who are fairly capable at getting their points across by hiding in 'fear' behind a keyboard and a terminal. Learn to be able to talk comfortably with others. It WILL help!
For example: The next time you go to the grocery store..(or whatever). Have a conversation with the clerk ringing your groceries in. Ask him/her something. If you have to...comment about the weather. Keep practicing. It will soon come with more ease.
That's about all I can think of for the dim-witted and dumb-founded.
In Peurto-Rico....signing off
Blackfire
PoW's previous post has got some great advice. Use it! Getting that first job can be hell, you really need to sell yourself. Don't blow your chances by showing up late for an interview or having a typo on your resume. Most interviewers have hundreds of applicants to screen and will use any excuse to funnel that list down.
Another thing you might try is video taping yourself in an interview situation. Get a friend to play the role of interviewer, preferably some one who has some interview experience, and do a full 30-45 minute initial interview.
Then play it back and honestly as yourself, "would I hire this person?" You may be shocked. In any event, use the information gained from the interview tape to sharpen your skills. It is only
a small investment in time and money and will pay enormous divedends (both in cash and by being able to get the more personally rewarding jobs) over your working life (i.e. the next 50 or so years of your life!).
Hope this helps....
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I agree with your thoughts, as I am looking also. I have been using the job search engines, but mostly nobody returns any e-mails, some send the standard blah, blah, blah letter.Good luck with changing the standards.
I was doing that job search thing just a couple of months ago (looking for a sysadmin-type position on UNIX, with the lion's share of my experience being specifically SGI). I'm glad I found a "permanent" position (I end up working in the entertainment industry, and you just can't tell...), because the whole drove me nuts.
.dvi files. *cough* as if...)
First off, I simply did not have access to Word. *All* the accounts I use, both at home (Linux box), at work (SGIs), and elsewhere are UNIX based. I told people I could either email them text or fax a formatted document (nobody seems to know what to do with
I put my resume up on monster.com, because, although I thought I was checking carefully, I didn't think it would be viewable by people unless I had specifically submitted it to them. But I got cold calls off it, which wouldn't have been so bad, except...
The number of headhunter agencies in Southern California must have quadrupled in the last year. My last job was a 6-month contract I got in October. Between that and the number of places hounding me this time, there was a noticeable increase in volume and an unfortunate correlation in cluelessness.
Funny incidents:
One recruiter asked me "How many UNIX commands do you know?"
"Uh, well, there's cat, echo, cd, ls...."
Geez.
Another recruiter, with a thick, unplaceable foreign accent called me, saying he had a great job in Alameda. "But I live in Southern California, and I don't want to relocate."
Him: "No, that wouldn't be a long commute at all!"
Me: "No, it's too far."
Him: "No, it's a great job. Not far at all."
Me: "You said Alameda, right? That's in the Bay
Area, right?"
Him: "Yes."
Me: "No, that's too far."
Him: "Where do you live?"
Me: "I live in LA County. That's 400 miles!"
Him: "No, not far at all!"
I finally convinced him I wasn't interested, although I don't think I managed to convince him it was a long commute.
Anyway, my recommendation to people would not be to plaster your resume all over the net. What happened with me is that the most promising position I saw was offered by what, from the looks of the office and the youth and, um, frat-boy, excessive aggressiveness of the employees, was a *very* new placement company. They sent me on an interview with this place, it looked like a great fit, but then I started getting stalling calls from the headhunter. Finally, the potential employer called me directly and said they were having trouble negotiation a fee with the placement agency. Apparently they were asking for 33% of my first year's salary! The headhunter hadn't mentioned that to me or apparently to the would-be employer. The headhunter said in special circumstances they could go down to 20%, but that's still a big chunk of money! He was just really jerking both me and the company around, being pushy and withholding information.
Anyway, the potential employer expressed regret that they had gotten my resume through this agency rather than directly or through a more reasonable place, and since the agency had gotten my resume off monster.com without my knowledge, they could have passed it on to any number of promising employers, probably without my knowledge, and thus *decrease* my chances of getting a good job when these companies balked at the fee!
Anyway, the story has a reasonably happy ending, but it was a very frustrating experience.
Why complain about recruiters' incompetence? Use it to your advantage!
In an one year period, I was the victim of "rightsizing" on three seperate occasions. In that same year period, I jumped from $7.75 an hour to $40k a year income. I had been foolishly studying a non computer/technology oriented major, but came to the realization that computers are what I'm best at (well, plus I was broke). My first 2 (computer jobs) were your usual contract/geeksploitation/sweatshop "add ram to these 400 peecees" type jobs. After being "added to the mobility pool" from these places, a decided to try out the local employment agencies. Most places tried to send me back to the crappy pc support jobs I had been trying to avoid until I learned to play the game. I decided to put any experience I'd ever had with any piece of hardware or software on my resume and added generous amounts of buzzwords to attract attention. Finally, a particularly dimwitted agency called me in for a "serious interview" (yes, they said those words).
Since I mentioned Unix on the resume, above mentioned agency asked if I minded taking a few tests. The Unix user and general PC support "exams" were so insanely easy I stopped midway and forced them to give me the SysAdmin tests (those were a joke as well). When the "official results" were tallied, said recruiter started gushing like a schoolgirl at a Hansen concert. Suddenly, the list of Good Jobs (TM) was requested while my "agent" asked me canned questions from note cards. Recruiters don't know anything about computers, otherwise they wouldn't be recruiters! I could have answered "transistorized cream cheese", and she wouldn't have know the difference.
What's the point of all this? Fill your resume with buzzwords the point and drool types go ga-ga over and hype yourself up to get an interview with the actual company. When I got a *REAL* interview with a company I was being placed at, I told them (the company)I know my skills were overhyped and if they were looking for a college graduate type, I was sorry to waste their time. I also told them exactly what I did know, how well, and that I was confident I could quickly learn any other needed skills. The tactic worked and they hired me. Now, I can now add to my resume that I set up and administer an RS/6000, a Unixware box (blech), several SCO boxes (blech, blech), a few Linux boxen (JOY!) and have set up a VPN and moved our office to NT/BackOffice (Arrg!) from Netware.
Use recruiters' cluelessness to get interview with the good companies. I know $40k isn't that great, but I think for a college dropout who more than doubled his income in a year, it is. Now I finally can afford to go back and get one of those expensive pieces of paper (a diploma, I think).
~Any apparent grammatical or typographic errors are caused by defects in your display device.
Hiring agencies aren't hindering step between you and geek nirvana. Quite the opposite: their job is to make sure you get as much salad as possible when you finally land the geek job of your dreams.
These guys are slimy sales goons: the suit's suit. But these suits work for the geek, rather than vice versa. Give 'em a list of buzzwords, and step back while their perfectly oiled hair and shiny shoes makes an assault upon any number of potential employers. Their job is to sell -you- and your skills to companies, for as much money as they can(they work on comission, and are paid by the company. If someone wants -you- to pony up the cash, run screaming).
So, while the suits run interference with HR for you, all you have to do is talk to the guys who you'll work for and with at the interview. If you don't like 'em, you don't have to work for 'em, and if they don't like you, the headhunter will let you know why the company passed.
The average recruiter -is- technically iliterate, so you'll have to speak in buzzwords to sell your skillset. Lots of times they'll miss, but they will eventually come up with a potential position you really like. And then they will smile with perfect teeth at the HR goons, rolling up your salary into the big numbers, while you sneak in to talk shop with the IT manager.
Darth JarJar!
Ok. So the title may be a little misleading but, I have been through the job search process within the last month and have successfully landed a new job. I did use the online job search resources and do agree somewhat with what was said. The postings are mainly from technical recruiters and employement agencies (who usually don't know what Perl, HTML, database admin, etc.. really is). If you are going to get a job you have to go beyond sitting at your desk and typing in eResume's. You have to talk to people. Work your way around the HR drones. And if they ask for a resume in .doc format, give it to them..what's the big deal?
I do agree with the assesment "If you really want the job you will do what it takes". That is a very true assertion. I am a techie but I work a less tech-oriented job. Why? Not because I sent my resume as a proprietary format or because of a database keyword system, but because I have not tried hard enough.
The point that the author and several follow-ups have presented is that tech job hunting really is a sad state of affairs. Not that tech hunting is the only job process that is lacking, just look at what your friends that are photographers or artists have to go through, but people that truly have the skills are being bottlenecked by those that don't. It is just a shame that the tech industry allows itself to draw skilled individuals in such an inefficient manner.
-Clump
When applicants here want to ensure thier resume gets seen by someone who knows something, they do 1 of two things.
1. Call the organization and ask for the IS Dept.
Once speaking to the IS Dept, explain that you have just submitted a resume for job XXX and that you aren't sure it has all the keywords and tricky phrases, but that you are more than qualified. Please leave a note for the IS Director/Dept Manager/etc to the effect that Person: So-and-So has applied.
Our Managers then ask HR where the resume from XXX is. Very effective....after the first few of these, HR stopped any attempt at weeding out resumes.
2. They call the org and ask for the IS Helpdesk..then follow approximately the same procedure as above.
I've often contemplated the problem of being at the mercy of far less educated (and usually far less intelligent) persons. The question is when will the computer science community wake up and start the struggle for more control of our working conditions. How many of you are managed by a person who could no more judge the quality of your work than see through lead. What we need is a professional society like the AMA ( American Medical Assoc. ) for doctors. An agency that protects or professional integrity through peer review, while at the same time makes demands of those whom we work for to insure certain standards. We are well paid (for the most part) and well educated, now lets start taking the control we need to protect our industry and our lively hoods.
"ATTITUDE" is never a good thing. Arrogance just makes for a difficult employee. Sure, there are some geniuses out there, but usually there're the ones with NO (0, NULL, nada) attitude. I've been a professional programmer for about 10 years now and if you took away all the "ATTITUDE" I have to deal with (Vs good computer science) my life would be a lot more fun, productive, happy....
Self confidence is good but "ATTITUDE" is just a false cover for the incompetent.
Engineers are just guys who couldn't handle the computer science curriculum. Without the code we create most of you wouldn't even be able to handle the modern engineering curriculum. I used to have respect for engineers until I started working with them. They hate CIS guys because they can't understand what we do, why we make more than them, and why they have to come to use to create the software that allows them to call themselves engineers. What a joke... Give me the good old days when being an engineer didn't just mean you knew how to run CAD software.
I began my professional life as an electrical engineer and let me tell ya, EE's (especially today) depend on CAD software as much or more than any other type of engineer. I agree that it's a symbiotic relationship but I get really tired of my profession (computer science) being considered pseudo engineering/science. I work mostly with civil engineers and they seem to have the biggest chip on their shoulder. I think they're, sort of, (now don't everyone flame me at once) the bottom of the bowl as far as engineers go and they seem to be a little overly sensitive about it. Most of them can't do manually what the software I create and maintain does automatically and yet they really look down their noses at IS. Rant, rant, rant...
sorry bad day.....
But I find the derogatory attitude of programmers to
engineers and vice-versa really annoying. They are both trained to be specialists.
I agree completely. We're all professionals with our various strengths and weaknesses. I know I beat on the engineers pretty good but they've got to accept CIS for what it is, a young science that has all the challenges and abilities that engineering has. We're different but deserve the same respect.
I have not been in this business a long time, but I have traversed the path from lowly minimum wage phone tech support to running my own consulting business, and have applied for my share of jobs. So far my experience has led me to ignore intermediaries. I have submitted my resume as ASCII text and .DOC files to my share of temp agencies and head hunters, and frankly none of them worked as well as faxing or even snail-mailing my resume directly to employers who advertise in the classifieds. At this point in my career I am also very dependent on contacts. So for example when I want a job with a company that usually only hires through temp agencies I find somebody who works for that company. This person may be a friend of a friend, but I will send them my resume and ask that they forward it to anybody in the company who they think is appropriate. I may end up working through a temp agency, but this short circuits having to deal with the temp agency first.
In many Fortune 500 companies, the resume goes from person to person, through layers of people who have nothing whatsoever to do with the actual decision making.
1) The head-hunting agent, who filters it and passes it on to the company's HR contact
2) Company's HR person, who passes it on to the IT dept. HR co-ordinator. Note that the company's main HR deals with hiring everyone from safety inspectors to cement mixers.
3) IT HR person, who collects a bunch of resumes and distributes it to the dept./project managers who get it next.
4) Managers (frequently non-technical and unable to understand the buzzwords) pass it on to team leads.
5) Team leads go over the resume with the local "Alpha geek" to schedule an interview. Every team has this person who is technically good and has no impressive title, but who is asked all the questions when it comes to deciding something. Frequently, this person has a line outside his/her cubicle.
6) If you make it this far, you're the final link. The info. is relayed back through all those layers, and you get contacted by the head-hunter.
Since information is lost at every communication point (like that little children's game), it causes the ridiculous results we see.
L.
Oh, you're so virile! The testosterone is dripping off my screen!
So your faux-macho engineering group requires prospective chewy punks to suck up to HR morons who require them to know things that have nothing to do with the job? Well, then it's no wonder you've got so many punks to chew on. Seems to me that you've got too much time to waste.
Maybe one day the current demand for skilled IT workers will subside, and job applicants will have to put up with braindead recruiters and this kind of sorry Stallone imitation, but not these days.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
I went through DOZENS of these "recruiters" and "consulting firms" before I finally landed a new job in this field. You are so correct when you speak about their lack of technology literacy. It is unreal how almost EVERY major corporation uses these people, but in actuality, they deal with so many people they have to do something to automate the process.
"You..! Off my planet now!"
They don't give much more that one or two lines of information on the job. There is no company info whatsoever for fear that the agency is bypassed. I have just visited an Irish one jobfinder and it's mind-boggling. I'd say more than 90% of the entries are various Recruitment services.
This is frustrating.
Worthy of a much better RANT really.
Checking the Irish Times newspaper (on-line) you can see the jobs pages are published in paper form only. Why? Has someone monopolised this industry? How can it not be worth the papers while to publish their job-ads? However, that said, even in the newspaper ads there is pathetically little information.
How can you choose the right job from two lines? I can't. If you ring the agencies up .... you get loads of hassle, no information until you interview with them and certainly no company or job choice. PATHETIC!
Okay you can apply and do the interview to find out what the job really is BUT I really don't want to go to all that hassle just to find out what I would be applying for.
How can there not exist an option to filter out all those nasty recruitment agencies? And why are the jobs advertised with such a tiny amount of information? Do people not know what they want someone to do? Where they will work? Hours, benefits, what is involved...?
If software companies have such problems hiring people why is it such hassle to find a nice geek job? Is there no jobsearch site that could act as a central resource for both companies and geeks? I guess not :( It would surely be worth someone's while. Think of the advertising $$$s.
Need: good job info, reject obfusticating recruitment advertisments (or filter them out) become THE job portal everyone uses, rake in loads of money.
Get Yahoo interested .... a people moderated Yahoo style jobs area would be quite interesting. Hmmm, I wonder could the ODP manage this?
So, why in the world haven't we begun to figure this out in the high-tech job area ?
In my experience, the headhunters don't do any intelligent resume evaluation. They just do "acronym matching."
They are unable to understand concepts like
"some exposure to technology X," "expert at technology Y."
They are reduced to comparing lists of keywords
and can really mis-represent you if you're not
careful !
Let's figure out a way to convince more companies to "go direct."
Middlemen just add cost and complexity to every
transaction...and in this case, little value.
shall
I have recently tried the online job market. My advice to getting by the recruiter is to agree that you have the skills they ask for, but be honest. They'll tell you they need four years experience in something that's only been out for three. Don't argue, just say 'Ive done it since it's been out.' And what ever you do, don't get suckered into trying to explain to one of these people what 'object-oriented' means.
I work at a job site for developers. We actually have a mission to help with this situation by bringing employers and candidates closer with less work for both. The main aspect on our site is the job search engine for developers, which queries company employment pages on the web. There's no intervention.
I want to thank Joseph and everyone who commented for making their voices heard here. I've passed this article and the comments to everyone in our company.
We will always be a job site focused on developers, and as such, we want to make it as developer friendly as possible.
Thanks again. Developers.Net
Here are some sites that link up open source coders with employers/patrons/sponsors. Some of these are just starting out.
Free Software Bazaar
http://visar.csustan.edu/bazaar/bazaar.html
sourceXchange
http://www.sourcexchange.com/
GNU Services Directory
http://www.gnu.org/prep/service.html
GNU Free Software Job Page
http://www.gnu.org/jobs
Cosource
http://www.cosource.com/
BTW, anybody want to hire/contract a telecommuting Java programmer?
Kevin
Java Programmer seeking telecommuting work
I know I am not speaking for all HR individuals, nor am I about to try. However, being a technical recruiter working for a technical staffing agency, let me just say that there are those of us out there that know technical, that ARE technical people. In fact, I get sick of taking the bad rap for poor hr departments. If you're worried that an HR person is going to misrepresent you, talk to them, ask them what they know, get a feeling for how technical they are. I think myself as well as a number of my colleagues can handle a couple of qualifying questions coming our way. In fact, I'd prefer it to having technical people presume that because we work HR we can't be technical people. The same way that it is my responsiblity to understand the difference between java and javascript as a recruiter, it is a technical professional's job to determine the difference for themselves between technical recuiters who know technical, and technical recruiters who know buzz words, and then decide who they want to represent them.
nyaa-nyaa! I can be more petty than you can!
I have also been in search of a new job, and I have run into similar problems. It is no secret that a lot of the recruiters and temp agencies are staffed with morons who can barely operatate their fancy telephones, let alone their PCs. I always get a chuckle when a recruiter starts to ask me UNIX questions because I know he/she has no clue if my answer is correct or not, they just write down my answer and submit it through their "system". There is a huge problem with this system as you've pointed out. We are trusting that these recruiters can represent us properly to the companies we actually want to be employed by!
i also went through this process recently in
Austin, TX and had roughly the same experience.
i was applying for very Linux oriented jobs,
so i thought StarOffice or plain text files
would be appropriate, nope; i got just as far
as he did. if it's not in Word'97+ format
the middle man thinks you don't know what
you are doing.
i thought making an online resume, offering
the resume in the different file formats,
would be a much more attractive resume.
i found that few people ever went to the url
after i gave it to them and they said they
would, or they didn't understand the concept
of a resume being online.
you just have to deal with it when dealing
with middle-man agencies -- i choose to
avoid them and plan to never deal with them
again!
Recruiters are largely a bunch of morons anyways - bunch of half-assed, lazy, fools who more-or-less exploit techies!
My only advice to folks who are searching for a job ----> NEVER GIVE YOUR PHONE NUMBER OUT! Unless you've a serious offer on your hands. Otherwise, you'll be inundated by every punk who thinks he/she can make a quick buck off your skills.
I was searching for a new job for over a year. Every day I would goto one of those job search engines and put in my info. Every day I would get e-mails with job listings. Every day I would send my resume (in plain text) to agencies. I stopped expecting response and began to feel I was putting a message in a bottle and tossing it in the ocean. I then started looking at companies that slashdot had postings on and sure enough I found one that doesn't deal with recruiters. I spoke with someone in the company directly and sure enough I had a new job. I spend my day installing all different OSes and am constantly challenged. I feel I owe all of this to slashdot and recommend that you forget the agencies and the job search engines and try to find your new job via slashdot.