Bill's Tips For Job Search
Resume
- Don't use a functional resume if you can possibly avoid it.
Everyone wants chronological.
- If you want to change fields, try to avoid too much detail about
the field you're trying to get out of. My resume was previously
going on and on about EDA CAD, saying things that were incomprehensible
to anyone outside of that field (including the headhunters) resulting
in my getting hardly anything but EDA CAD interviews.
- Keep your resume down to 2 pages
- Things are substantially
complicated by the use of Word to do resumes, and the fact that Word is
an ugly, unreliable and shifting standard controlled by an evil empire,
and Word resumes will look different when viewed on a variety of
different platforms. But Microsoft Word is the gold
standard in resumes. It's what the headhunters want to deal
with. Some people like to publish their resume as a pdf, rtf file
or other format, headhunters don't like that. Many headhunters
want to edit / reformat your resume, at least to remove contact
information, and they can't do that with any format other than Word or
text. I've often showed up for interviews and found the manager
was reading a substantially reformatted version of my resume. I
never saw one that the headhunter had actually improved, but I figure
let the headhunter do it, a happy headhunter is a headhunter who is
more likely to find me a job. Also, the internet job boards are
usually only able to cope with text or Word formats, most of them deal
primarily with text format, so you have to have your resume available
both as a text and Word document. If you send multiple formats to
the headhunters, like a Word and a pdf file, they will use one (Word if
it's available, or text), forwarding that to the hiring managers, and
throw the others away.
- Don't just do your resume in Open Office or Wine on Linux and
start sending it out. I learned this one the hard way a few years
ago. Although Open Office and Wine are trying hard to emulate
Microsoft Word, for some reason, possibly legal, they aren't allowed to
use exactly the same fonts, so things don't line up exactly the same
way and your resume can look like a disaster (columns collapsing, pages
overflowing 5-10% followed by a page break) when the headhunter views
it using real Microsoft Word. Over a couple of months in 2002, I
sent
out many copies of a resume I had painstakingly done with Wine before
finding out it
looked absolutely horrible when the headhunters were viewing it with
true Microsoft Word.
- When you save your resume on Microsoft Word, don't save according
to an
old format. Saving to an old Word format was a good idea when new
Microsoft products could read old Microsoft formats, but now Microsoft
deliberately hobbles new versions of Word so they can't read files
created by old versions of Word (to force people to buy every release
that comes out).
- Just because your resume looks good on true Microsoft Word, don't
assume you're home free. View it with Open Office.
Often the different fonts will bite you then. Though basically
none of the headhunters will be using Linux to view your resume, they
will be forwarding it to managers and engineers, many of whom will be
Linux or Unix-based. Generally, I have found that the fonts on
Linux are
a little bigger than the ones on Windows, so a resume has to have about
5% empty space at the bottom of the page on Word to fit right on
Open Office.
- One thing a headhunter told me is to make sure that your contact
info appears on every page of a printout of your resume. Many
headhunters have a pile of unstapled printouts of resumes all over
their desk (I think I would use a stapler if I were in their position,
but we have to play the game their way) and the pages get mixed up and
they have trouble telling which page belongs to whose resume.
- Don't change your resume too often, when you overhaul it, spend
days on it. You have to examine it very carefully for typos,
typos will kill you. The spelling checkers don't understand the
computer jargon and acronyms, it's really easy to get
typos into your resume, and every time you make any change whatsoever,
you have to check it looks good from Windows, and that it looks good
from Open Office on Linux.
Job Boards
- The places to post your resume to get results seem to be
craigslist.org, Dice, Monster, Careerbuilder, and Hotjobs.
Craigslist seemed to be the most widely read.
- The main thing I have to offer is my extensive C/C++
background. Most job boards can't cope with a search for "C" and
return all job listings that contain words containing the letter "c",
so you have to look at lots of irrelevant jobs. Some object if
the search string contains a "+" character, perhaps thinking it's a
regular expression. Only Dice and
Careerbuilder were able to search effectively for "C" or "C++" jobs.
- Dice is particularly good in that you can narrow down your job
search to specific telephone area codes. No other job board that
I saw can do this.
- I was able to set up Dice and Careerbuilder to deliver to me,
every day, an email listing all the new jobs in C/C++ in certain
geographic areas that I was looking for. This was very efficient
in time usage.
- A lot of robots scan job boards to harvest email addresses to
spam with really stupid offers for work at home schemes, "resume
blaster" services, and invitations to visit obscure job boards
that don't really have any worthwhile jobs on them. When you
start a job search, create a new email address that is forwarded to
your regular email address. When you finish your job search,
forward that email address into oblivion so your real email address
will be unspammed by these parties in the future. In my text
resume, I put spaces between every char of the email address to make it
harder for the robots to harvest.
Emacs
- If you are an emacs user,
at the start of your job search, turn off your soft keys and get
proficient at using the editor without them. It is quite likely
that, during a job interview, you will be asked to write some code to
solve a problem, and it is also quite likely that it won't be feasible
to get your softkeys.
Interviews
- Always eat a big breakfast before interviews. You may need
the
energy, and you can't be sure what sort of lunch opportunity you're
going to have. If you're in a strange town, the "Big Breakfast"
at MacDonald's will do just fine.
- Usually, they ask you if you would like a coke or something
between each person you talk to. Always go for the coke so you'll
be as awake as possible. Bring change to pay in case it's a
vending machine. When I was interviewing at Amazon in Seattle,
they didn't
have a coke machine in the building, and at the end of the day I was
getting exhausted and stumbled on this unbelievably basic question,
something
everybody learns in college, which I think cost me the job.
- Always bring several copies of your resume with you. Often
you show up and the engineer interviewing you has either a text version
of your resume (which in my case is much harder to read than the Word
version) or a horribly mangled version the headhunter has forwarded to
him. It's good to be able to pull out a nicer resume and say
"read this" and when I've done that they've always agreed that what I
gave them was more usable than the headhunter's version. Plus it
will have your contact info on it.