Candidates need to know where they stand — from the time you receive a resume until you’ve either hired them or rejected them. Make sure your autoresponses — or real rejection letters — don’t look like this:
Subject: Got your pathetic resume.To: (name withheld out of decency) Look:We here at insult.com got this soggy lump of drivel that you submitted to our jobs mailbox. Why you could even think to send this piece of incoherent junk out for potential employers to look at is utterly beyond us.It will be cursorily examined by a disinterested intern in HR, who is exceedingly spiteful toward any applicant for a job that pays more than hers (which is, basically, all of them). She was an English major and so the abundant grammatical and spelling errors in your CV will doubtless either make her laugh, spit or scream with rage. Even money on which one yours will do. She mails the funny ones to her friends and sometimes posts them on alt.personals.bondage.In the VERY unlikely event that she passes it on to the hiring manager, he or she will probably cut it up for paper dolls. Your inflated claims of advanced degrees will be ignored, your trumped-up claims of decades of experience with buzzword-system-of-the-month will incite giggles and/or guffaws (as gender-appropriate). He or she will call someone who knows someone who knows someone at the last few places you claim to have worked, and see if anyone remembers you there, and if so, what an incompetent jerk you were.The three or so poor wankers invited in for personal interviews will be grilled slowly over medium heat by people who are far more knowledgeable than they, over every niggling technical point they claim to know, until their brains run out their ears. We do this for the sheer amusement. And to perpetuate the company culture.We won’t even call any of them back. We’ll hire a friend of ours from college, instead. The whole job-advertising process is just window dressing to give the investors warm fuzzies.Let’s face it, we get 3,000 applications for every position. Don’t get your hopes up.Worst Wishes,Insult.com
This kind of a rejection begs for John Kador’s rejection rejection letter.All a rejection letter has to say is, “Thank you for your resume. Your experience doesn’t fit our needs at this time.” That’s it.
One thing I see little of in resumes, but which pops out in a positive way when I do see is, is acknowledgement of past failure, with evidence that the candidate learned something from it, or at least walked away with motivation to improve.
.I’ve been thinking about what to suggest. I agree that if candidates could somehow say what they’ve learned and could show people who read their resume what they’ve learned, the resume reading experience would be richer for all concerned. I’m not sure how to directly show that.One technique I have used is during the behavior-description question part of the interview is to ask people to contrast techniques and practices. Here’s what I mean for a variety of positions:
“Tell me about a time you used pair programming (or peer review or some other collaboration technique). What happened? (listen to the story) What did you learn? Then ask some of these: Would you do that again? Why/why not? Would you use something else instead?
For testers, ask about test techniques. For project managers, ask about lifecycle selection, or getting status, or facilitating meetings, or whatever’s important to you.Each manager will want to detect different learnings. I don’t quite see how a candidate can put those learnings into a resume that stays a suitable size. If you do know how, please comment.
The folks at the monster blog have another winning post One More Time of tips for job seekers. One of the most important tips is to show your value in a resume, a tip from Five Ways to Make Your Monster Resume Stand Out. Thad Peterson says “Use Numbers to Your Advantage” and highlights some ways to showcase your value.Here are some ways for technical people to quantify their value to the organization. Remember, senior managers care about time, cost, and customer experience. If you can, explain how you:
Saved time on a project, especially if you can explain the effect of saving time. “Developed an automated build script. We went from builds every two weeks to builds whenever the developers wanted, decreasing overall project time by 2 months (estimated by project manager).” If you fixed a system problem that wasted time on multiple projects, say that. “Created an automated something-or-other that helped every project save time. Estimate of time saved was two person-months per project or $40,000.”
Saved money. “Built automated entry system, eliminating the need for overtime. Overtime previous year was over $50,000.”
Improved customer experience. “Salvaged critical customer relationship, saving account. Customer spent $2M last year on product and support.”
Look at each of your jobs. See if you can articulate at least one line that shows your value for each of them. (If you have other ideas about value that differ from cost, time, customer experience, fine. I hope you comment with your ideas.) Just remember to articulate your value clearly for each of your jobs.
A service to rate blogs, bloghop, used to exist. It no longer seems to exist, so I’ve removed the links to the rating. If you want to tell me how you’d rate this blog, great. If bloghop comes back online (and I know about it), I’ll put the links back.
Recently, I spoke with a senior manager who’d outsourced new development to a non-local group. The development team has worked together in the past, and knows each other well. However, they are used to working on mature products, where you can actually write down the requirements and have them stand still for a few months. In this case, the requirements don’t stand still for longer than a few days. In fact, the development group should be using agile methods to develop the product — but they don’t know how and the management team didn’t know enough to ask. Everyone’s frustrated — no one is making the progress they want, and no one knows how to fix it.This unfortunate circumstance is a mismatch of culture. Here, the mismatch is obvious. Management wants an entrepeneurial team. Development wants lots of definition — something that’s not possible if you don’t know what you want to build. Neither is wrong; they’re just mismatched.The best way to prevent problems like this is to sit back and look at your culture before hiring or outsourcing, or anything to do with acquiring people to do work for you. Can you identify people who are particularly successful in your environment? If so, define their qualities, preferences, and non-technical skills, so you can choose whether you want more people like them. For example, if I’m hiring for an entrepenurial organization, I look for adaptability, initiative, resilience, oral and written communication skills, and people who are able to live with significant ambiguity. If I’m hiring for a mature organization, I might more for people who can enter and become part of the team quickly, people who can learn the product quickly, people who know how to finish things, people who can recognize when the process isn’t working (rather than reinventing a new process every time something new happens).Not everyone knows how to adapt to a new environment, so asking behavior-description questions such as, “When was the last time you didn’t have complete requirements? … What happened?” will help you learn how people expect to work and what they do when faced with the unexpected.
If, on the other hand, he is an alumnus of one of the “Grandes Ecoles” (which are themselves finely ranked), then it means that guy has what it takes to compete in the system.
I believe that competing in the education system is different than success at work. I had a completely undistiguished academic career. I’ve been much more successful at work than I ever was in school. I don’t think I’m alone. That’s one of the reasons I don’t count education (success in admission to some school or taking some classes) as a predictor of work success.Let me ask this question of you, my readers: Have you found that education success is a predictor of work success?
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