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Me Myself & Riggins

Tag Archives: job application

The F Word

10 Tuesday Jun 2014

Posted by wendynewell in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

arial, calibri, comic sans, cover letter, employement, font, format, job, job application, job search, recruiting, resume, work

photo 3 (11)Format Format and Format.  Man it makes me crazy.  I just spent 3 hours today re-formating my resume.  Recently one of my ex-employees sent me his resume.  I didn’t really read it I just glanced over it and the only thing I thought was, “wow my resume makes me look old.”  His was just so smartly formatted that I couldn’t help but be impressed.  I’m one of those people who think resume format is BS.  I never cared about it when I was a hiring manager.  As long as it wasn’t horrific I was good with anything.  I did not hire you (or not) based on what font you use or if you found a way to paraphrase your life goal and objective in one to three sentences at the top.  I’m doing recruiting for a company right now and the people I am looking at come to me via one or more of the popular job sites.  I rarely look at the resume and if I do it is only because the applicant has annoyed me and hasn’t filled out their phone number on the job site itself.  I’m usually just looking at the words on the resume that have been all pushed up into a paragraph of zero formatting when the site spits out what it sees. photo 4 (8) Font size, formatting, etc play zero roll in my calling, talking to, interviewing and/or hiring you.  It’s the content on your resume that is important to me.

I’ve been hesitant to reformat my resume …. again … it’s a constant and ongoing process for one reason … you can never make all the people happy all the time.  It’s just not possible.  For every person you show me that doesn’t like something on how my resume is styled I’ll show you a person who loves it.  I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting an HR person who didn’t have a strongly held opinion one way or another and unless you have some superhuman mind reading skill you aren’t going to know what each person wants.  You have no choice but to put together something that makes you happy and hope that whoever sees it is logical enough to realize using Arial vs. Tahoma doesn’t mean you are incapable of doing whatever job they are hiring for.  For photo 2 (14)the record my new format uses Trebuchet MS.  I read somewhere that Trebuchet MS is a clean font that allows you to stand out since it isn’t used as often as other fonts.  Of course in the same article I read that one HR woman prefers Arial over all other, while another is fond of Calibri because, apparently, studies have shown it shows confidence.  Are you kidding me?????  Am I truly being hired or not based on the font I choose for my resume?  Do people really have strong opinions on this.  As long as you don’t use Comic Sans I think you are a-ok.

Another thing that I would never read and was a giant waste of time for anyone that applied for a job through me was a cover letter.  I get it.  You want the job.  I don’t need to read a paragraph of how great you are followed by a paragraph of generic ass kissing.  I’ve got your resume in front of me.  I’ll figure it out … thanks.  AND YET MANY companies require a cover letter while many articles suggest without it you will be passed over completely by most.

photo 1 (13)Well …. I have my new formatted resume ready.  It actually is very reminiscent of a resume a used 2 years ago.  It’s like I’ve come full circle while following different people’s advice.  I’ll take a look at my cover letters and see what I can do to punch them up then I’ll send some off and let you know if it has made any difference at all.

The other day I received an email from a company I had applied to letting me know that I had attached an excel sheet vs. my resume when I applied for an open job there.  That means a random old call sheet on my computer has gotten more response than my actual resume has in the past 12 months.  Perhaps I should just start using it.

(Pictures of cute dogs from our hikes over the past few days because pictures of resumes are even more boring than discussion of preferred fonts.)

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My Hatred of the Job Hunt Joke

08 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by wendynewell in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

career, dogpark, employment, HR, job, job application, Morgan, online, Riggins, sales

If you read my blog regularly you know I took a leap earlier this year and quit my job without having another one in place.  Although I’m madly in love with not working every day and I adore babysitting dogs when I can, mama’s gotta pay the bills.  Unless Riggins and I want to be on the street with a cardboard sign I need to dedicate part of my life to finding a new job.  This task is made harder by my wanting to take a different career path and move out of pure sales.  If I wanted to just have a job I could have easily gotten one that was just like the last, and the one before that, and the one before that.  I’m sure I would be successful and make good money, just like before, but I can’t guarantee I would be happy and I’m really into trying to be happy.

You know what really harshes my happy?  Job hunting online.  Let’s bypass networking in person and all that and just concentrate on how ridiculous electronic job hunting is.  Everyday I check three specific job listing sites to see what is new and if anything looks like a good match to me.  Then I move on to a list of companies and I check their individual web sites for new openings.  I rotate which companies I check each day and end up looking at all at least once a week.

Now let’s ignore that these resumes are going to a computer or someone in HR that simply scans for keywords and specific past titles.  If you don’t make the buzz word cut you won’t be hearing from them no matter how good you are.  That isn’t even my issue today.  Today my main issue is that applying online is a joke.  Why you ask?  Well I’ll be happy to tell you.  It’s OBVIOUS that most companies don’t care about any resumes that come in online.  They are looking at promotions from within and/or word of mouth from those they know.  They post the job to the general public because … well … they kinda have to.  Makes me want to sob into my 1/2 full glass of Cabernet.

How do I know this?  Well besides common sense let me just go over some of the things I’ve dealt with today while trying to apply to jobs online:

* A major consumer products company career website just isn’t working.  This isn’t something out of the ordinary.  It rarely works.  I’ve emailed their hr dept. about it and sent my resume directly to them in the past.  The site still rarely works.

* A major movie studio web site that surprisingly works a majority of the time, didn’t work well today.  I wanted to apply to 2 jobs and each one I had to restart the entire process 3 times for it to fully submit.  The site just stopped responding part way through the very very long questionnaire.

* Another major studio web site has a search option that just doesn’t work.  On the front page it shows most recent job openings, many of which are located in LA.  When you do a search for jobs in CA you get a message saying there are none.  Doesn’t make sense to me either.

* This didn’t happen today but another example. … On LinkedIn a non-profit company had a really interesting job listed.  To apply it linked you to their site.  Where THERE WAS NO PLACE TO FIND ANYTHING ABOUT THEIR OPEN POSITION(S).  I emailed them and was told to go to their site.  Someone didn’t read my entire email … did they?  So I responded to say that I had done that, that I still was unable to locate it, and requested additional help.  They told me the link was at the top of the page.  It wasn’t.  I’m not a moron.  I know my way around a website.  It wasn’t there.  Heaven forbid they just give me the direct link.  I gave up.  I’m sure that was their goal in the first place.

* I attempted to apply to a position at another entertainment studio today.  The listing stated that you MUST include a cover letter with your resume.  You could only send your resume electronically through their complicated online system.  That system did not allow you to include cover letters.  So there you go.  Set up to fail from the start.  I still turned in my application without the cover letter.  Well at least I think I did.  That was an hour or so ago and the website still says it’s thinking, so who knows if it was processed or not.

Come on people.  I know it’s a waste of time and you know it’s a waste of time but can we please just pretend for my sanity?  At least just a little?  Sigh … I’m going to go take a bath with the chamomile epson salts I bought from Target this weekend.  That should bring my blood pressure down a bit … maybe.

On a happier note — Pictures of Riggins and Morgan playing at the dog park this weekend:photo

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