further random questions from the newly-unemployed

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

On Sunday 17 November 2002 11:16 am, Derek Martin wrote:
> At some point hitherto, Robert L Krawitz hath spake thusly:
> > A lot of companies feed resumes through a search engine to do
> > matching.  That's a lot easier to do with text than with Word.
>
> Not really so.  Many companies who use word extensively have macros
> that do the searching for them.  For this reason, many companies
> insist upon resumes in word format.  This causes me no end of
> annoyance.

We were talking about cover letters, not resumes.  Different animal.

Of course my resume attachment is in MSWord, but my cover letter also points 
to where on my website they can get the most recent format in MSWord, Text, 
and HTML, which I always keep in sync.  And I know they're in sync because I 
use version numbers on my resume.  The resume itself is usually read in a 
second step, and maybe even printed out for later perusal.  But only if the 
cover letter convinces them to do so.

Cover letters, on the other hand, need to be read in an email program, and you 
need to sell yourself switfly and definitively as being different from all 
the rest.  I am not going to trust that they are using an HTML-rendering 
email program that will make the same decisions I would about absolute font, 
font size, line thicknesses, and even after all that, hope they have their 
browser opened up wide enough that the text will look good and not seven 
screens long.

Even the most rudimentary email programs will wrap incoming text in an 
appealimg matter.  With the right placement of \n, \t, and \s, I can bve 
pretty sure that a cover letter with a multilevel bullet list is going to 
look good on the recipient's screen.

SIDEBAR:
I'm not sure that the 70% of the list members that are employed are enjoying 
this discussion.  If this is annoying anyone, let us know.

Either way, I am going to be starting a mailing list for high-tech unemployed 
people in the area after the whole SDExpo/ESC thing is done next week.  I'll 
post the address with a blurb about it here.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
DDDD   David Kramer         david at thekramers.net       http://thekramers.net
DK KD  
DKK D  You don't usually hear "hydraulics" and "simplicity" 
DK KD  in the same sentence.
DDDD                                             Cathy Rogers, Junkyard Wars