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From: "Bill Horne" <bill at horne.net> Date: Sun, 17 Nov 2002 08:55:27 -0500 The biggest problem with text-formatted emails is that you can't predict what font the recipient will use to read them. Since it's common for both OE and Messenger to use Proportional fonts for text emails, the work of lining things up is often lost at the receiving end. HTML, although a bandwidth hog and inappropriate for posts to a reflector, is nonetheless useful for assuring that a message is seen as the sender intended, and I use it for all my email r)B?sum? submissions. As a software development hiring manager, I detest HTML-formatted email, whether for resumes or any other purpose. For one, I use a purely text-based mail reader that doesn't do HTML (and I don't want an HTML-enabled mail reader that makes me susceptible to every webbug a spammer chooses to embed). Secondly, even with HTML you're not really guaranteed that the result will match your intent; Mozilla and Netscape 4 render things quite differently, and I have no idea what IE and Opera do. If you send PDF the recipient will get your exact intent, but that has other problems (harder to search, for example). Word causes lots of problems (we're decidedly *not* a Microsoft shop, and while OpenOffice or StarOffice works, it's somewhat of a nuisance). I'm used to getting text-formatted resumes that are mangled by various outbound mailers (usually stupid clients that decide to insert line breaks where they think they should be). That doesn't bother me; it's not hard to reformat them so that I get the desired information. If you're worrying about losing fancy column formatting, you're worrying about the wrong thing. I'm not impressed by your skill at formatting your resume; I want to find the information I'm looking for (evidence that you can do what I need done) without having to look too hard. In other words, keep it concise, hit the highlights (these days you do need to use buzzwords, unfortunately), and make it ask the questions you want to answer. That last point is motivated by interview technique. The most common interviewing methodology that's pushed these days is called "behavioral" or "behavior-based" interviewing. It's a somewhat high-falutin' name for a very straightforward concept, which is based on the theory that the best predictor of how someone will do in the future is to examine how they've done in the same situation in the past. The basic behavioral question is of the form "Tell me about a situation in which you did X". X might be just about anything; "wrote a program from scratch with weak requirements" is one possible example. The interviewer then follows up with increasingly detailed questions about that situation. If your resume gives tantalizing glimpses of what you want to show, without answering the questions outright, it helps steer the discussion. This kind of question is very hard to fake one's way through; the interviewee doesn't know exactly what's going to be asked, so it's hard to prepare a lot of fake experiences. It's also hard to keep it going through the drill-down; a faked experience is likely to collapse under its own weight. At the same time, a strong candidate who's a poor interviewer (which typically means someone who isn't terribly spontaneous) will usually find it easier to remember specific experiences and remember how he or she handled them, with only light guidance from the interviewer to keep it flowing in the desired direction. A lot of interviewers ask about hypothetical scenarios ("what would you do if this were to happen") or gimmick questions ("if you were a plant, what would you be and why"). The former question doesn't prove anything other than someone's good at memorizing things; it doesn't say how well someone will recognize a situation developing or how they really will react under pressure. It's also hard for someone who's good, but not very spontaneous, to answer. Determining how someone actually *did* behave when that kind of situation *did* happen is much more useful. That's probably true even if real-time reaction is important for the job. As for gimmick questions, the less said the better. Usually the interviewer has a specific answer in mind, and since the question has nothing to do with the job, the desired answer won't either. If you really want to determine how the candidate will handle tough questioning from the customer (for a sales position, for example), where behavioral interviewing might not work as well (in that case, it might be easier to pick an example in which the customer pressure wasn't really that bad), do something like ask the candidate to "sell" you a product that he's sold before, and raise the nastiest objections you can. That's more of a real-life scenario. Back to resume formatting: obviously, if you're applying for some kind of graphic design position (web designer, even technical writer) the considerations are very different; in that case the appearance really does matter. -- Robert Krawitz <rlk at alum.mit.edu> Tall Clubs International -- http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2 Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf at uunet.uu.net Project lead for Gimp Print -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works." --Eric Crampton
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