Magic Pot of Jobs

Looks like the SHRMers are getting to witness the crappiest weather DC has had in a while- 5 inches of rain since Friday!

Much like mail carriers, third-party recruiters don’t get much of a break when the weather is crappy and has screwed up transportation around town. We’re expected to report as normal. After all, someone has to be at the office to make phone calls like these:

“Hi, this is Tiffany from [MISF]. We’ve got a talent scheduled to be out there with you today in your creative department… Yeah, Joe will be a little late this morning. He lives in a basement apartment… yep, it flooded last night. So as soon as he’s done moving all his stuff up off the floor, he’ll be in. Thanks!”

Be sure to take an umbrella to the conference today. Oh, and I’ll buy the first round for anyone who manages to score me a Yahoo! Hotjobs Captain Candidate. My boss has a Super Recruiter and I must continue the collection, but our Hotjobs account is national, so our action figure will be at HQ somewhere… (Why yes, I did somehow get on Yahoo! Hotjobs’ PR list, why do you ask?)

Ben Gotkin provides a little local flava to people attending the SHRM conference in DC this weekend. Excellent choices, Ben.

Might I also engage in a bit of shameless plugging and recommend that you check out Metroblogging DC for some other local choices for your time here in our nation’s capital.

Great article today about the latest fad in Japan- the lunchtime powernap.

I am a big believer in taking 15-20 minutes to close your eyes and recharge. It seems to me that if you have to give up 15 minutes of productivity to be alert for the rest of the afternoon, rather than muscling through the day exhausted and with poor concentration, you’ll get much better results.

This is a trend we need here in the US.

I made this offer over at Recruiting.com already, but I thought I’d mention it here as well:

The SHRM conference is happening here in DC next week, just a very short Metro ride from my office. I don’t plan to attend except to possibly wander the exhibit hall a bit, but would love to have beverages/swap war stories with any MPOJ readers who might be attending.

And as anyone who has read Keith Ferazzi’s excellent Never Eat Alone knows, the real reason to go to a conference isn’t for the seminars, it’s for the networking.

Just a quick tip- this isn’t a dealbreaker issue or anything, but it’s a little thing that will make you look more prepared and generally together:

When you’re going to meet with someone about a job, and especially when you’re just walking in, unannounced, to a placement office and interrupting someone’s day, be sure to have the folder containing your resume in your hand. Don’t stand around digging through your giant bag with the zipper and clip closures and multiple pockets for a few minutes to fish it out while the person you’re speaking with stands there, waiting.

Ilya Cantor is appropriately horrified at CNN or Careerbuilder’s suggestion that you write your resume in an hour.

Dear heavens, please save us from the waves of people who have no idea how to write a resume who will smear some stuff down on paper and send it off, because CNN says so.

I do think that people overthink their resumes, and I do think that people spend far too much time worrying over stupid things like how many pages it is, but honestly… I see scads of resumes every week that were clearly not thought out at all, and I shudder to think at how many more I might get because of irresponsible advice like this.

Let me give you some better advice: Because resume writing is so fraught with emotional issues- not knowing how to sell yourself properly, stress about being jobless, questions of professional self-worth- it’s easy to get writer’s block. Resist the urge to agonize every sentence as you write it

Spend one hour writing your first draft. Take an hour, write down everything you can think of for every job you want to put on your resume, ideally in some semblance of an organized fashion. Don’t think, just write. If you don’t like it, you can fix it later. Then polish, polish, polish. The key is to push past all the pressures preventing you from being able to put words on a page, because once you actually see it there, you’ll calm down a bit and be able to think about it.

One of the best things about working in pairs at my job is…

When I get back from a week’s vacation, I still have those 700 emails in my inbox, BUT a large portion of them are responses from Stephanie, ably handling the situations such that NOTHING piled up while I was gone. Such a nice way to ease into the post-vacation grind.

Sure, less sales and recruiting got done last week than would have gotten done if we had both been there (this really is a big enough job for two people), but all our in-progress and time-sensitive stuff was moved along appropriately and I didn’t have a big pile of “URGENT URGENT!” when I got here this morning.

An email from a friend-of-a-friend was passed on to me this morning, and I thought I’d share it, and the advice I gave, with you. I’ve covered a lot of this at various times here at the Magic Pot, but it bears repeating:

I want to make an ultrapimp resume. I’m talking about the kinda thing that makes the reader pee their pants, if you know what I mean. I want it to be so pimp that people will not only want to hire me, but they will want to sleep with me too. Sleep with me naked, that is.

Resumes are boring as hell. They make me sleepy.

There is One, and Only One thing that makes a resume interesting- it has to convey that the skills you have are exactly the skills the employer needs. If it doesn’t, there is nothing that will earn your resume a second glance. Nothing. And a resume alone doesn’t make people want to hire you- it makes them want to interview you.

So…

- Customize your resume for EACH AND EVERY job you apply for. I know this is a lot of work, but suck it up because this is your career we’re talking about here.

- When the position comes with a moderately detailed job description, mirror the language of that description in the resume.

- Assume that the HR person screening your resume isn’t even close to an expert in what you do. Yes, ultimately you’re trying to interest the hiring manager in your resume, and you’d hope that person understands your field, but 9 times out of 10, your resume goes through HR first, so when in doubt, SPELL IT OUT so that the HR person understands that your resume is worth passing on to the manager.

- And don’t bitch that the HR people don’t understand what you do. That’s not their job- they can’t possibly be experts in everything.

- Don’t think of your resume as simply a list of skills and accomplishments, though these are certainly important. No one wakes up one day and says, “Hey, I’ve got all this extra money in the budget… I’ll hire someone new!” There’s always a problem to be solved- too much work for too few people, a lack of particular expertise on the existing team, whatever. Think of yourself as a solution to the particular problem and write your resume with that in mind.

Eluta is a great resource for finding jobs in Canada, in places like Toronto and Montreal.

Stephanie will be ably stirring the pot o’ jobs on her own this week, since yours truly will be honeymooning and the only recruiting I intend to do involves finding people to bring me fruity drinks with little umbrellas in them.

But before I go, a few links for you to chew on:

Why They Hate Recruiting - Dave Lefkow suggests that recruiting no longer be an HR function.

Develop a Who’s Who List of Outside Talent - How to develop a deep database of great candidates and referral sources.

Too Many Jobs, Too Few People - the Washington Business Journal finally catches up to what Stephanie and I have been noticing for months. Via Ben Gotkin.

Before Scoring that Job, You’d Better Ace the Test - The increasing use of personality tests in hiring decisions. If I weren’t about to go to our rehearsal dinner, there would be a long rant on this topic. The nutshell version: THESE TESTS ARE A BIG WASTE OF MONEY.

“Thank you for your response. I’m sure that you are correct, and that your failure to get a job through an agency for four months was due to deficiency on the part of all the agencies you visited. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the complete lack of professionalism or English skills displayed in your written correspondence, or the amateurishness of your design portfolio. Good luck in your job search.”

“Oh, there’s an opening for a recruiter in my office… just not for you.”

“I don’t need all four versions of your resume. One will suffice to clog up my inbox, thank you.”

“I understand that you really need this job. I do. But calling me every half hour to see if I’ve heard anything isn’t going to get the client to make a decision faster. It’s just going to earn you a snarky nickname among my coworkers.”

“If your wife is the one who needs a job, why did you call me?”