[TriLUG] looking for resume writer/improver

[Jim Ray]

I vividly remember Mr. Tew at NC State career placement coaching
students 30 years ago on interview where interviewer asks interviewee to
describe this pencil. He said tell them to stick it up their @%#$.

Whether getting job or new customer, I've always had better luck getting
to know folks, landing the job and then sending the resume after the
fact to satisfy HR. Will be happy to discuss.

Our area has a very active IEEE section if you are interested in more
venues for networking:

http://www.ieee.org/enc

I helped sponsor a meeting a few months ago and had president of
engineering firm tap me on shoulder to provide managed services. Just by
virtue of getting involved as a volunteer to introduce guests and/or by
helping  to sponsor/plan/execute meeting, new business happened.

Regards,

Jim Ray, President
Neuse River Networks - ONE(tm) Plan to put IT maintenance behind the
scenes, after-hours and out of your way.

Tel: 919-838-1672 Cell: 919-606-1772 Skype: neusedotnet 
Web: http://www.neuserivernetworks.com Linkedin:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/neuse Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/neuseriver Twitter: http://twitter.com/neuse



-----Original Message-----
From: trilug-bounces at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-bounces at trilug.org] On
Behalf Of Peter Neilson
Sent: Monday, January 24, 2011 5:32 AM
To: trilug at trilug.org
Subject: Re: [TriLUG] looking for resume writer/improver

On 01/23/2011 09:47 PM, Maxwell Spangler wrote:
> On Sun, 2011-01-23 at 14:12 -0500, Chris Merrill wrote:
>
>> ... we hire engineers to do load testing for our customers, we 
>> specifically do NOT look for people with load-testing experience. 
>> Crazy, I know. Instead, we look for someone who brings other skills
and knowledge that we don't have...
>
> ... But, as Chris suggested, he sometimes likes to hire people with 
> other, complimentary skills.  So in this case, you might be out 
> because you are *too much of a fit* for the job...

Chris's ideas entirely match my experience when I first got into tech
writing. The manager who brought me in, a fellow science-fiction fan,
said that his preferred interview questions were, "Who is your favorite
science fiction author?" and "Please sing a song from a G&S operetta."

What was needed was bright people who could see the material from the
user's point of view. Too much knowledge of the products already in use
might provide "techy" tech writing that would be useless to naive users.

(This was back before the Mac, when intuitive systems didn't exist.)
Indeed, my own Unix experience, through which I was good at writing
classic 'man' pages, nearly sank me in my first few weeks. Our worst
tech writers, it turned out, were those who claimed the greatest
experience with technical stuff!

So almost the only way to get into our shop was to show up looking
naively for SOME OTHER JOB and get grabbed by our hungry writing
department before you escaped! Our best tech writers for naive audiences
were holders of PhDs in off-the-wall areas: French, English, Ancient
History, Drama, Theoretical Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry. The hard
part was getting HR to send them to us instead of out the door.

Now HR's resume-scanning is automated, and that kind of serendipity is
nearly impossible in any shop larger than about 30 people. It's almost
as if one needs two separate resumes, one to get through HR and a second
for HR to pass to the hiring manager. That'll never work, of course,
hence the development of techniques to bypass HR entirely. Or as one of
the large and famous companies in our area told me, "We understand you
spoke directly to so-and-so. This is to inform you that all applications
must come in through our HR department."
--
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