It begins with a spot on the wall.

I’m eating dinner with my wife when I notice a white speck on our red dining room walls near the wooden baseboard molding around the floor. My wife and I are having cold left over pizza for dinner because we’re both tired from a long day at work and we want to spend the little time we have in the evening with our toddler son as he throws applesauce at our heads. But there’s this little spot, just a speck, on the wall. I bend down and scratch it with my fingernail.

A chip of paint falls to the floor. “Hmm…” I say, leaning forward to avoid a flying cheese-covered piece of macaroni. “I guess I’ll have to touch up the wall tonight.”

This one room studio cottage soon grew to a 437 room castle after the owner’s wife said she’d like “a little rack for my spices.”

My wife, never missing an opportunity to keep me busy and off the streets, says, “If you’re going to fix that spot you’ll probably need to touch up other spots to match it.”

My agenda for this evening revolves around drinking beer and making fun of people on the TV so I don’t really want to spend those precious few hours sitting on the floor painting baseboards. I try a clever excuse: “Those baseboards are fifty years old, they’ll need more than paint to look good.”

“So why don’t you replace the baseboards?” my wife asks. D’oh! This is getting worse, not better.

“Because if I replace the baseboards I’ll first have to update all the trim around the doorways to know how short or long to cut the baseboards.”

“Why can’t you do the trim and then the baseboards?” she asks.

“I can’t do the trim because we’ve already planned to widen this doorway into the kitchen sometime. There’s not point in putting the trim up if I’m just going to take it down a little while later,” I answer. This is when I realize that I’ve completely lost this game. She has already analyzed this entire conversation and has easily figured out the thousands of possible ways it could go. Like Gary Kasparov playing chess with a chimpanzee, my wife has planned out the whole game before I even have a chance to unfold the board.

“What’s stopping you from widening the doorway now?” my wife asks innocently.

“Well, I’ll have to replace the kitchen cabinets before I widen the door because they are in the way.”

“So why don’t you replace the cabinets now?”

“Because I really need to fix up the slanting floors before I put new cabinets in.”

“What’s keeping you from working on the floors?” my wife asks.

I sigh. “I can’t get to the floors from the basement right now because the ceiling down there has that old sheet rock installed.”

“Can you remove it?”

“Sure, but it will make such a mess that I’d probably have to remodel the whole basement after I tear everything out.”

“Why can’t you do that?”

“Because I don’t have any place to put all the stuff we have in the basement now,” I answer with a sigh. I could mention to my wife that we really don’t have the ability to pay for any of these ideas, but I’m almost afraid she’ll reach under the table and bring out some sort of Carlton Sheets Easy Home Improvement Financing Course book and DVD set.

“What about that addition we keep talking about?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I say slowly. “I guess if we built that addition we could move the stuff from the basement into it while I worked down there.”

“Okay,” my wife responds with a smile. “So now we have a plan.”

I nod, removing a pea that is stuck in my hair. “We’re going to build that addition so that we can remodel the basement so that we can fix the slanted floor that will allow us to replace the kitchen cabinets that will make it easier to widen the doorway that we’re going to put trim around that will make the baseboards easier to replace so that I can paint that speck on the wall.”

“Sounds like a plan!” she says with a smile.

Damn.

2 Comments » | Email Link

Ever since receiving a promotion at work a little while ago I’ve found that one of my main duties is serving as a hiring manager for my office. Between retirements and position changes and job additions I have been hiring and moving people around for the better part of a year now. I have seen hundreds (maybe thousands) of resumés over that time and I thought I would impart upon you some of the things which could very well be preventing you from getting that dream job or even that pity interview.

As I’m wading through all these resumés and cover letters and job applications I have several things that I’m ultimately looking for, no matter what kind of position it is. I’m looking for:

It’s only okay to send naked photos of yourself with your resumé if you’re hot.

1. Someone who can do the job.
2. Someone who wants to do the job.
3. Someone who will stay for more than a few months.
4. Someone who will fit in with the current staff.

That’s it. I don’t care if you’re brilliant or have excellent oral hygiene or know the Pope on a personal level. I don’t care about your hobbies or your volunteer work or what kind of position you want. I just want to know that you’ll help out, won’t screw me and won’t end up pissing off everyone else. It helps to know if you’re hot, but if you’re really annoying you still won’t get the job.

Below are some of the horrifying things I’ve seen on resumés that have landed on my desk. Please, for your career, don’t do these:

Use a wacky email address: Sure, having an email address like “hansolo32@aol.com” or “sexxxy-latin-mamma@comcast.net” is clever and fun when you shout it across the bar as you order your seventh beer on a Friday night. It’s really not all that amusing, and even a little bit creepy, at 10am while I’m sipping my coffee and wearing pants. Here’s a tip: free email. Welcome to the 1990’s. Just get a professional address and stop putting “funkychunkymunky@verizon.net” at the top of your resumé.

State in your cover letter that you’re applying for multiple jobs in the same company: I work for a large company and we always have a lot of job openings. Please don’t write one letter and resumé and send it in for all the open jobs that sound interesting. That just tells me you really don’t care about MY open job, you just want ANY open job. Sure, I know, you were once told that if you “just send your resume in” out of the blue that the Human Resources department will hold on to it and lovingly care for it and hold it until the perfect job opens up and they’ll call you in. That’s a load of manure. Human Resources people are swamped and they don’t care about finding you a job. They care about how they’re going to reprimand that guy in accounting who keeps putting up pornographic photos of sheep on his cube wall. If I’m expected to have the decency to call you in for an interview then YOU should have the decency to write a separate letter and resumé for my open position.

State in your cover letter that you can’t find a job and you’ve been applying for months/years/decades: Sooo… you’re a loser. Don’t advertise it. If someone else doesn’t want to hire you, why would I? Seriously, cover letters and resumés are about listing strengths and being positive and blowing sunshine up my ass. Be truthful, but just enough to get in the door. The interview is when I’ll have a chance to find out things that are less than wonderful like your habit of picking your nose with your tongue.

Use abbreviations that aren’t explained: I work in a somewhat technical field, so I get this a lot. I see resumes that list experience with “I-Mod 4.3, 4.4, 4.45 and configulating RMF adapters under EEbIEM Licensing protocol 92.1.” Great. Thank you. I’m very impressed. Right now I’m using Microsoft Word 12.0.6311.4998 SP1. Do you think I’m smarter for it? No, you think I’m a tool. I find that older tech workers love to cram in all sorts of pseudo-technical terms and product names with versions, hoping that a bunch of letters and abbreviations will sound impressive enough to get them in the door. Guess what? If Human Resources can’t figure out what the hell you’re talking about I probably won’t even get a chance to see your alphabet soup of a resumé. Write your resumé and cover letter so that a 5th grader can understand it. Remember: your future boss will be the one who hires you and think about how stupid you think most bosses are.

List your boring hobbies: I’ve never hired someone or even invited them in for an interview because they liked “music, reading, going for walks and surfing the Internet.” You know what those hobbies prove? They prove that you’re human… barely. Everyone likes and does those things, so I don’t care about them. In fact, I don’t care about anything you do outside of the office as long as it isn’t cleaning your gun and stalking me. If you have some sort of extraordinary and relevant volunteer work or hobby that might somehow help with the job then you might want to find a way to weasel it in. Most of the jobs I hire for are technical and somewhat menial, so unless you have a hobby like watching paint dry it probably isn’t going to help much.

Use poor grammar: Okay, sure, most hiring managers and human resources can barely compose a three word email without butchering the English language. Guess what? I was an English major and now it’s my turn to pick on all you people who made fun of me back in college. I regularly read letters with sentence fragments, grammatical errors and just plain old weird language. I once had a person apply for the “data enterer job” where she was qualified because she “maintenance of the intensive data base.” What? Where’s the verb? What’s an intensive data base? And isn’t “data base” really one word? Have multiple people look your resumé over before sending it out. Typos are inevitable, but not catching and fixing them makes it look like you don’t care. We all make misteaks…

Pad your resumé to make it appear more full: If you’re new in the work world I’m okay with that. List some classes you took or change spacing a little bit. List the relevant things that you can, be honest, but don’t just chuck in random bullet points of responsibility. I once had a person who listed three jobs and each of the three jobs listed “Attended meetings,” as a responsibility. I don’t consider that a job responsibility any more than “sat in chair” or “drove to work each day.”

Make your resumé longer than two pages: I don’t care if you’ve had more jobs than Dick Clark and Ryan Seacrest combined, your resumé shouldn’t be longer than two pages simply because I don’t have the time or the energy to read a four page resume and try to pick out the important things. I have a two foot stack of other resumés to get through and I probably have one day to do it. A resumé is supposed to show relevant highlights, not everything you’ve ever done to make a buck since grade school.

Use strange fonts, paper or formatting: Please, consider the fact that not everyone likes to read pages of 8 point italicized Script MT Bold text. Consider the fact that most companies use some sort of scanning software that needs clear text and consider the fact that many hiring managers are old farts with bad eyes. I guarantee you won’t impress anyone with clever use of fonts or tabs or shading or highlighting or nice parchment-like paper. Every fourth grader in the nation knows how to change fonts by now. And I’ve never heard someone scream out, “Let’s hire this guy!! He can type on PARCHMENT!!” You know what I think when I see a resumé that isn’t on plain white paper and with a readable font? I think “Oh, that’s eye-catching… and I can’t read it and the person is clearly trying to hide something or has spent too much time hanging around Ren Faires.”

You get the idea. Here’s a good rule of thumb for sending in resumes and cover letters for jobs: Don’t be Stupid.

Sure, every company does hiring a different way and what works for one company may not work for another. But hiring managers are all human (well, maybe not in law offices) and we all pretty much want the same thing: someone who can do the job, who won’t annoy us and who may make our dull, miserable lives a little more enjoyable.

Remember: hiring managers are people, too. If you screw up your resume or cover letter, don’t worry about it too much. It’s not like we’re going to post all your stupid mistakes in some blog and spread it all over the internet or anything…

Technorati Tags: resume, hiring, cover letter, job interview, get a job, job application, resumé, Ren Faire

11 Comments » | Email Link