Friday, June 27, 2008

Hey, Why Don't You Get a Job?

There's some comfort in blissful ignorance. Never knowing what's in store or what's down the road and having blind joy and excitement for the time to come is characteristic of a special kind of person. There's an old demotivational poster just for them.

"There is no greater joy than soaring high on the wings of your dreams, except maybe the joy of watching a dreamer who has nowhere to land but in the ocean of reality."

I understand the hope, the dream, the idealistic tendency to feel prepared, or the fake it till you make it mentality. But at some point, you have to also be realistic. And when all else fails, you have to at least try.

Diego is a bright guy. He's not the traditional loser we generally refer to on this site in that he's definitely intelligent. Perhaps that even exacerbates the disappointment we, as women, find with men who end up as loser-exes. Intelligence gives you such a leg-up and yet... I guess intellect isn't always followed by perfection, but the least we could ask for is proofreading.

Diego wanted to move to the big time. He wanted to leave his small college town and venture to the wide world of the big city, with big names, companies, and causes to boot. Being that I was already here, I was happy, even eager, to help. I have a few connections here and there, and know a few hiring managers, so I asked him to send me his resume.

Diego didn't have much experience to speak of. The trouble with having no experience in the field, in a town completely and utterly revolving around that exact field, tends to be that no one wants to hire you. When your star accomplishments out of undergrad were holding an office (not President) of one club, even though it was of considerable size, and two jobs as a waiter and a golf-course attendee... you're not turning heads easily. So I tried to help him improvise. Spice up the story, use descriptive verbs and emphasize the volunteer experience you have, right? Diego was by no means an idiot, and I had confidence he could handle anything one of these employers could throw at him if he could just get in front of them... but it would take some work.

Well, when I finally received the resume, it had a litany of problems. It was in different fonts, had misspelled words like February, switched tenses back and forth between present and past.... and just basically reeked of "do not hire me." To highlight the barrage of mistakes, I used Microsoft's nifty "Track Changes" tool. I corrected the spelling errors, rearranged bullet points, fine tuned the wording, and used a thesaurus for action verbs. After feeling like we had at least taken a step in the right direction, I returned the resume, with changes highlighted in red, to Diego. I wanted to ensure he saw where he'd made mistakes, and how to fix them and make his resume minimally acceptable.

I had really hoped my critiques had sunk in. What kind of message does it send your future employer if you can't read through something as important as your resume for mistakes? Let alone what do they think when you can't even stay in the right tense or mention "learning about the office environment" as one of your bullet points of what you did at an internship from high school....

The next day, he found a job he was interested in. Off went the resume to a prospective employer with my own email covertly attached in the "bcc" line, so as to prove he did actually send his resume and was moving forward on his own.

The first thing I noticed was the lack of a cover letter. You MUST introduce yourself and convey why you are not only interested in the job, but why they should be interested in you. This is especially critical when your resume lacks any substantive experience! There was but a sentence, urging the recruiter to review his resume and stating his intent to move upon the offer of a job. (On this note, you MUST say I will be there on this day at this time, may I meet with you or your hiring manager!!! You can't say I won't move unless I get hired by you because not only am I not a local, but I am unsure of whether or not I'm willing to take the leap unless you leap first.)

And perhaps I exaggerated... he had two sentences. The other offered an interview by either phone or email. Email, folks.

The last, and more heinous offense, was that the resume was still redlined. All the changes I had made, comments, misspelled words, crossed out words, rearrangements, etc... were all there highlighted on the screen for the potential hiring manager to see.

(Note: Picture not mine. Saw it online and it cracked me up. Fit well here. Visit www.CartoonStock.com for more hilarious ones!)

Needless to say, I was mortified. While I do not doubt that Diego is plenty intelligent and would make a good employee to someone in the DC area, I worried after seeing him make this mistake, and if I was doubting him, you know some office assistant was laughing her ass off and hanging that thing on the wall as the ideal of what not to do to get hired.

It was an honest mistake, to be sure. But let's get serious here. Any hiring manager would see that as a fatal flaw simply because you didn't properly prepare a document, nor do you show yourself to be adept at proofreading at first glance. You can't naively expect to be hired just because you're sweet and southern. Jobs up here look for demonstrated talent - and you have to show them to get them to see it, even if we know you have it.

Post-script: He improved his ability to submit resumes over time and got pretty good at them, along with cover letters. And, while Diego never got hired in Washington, he found employment at a local middle school coaching football.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.

Anonymous said...

You just know that resume is hanging on someone's wall of shame.

Anonymous said...

Those who can't teach, teach gym. Or coach football. Same thing.