Job Search Rules

I have helped with the recruiting of new employees at a number of companies for which I have worked over the years.  Based on that experience, I would like to offer the following list of suggestions for anyone trying to get hired.  You've probably heard them all before, but I can tell you from looking at a lot of bad cover letters and resumes that many people just don't seem to take these to heart:

Your cover letter matters: it is my first impression of you, and if it is poorly written, I may not even get to your resume.  It also indicates to me that you aren't just spamming every e-mail address you can find with your resume.

Proofread your resume.  Then have someone else proofread it.  Much like your cover letter, it is how I continue to develop my first impression of you.  If you can't provide me with one perfect page of work that you had all the time in the world to do, what can I expect of you once you're under time pressure?

Provide a .PDF of your resume, not a Microsoft Word file.  I may or may not have the correct version of Word, and I generally dislike opening .doc / .docx files of unknown origin, just in case some clever new exploit is floating around in them.  Some people don't use Microsoft Office at all, especially Mac and Linux folks.  I may also not have the same fonts as you.  PDFCreator is freely available, and .PDF documents are, as the name says, portable across numerous systems.

The ONLY job of a resume is to get you an interview, and provide starting topics for that interview.  Make it good, but keep it brief.


Polite formality matters:  I want to know that you are capable of interacting in an appropriately professional manner, when needed.  If we end up working together, then the abbreviated e-mails and collegial joking can begin.  But don't jump the gun.

Sell yourself well:  I want you to succeed, because I have a job to fill, so let me know how you will meet my needs.  If we end up working together, I may, at times, spend more of my waking hours around you than I do with my family.  I want to believe that time will be well spent, and that we will work well together.

Expect to be Googled:  My goal is to find professionally relevant information about your work experience, but I'm going to see whatever comes up.  I don't care about your personal life, but if I find your blog entirely about how to sell stolen lab supplies on eBay, I'm probably not going to want to hire you.

And finally, a couple suggestions from my various job hunts:

Talk to your friends: Almost every job I've ever had has been the result of a connection made through a friend, or friend of a friend.  That's how you find out about jobs when the company is thinking of hiring, before they've even cast out their net.  It's a lot easier to stand out in a hiring pool of one than when there are dozens of resumes coming in from a Craig's List posting or Monster.com listing.

Make targeted cold calls:  If you know where you would like to work, do some research and then call them up, and ask to talk to the person likely to be your boss there.  I really loved what was being done at Leapfrog years ago, so I called their engineering R&D office and asked for the CTO, who's name I had gotten from a web search.  He was out of town, so I was referred to the VP of hardware engineering.  I asked if he had any upcoming openings.  He said he did, and asked me to send him my resume.  Two weeks later I had a job there.  This is important though: do not treat this as a "numbers game," but rather as a carefully targeted approach to somewhere you'd really like to work.  Even if they don't have any openings when you call, they might know if any are planned in the near future.  Or, if you present yourself well, they may even make some effort to find a position for you, or accelerate hiring for a planned future opening.

Have you got any good stories from either looking for a job or looking to hire someone?  Comment below!

Manita Guidero / Nery, Alderwood Middle School Home Ec.

I have been extremely fortunate to have had a number of excellent teachers throughout my life.  Some I have kept in touch with, others I wish I had made more of an effort.  One of the latter was my 8th Grade Home Economics teacher.  When I knew her, she was Mrs. Guidero, although I learned that in later years, she got divorced and became Ms. Nery.  She was about 40 years old and a new teacher to Alderwood Middle School when I arrived there in 7th grade. As I sat in her class on the first day of school, I was terrified of her.  She was, I thought, an unreasonably demanding battle-axe, outlining in excruciating detail during that first class exactly how we were to put the headings on our papers, how she would brook no foolishness, and all the behavioral strictures we were expected to observe in her class.  I found her so daunting that when one of the science teachers (another of my favorites) asked me to be a teaching assistant for him, I immediately dropped Home Ec.

The next year, I found myself back in her class, without the option of dropping.  I quickly learned that she expected a lot of us, because she had a lot to teach us.  I loved her class.  I learned a lot about cooking from her, and I did great.  I discovered that she recognized and respected good behavior, and was happy to give freedom to those who demonstrated they could handle it.  By the end of her class, I had so much enjoyed myself that I ended up becoming her teaching assistant the next trimester.  She taught me more about cooking, and taught me to teach, asking me to run entire cooking demonstrations in her class.  At the end of the year student awards ceremony, she gave me the Home Ec. cooking award for that year.

Mrs. Guidero, later Ms. Nery, continued to teach at Alderwood for the next 17 years, becoming, I have heard, a pillar of the school.  I suspect that she demanded, and got, the best out of a lot of students in that time.  I often thought of her, and several years ago I finally did some Googling to try to get in touch with her again.  I wanted to let her know what a positive influence I felt she had had on my life.  I was sad to discover that she had died in a freak hiking accident in Glacier National Park on June 28, 2002 at the age of 59.  I'm sad that I never got to talk to her again.  I expect I am only one of many lives that she touched in the course of her amazing career.

I'm Illiterate in over 160 languages!

I have been travelling to Taiwan occasionally for business, and although I've made some effort to learn Mandarin Chinese, I've not really had the time to make a serious study of it, so I know only a few phrases.  The single most useful thing I can say is "I can not speak Mandarin.  Can you speak English?"  My favorite response to that was a guy who responded in perfect, unaccented west coast American English, "Yeah, what's up?"  The reason I'd needed to speak to that particular person was because I couldn't figure out which "cycle" button to press on the coin operated washing machine I had just dumped my clothes and money into.  The operating instructions, quite helpfully, were in Chinese and English, but step four was "select cycle."  All five of the cycle buttons were labelled only in Chinese.  I can't tell "ultra gentle non-agitating non-wash" from "shred your clothes and set them on fire," so I didn't really want to just pick a button at random.  And this was only one of many experiences that has taught me how utterly terrible it is to be illiterate.

There is a LOT of good information written all around us, to the point that we take it for granted, and often don't even realize when we're absorbing data from our environment.  But when that information isn't there, you really miss it.  Ideographic Chinese is so completely unintelligible to me that it effectively isn't there.  And when I want to get something as simple as a bottle of juice at 7-11, it becomes apparent.  I don't like to drink caffeine or artificial sweeteners.  When I picked up a grape juice bottle the other day, the only thing I could read on the label was "100%," which I eventually assumed was most likely "100% juice."  But it could well have been "100% of your day's vitamin C," or "100% recycled bottle!" or "100% rocket blast wake up caffeine super energy cocktail!"  And yes, I could have started asking people around me, but then I'd also need to explain in at least some detail what I was trying to avoid.  If I had gone through that exercise, then I would always know in the future that I could buy that one item.  But still, coming from a world where I can instantly know quite a lot of details of that product just by reading the label, illiteracy is a jarring change.

Maybe that's part of the secret to how people get by without being able to read:  They always have, so they just aren't acclimatized to the huge chunk they are missing.  But when an adult learns to read late in life, do they undergo a period of realization of how much richer their experience of the world can suddenly become?  If you've taught any adult reading classes, please comment below.  I'd love to know.

And maybe I should renew my efforts to learn some written Chinese as well...

Welcome to The FUTURE!

When I was walking out of an MRT station (Metro Rail Transit - Like London's Underground) in Taipei this sign caught my eye:

Why yes, that is in fact an LED indicator board to tell you the status of the stalls in the men's room.  No more of that pesky furtive glancing under the stall wall or embarrassing rattling of locked doors.  Indeed, this was out IN THE MAIN HALL, so you didn't even need to go into the restroom to know what was available.  This truly is an amazing time in which we live.

Seriously though, this got sorted into the bin in my brain labelled "Huh?"

 - Is it useful and cool, or just kind of creepy?

 - Who created this?  It obviously took a great deal of doing.  SOMEONE has this thing on their resume.

 - Why is this the first time I've ever seen it?  Is it really new?  Or a pilot run?  Or somebody's college art project?

Anyway, I thought it was interesting, enough so to stop in a busy train station and take a photo of a restroom sign.  What do YOU think?  Have you ever seen one of these before?  Comment below.

The New Inventors

I was in Taiwan recently, and one night while channel surfing, I ran across a show on the hotel's Australian channel called "The New Inventors."  (You can download episodes from their website!)  Imagine "American Idol" except for inventors.  And they're Australian.  It is really really really cool, and it brings popular focus to things that really matter.  I know, I know, American Idol is important too because it allows beautiful talented people under the age of 26 to sign tightly binding contracts with the producers of the show.  Or something.  But encouraging and rewarding people that are building a better future has the potential to change all our lives in ways we can't yet even imagine.