The Job Search: Day One, Again
I made the mistake of thinking a job prospect was a “Sure Thing” and as a result, during the 3 week process, I relaxed my efforts on the search process. I’ll get in to why this was bad later on.
In the meantime I thought it might be useful to pen some advice and what insight I have into the process in a series of daily(ish) pieces. I may end up posting multiple a day, but I’m going to try and resist the temptation. My hope is that other people will at least gain some utility out of this.
Over time I will probably add formatting and updates directly to these posts.
Feel free to drop a comment if you found something useful or inaccurate.
Jumping right in…
This being the first day back at it, today I went through my resume, looking for edits, imperfections and other tweaks. I found a bunch.
A couple words about resumes:
Your resume is the top priority. It needs to be in shape, solid, accurate and compelling. I’m not going to talk about content here. People have that covered elsewhere. Plus, I’m not all that confident I’ve nailed it well enough to be telling other people how to do it.
What I AM going to talk about here is formatting.
First, create it in Microsoft Word. This will save you an incredible amount of headache. It’s the format people want, almost exclusively. You can use something like OpenOffice, which will save as MSWord. But be SURE to view it in Word to make sure all the formatting translates exactly as you expect. You don’t want people to enthusiastically pull up your resume then wince as the bulleting is wonky.
Yes aesthetics matters. It should be neat, clean, and consistent. BUT it should not WOW people with watermark images, clever (or ‘cute’) bullet icons, horizontal rule section delimiters, borders, or multiple fonts. None of it. Unless you’re a graphic designer, the design isn’t something that should even be seen. People should look at your resume and see what it says, not what color it is.
Now that you have your Microsoft Word resume… Create a “plain text” one. In Word, use “save as” to save your resume as “TextResume.txt” using the “plain text” format. (A word of advice here, if you’re original word resume filename is “resume.doc” do NOT save the plain text version as just “resume.txt.” I promise you WILL get them confused and send the wrong one. Just add “Text” to the beginning of the filename and you’ll never have to wonder. While the Word version will always be the definitive edition, you’re going to need the plain text version.
Reload the text version and clean it up. Put blank lines in where other formatting tricks were being used in word. Align the dates and headings. It’s monkeywork, but it’s easy. Blur your eyes a bit and see what looks out of place then fix it. Rince, repeat.
Now you’re ready to go.
As I see it the first task is to become available.
You’re going to have to slog through job recs, recruiters and help wanted ads. But it’s imperative that you are as visible as you can be while you do this. Don’t forget that your future employer is actively looking for you as well. Make it as easy for him to find you as you can.
So my first order of business is posting my resume on various online job sites. It’s the fastest way to get the massive employee search machines of the world working for you.
As a programmer I’ve started off with: monster.com, hotjobs.com, dice.com and a couple others. There are great reviews of these sites that are pretty easy to find. Google is your friend. A simple search for “job search sites” will turn up a gold mine.
Aside: I don’t like recruiters having my real email address, so I don’t give it out. Fortunately services like gmail allow you to create more email addresses than you can shake a stick at. So I’ve created one just for job searching. It’s innocuously named and used only for that purpose. This is important, you don’t want prospective employers responding to “furryleatherlovemuffin@xtreemfetish.com”
So you have your pair of resumes and your email account. Time to start filling out a mind-numbing number of web forms.
Which is where I’ll pick up next time.