rebelutionary / 2.0

As somebody who has recently been on both sides of the hiring table, your post rings all too true.

I'd also like to add:

"And don't call me to ask the status of your application 4 hours after emailing it to me (no doubt in the improper format). If I like you, I will call you - I don't want to have to akwardly lie to you and say it's still being processed. Or worse, if you catch me on a bad day have to tell you straight out that there's no way that your crap of a resume will get you any job, never mind this one."

<font color="pink">Hey is that job still open? I live in Denver but I have always loved Sidny.</font>

I've had the same experience. We're hiring a senior J2EE engineer http://jroller.com/page/thuss/Blog/hiring_a_java_spring_hibernate and out of several hundred resumes we've gotten I can count on two hands the number of applicants that exhibit a polished resume, proper english, ran spellcheck, and who took the time to write a thoughtful cover letter.

I agree with almost everything in your article. The single thing I disagree with is the point about the spellchecker. I don't run spellcheckers. Ever. If I can't type it correctly, then I can't type it correctly. Not only that, but most spellcheckers in my mother tongue (Norwegian) sucks.

Spellcheckers are part of ruining an important part of our language. In Norway we combine words into concatenated words. As an example: "orddelingsfeil". (Word division error). Spellcheckers most of the time want to divide this into "ord delings feil" - which is plain out WRONG in Norwegian. The dorks that use spellcheckers tend to get this (and other concatenations) wrong every time. They divide the word into three words to get the spellchecker to stop complaining - trusting it to know the language better than them.

I'm pretty sure you can find plenty of errors in my english here - but hey - I'm not to worried about that. I'm far to angry at spellcheckers to ever want to use them.

Except for that - excellent rant.

RE: point #1 above

"learnt" is not a word :-)

See you in Vegas....

AC, it's a question of care. If you don't care enough to do _some_ sort of review over a job application, then it can't really mean that much to you. At the very least, sit down and proof read it.

Too many people treat a job application like a casual piece of email, and it really shows.

RE: Jason

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=learnt

Looks like a word to me!

See you in Vegas :)

I understand and agree with your comments regarding good English usage in cover letters. However, I can understand why many people would want to send their applications despite knowing beforehand that a certain criterion needs to be met, for instance, the applicant should be eligible to work in this country. I, myself, have applied to jobs in the UK even if I know I will require sponsorship and the job ad says that they are not interested, but whenever I do, I kindly state this in my cover letter. Maybe the reviewer will find my skills relevant and will accept to sponsor me. I can never be too sure.

What pisses me off most is when I find the candidate have a puffed up resume with many technical terms yet doesn't have much knowledge about them or just have a cursory idea.
Nowadays everyone knows EJB till you ask them few questions.

And if you are trying to impress me you better read about the company and make some intelligent comment about the business to show your maturity.

Here I also get resumes often with their beautiful pictures and with their marital status (why the hell do I care?) and their father's name and sometimes even their passport number!

Are those quotes for real? Oh boy do I have some fun ahead of me...

so it seems you are getting the top 99.9801% of candidates
(http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html)
and maybe you got everybody you can in Melbourne ...

alek

Learnt vs Learned :
http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutspelling/learnt?view=uk

I am viewing your site on an Apple 12 inch powerbook, but still I have a resolution over 1000 pixels wide. Yet because your site or table width is set so big I have to keep scrolling back and forth horizontally to read your article. The text should wrap to a narrower width. Before you rant and rave at the poor presentation/professionalism of others, you should fix yours! If you used this site as a reference of your own abilities, no one would hire you.

I am viewing your site on an Apple 12 inch powerbook, but still I have a resolution over 1000 pixels wide. Yet because your site or table width is set so big I have to keep scrolling back and forth horizontally to read your article. The text should wrap to a narrower width. Before you rant and rave at the poor presentation/professionalism of others, you should fix yours! If you used this site as a reference of your own abilities, no one would hire you.

Mike,
I have sat at both sides of the table, and I appreciate the comments that you have posted. I agree to all the concerns you have raised here.

Since you are having trouble getting a focussed repies from potential candidates, it might also help to think if there is something you can do to improve things. I admit that it feels cool to conclude how everyone else out there is stupid - but to get around the problem you need to look at your end too. So here goes:

1) Be specific. Don't have ads with "O-R Mapping is important to us, so we are looking for a person who is comfortable with Hibernate, TOPLink, Cocobase *and* Kodo" when looking for a developer. If a project is using all of these tools, its because either it is super-cool or a super-mess - many if not most J2EE shops anyway develop CRUD web GUIs for an RDBMS, so I am inclined to think its the latter.

2) Be realistic. Dont put out ads asking for "..should have 8-10 years of Java experience" to fill a developer position. Java itself is just reaching its 10th year of existence, and please tone down the ego and look if your application realistically needs those skills.

3) Dont be too picky. Maybe you will have trouble finding Tapestry + WebWork developers, but its highly likely that you can hire some good Struts + JSP developers and train them in the specific technologies you want to use.

Often I see advertisements from employers without any focus whatsoever ("Yeah, we are looking to hire James Gosling, if he can accept a developer salary!"). Also, often I see recruiters getting on their soapboxes and preaching how stupid every job-hunter out there is. After being on both sides at different periods in life, I feel that *both* sides can do better with some introspection.

Thanks,
Binil

Mike,

I think the most important word here is "respect." When you think about it, if the applicant does not respect you enough to submit a resume that is well formatted, concise and targetted to your needs, how can you expect them to do so once you have employed them. This is at least the approach that I take when applying for a position and definitely reflect my thoughts when I am the person doing the hiring.

I think that you have compiled a fairly comprehensive
list of my complaints in this area but have missed one of the most important, i.e. "keep it short!" Keeping the resume at around 2 pages helps to ensure that your resume is going to be read in the first place. It also ensures that you are not giving so much information away that the reviewer can look at it and decide immediately that they don't want to talk to you. From a candidate's point of view it is important that you get in front of the people that are doing the hiring, and this is when you can really impress (as long as you don't turn up with your arse hanging out of your pants).

Just remember, demand respect now, or you'll never get it.

Shouldn't it be "proofread" ? :)

You mention that your company prefers resumes in PDF, HTML or plain text (rather than Word), but your web page will not render correctly in Firefox or Konqueror -- it only renders correctly in IE. I find this to be quite odd...