It depends. You certainly have power if you are already employed, or if you have relatively certain employment options. You shouldn't have to jump through hoops for another job, no matter how attractive, if you already have a good job. You should tell the prospective employer, hey, I'm interested, but I'm also happy, and in-demand, so don't waste my time.

This is true... It's also one of the really tough catch-22s for unemployed applicants.

It has come up with candidates I've interviewed - with the HR rep and my own boss casting doubt on certain candidates who applied without already being employed.

In one case, I actually was denied the opportunity to interview a candidate I really liked on paper because he had been jobless for 18 months (at least, the gap between his most recent job and 'now' was 18 months). I thought that was asinine - I pointed out that it was a tough job market, he might have gotten a good severance package and just spent a year backpacking, or maybe he had non-compete severance and had simply worked at a job that was wholly immaterial to the current application, but it was a fight I lost anyway.

I've received compliments on my cover letters in several different interviews. When I've had to write them, I always make an effort to address the specifics of the job in question while avoiding jargon and buzzwords as much as possible. Essentially, I try to come across as a human being, which seems to be rare enough that interviewers seem to notice and appreciate it.

Of course, I've lost out on the jobs more often than not . . . .

I'd imagine that the chances of a cover letter being read decrease with the number of applicants. I never read them when reviewing candidates, and tend to focus mostly on relevant work experience.

I didn't post on this thread for a few days... because I have been hip deep in interviewing job applicants.

I am hiring programmers / web developers. I don't read cover letters. It wouldn't really matter if you wrote a specific one because the job description itself was too vague to let you demonstrate you unique snowflake compatibility with it.

It's actually quite hard to find experienced, up-to-date programmers in the Bay Area what with all the twitterers, apploids, googlists, and facebookdrones. Not to mention hordes of start ups and contract workers. I actually got a recruit pitch sitting on the caltrain dicking around with some new Javascript framework and the guy next to me looked over at my lap top and said "Are you a front end developer, do you want a job?". I replied "If I was a good one, I'd hire myself".

I did come up with a more or less impossible programming exercise to test candidates (well, to do in 4 hours) but it's not a brain dead one. So far the only one who got that far did OK. 2 more will take it by next wednesday.

Worst interview I ever had went like this:
I have been looking for a job in bioinformatics for about 6 months after I got laid off with 1/2 the rest of my division. I get a call from a guy at Tularik, a South SF company just bought by Amgen. He says he read my resume and would I come down to the office for an "informal chat". I say sure.

I get there at 9:00am and a flunky hands me a sheet of paper "Implement the following in Java" (I think it was Quicksort). I am actually not much of a java programmer, so I was pretty screwed at this point. They put me in a room with another candidate. After realize that my Java was not up to snuff, I say screw it and just do it in python (what I was most comfortable with). I spend several hours in this little basement hole hacking away. About halfway through, the other guy who is being interview stands up and says \"#### this" and walks out. I finish up, and go upstairs to meet the department manager.

And now the punch line: He says "I don't have any positions open right now, but I hope that with the merger I should get some more FTEs".

Needless to say, there was never a job for me to get.

I've always been in the Accounting & Finance end of things so at times when I've been hiring people I've looked at all kinds of stuff from Tax specialists to Treasurer-compatible functions.

The thing that really shows you how depressing the economy has become is the number of applicants I've seen who are so desperate they are just throwing darts at the board at this point. They aren't even remotely qualified to interview because they don't have the necessary technical background in Accounting or Finance. For example, lots of them are ex-real estate industry people whose careers got wiped out when that market went into the wood chipper.

Are others seeing a similar thing in other industries? I'm guessing if you're looking to hire engineers or programmers or whatever you would of course be looking for someone with expertise in that particular field - are you instead getting inundated with resumes from people with no experience whatsoever in your industry? I wonder sometimes if applicants really realize how much technical knowledge goes into various fields? They often act completely clueless about this...

Since resumes are being discussed here a little bit and I know there are lawyers about I have a question. I've written exactly one resume and managed to get every other job I've had entirely through being in the right place at the right time and having the guts to ask about jobs.

The one time I wrote a resume I went to the people at the law school for help. She asked me about my work history and I told her I really didn't have one. She asked if I had any special skills, I said I was kind of a writer. She asked what I'd written and I told her I'd recently sold a novel, she told me to leave it off. I said I'd once written an article that was picked up by a local newspaper, she said leave it off. I told her that was it, she asked what I did in college. I told her I played a little baseball she told me to put that.

I got the job because knew the guy who was hiring and it was only a clerkship for a couple months anyway. He told me that I had the worst resume he'd seen and that I was lucky he knew I was a smart guy or he'd never have considered me. I told him what had happened and he asked to see my original resume, and declared it much better. He told me that universally law schools were awful at helping students find employment and that I'd be better of learning to write a resume from a book.

Now to my question, have you law professionals found the same to be true for you?

The one time I wrote a resume I went to the people at the law school for help. She asked me about my work history and I told her I really didn't have one. She asked if I had any special skills, I said I was kind of a writer. She asked what I'd written and I told her I'd recently sold a novel, she told me to leave it off. I said I'd once written an article that was picked up by a local newspaper, she said leave it off. I told her that was it, she asked what I did in college. I told her I played a little baseball she told me to put that.

Based on this description, your resume looked like this:

BIGGLOU115

EXPERIENCE:

I played a little baseball in college

I agree with your friend, that's a pretty terrible resume.

I agree with your friend, that's a pretty terrible resume.

Well that's my point. I did exactly what the lady who get's paid to look over our resumes said to do, and I left a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor. All a clerk does is research and write, and I had experience that could prove pertinent to that. Like I said, the guy liked the unedited version.

Seems like everybody has a horror story about law school career services like that one, I'm just curious if the law types around here are the same way.

But for Smith to leave me a voicemail and try and act like it was MY error- that just compounded the obnoxiousness.

It was your fault, for applying for a job in the matrix.

I don't tailor my cover letter to the job I'm seeking. I skip the cover letter, and tailor my resume to the job. I give more detail on responsibilities that have direct bearing to the job requirements.

When I'm hiring - which I am now - I have an HR recruiter pre-screening candidates. It takes some time to "train" them on what is a good candidate vs. a bad one, but once they know that, I start getting mostly just the good ones, and avoid having to look through 165 resumes (most of which are crap). The thing is, to an HR recruiter a cover letter is not very enlightening if they want to filter the wheat from the chaff for my positions. A good cover letter is essentially worthless.

The thing that really shows you how depressing the economy has become is the number of applicants I've seen who are so desperate they are just throwing darts at the board at this point. They aren't even remotely qualified to interview because they don't have the necessary technical background in Accounting or Finance. For example, lots of them are ex-real estate industry people whose careers got wiped out when that market went into the wood chipper.

I work in real estate, and a large slice of our recent applicants (last couple of years, anyway) have been middle-aged former engineers and other sorts of technical people, who got downsized because they had enough seniority to be expensive.

I told her I'd recently sold a novel, she told me to leave it off. I said I'd once written an article that was picked up by a local newspaper, she said leave it off

I just did a webinar on resume writing in my industry (legal-related) and the speaker specifically said to put that stuff on.

I'm in software development and the times I've been looking for work, I've just used a short, plain text resume, with a focus on employment history and skills, with minimal customization for each potential job (generally most of the somewhat similar anyway) and it has always worked just fine. I usually don't include a cover letter unless its specifically asked for. I think a lot of people overdo their resumes/cover letters, people usually just want to know if you have the experience and skill to do the job or not. In other fields something more puffed up might work better, but it seems like that often requires just adding a bunch of nonsense and probably lying (do I really need act like I'm super excited to potentially work at some software company I've never heard of or some insurance company that needs their old crappy system updated, I think most people know that isn't true) and its often a waste of time.

The most insulting interview I've had involved someone bringing me in, asking me how I'd implement some website and online shop for his client (not really my expertise), so I draw out some vague high level design and then he asks if I'd be willing to do whole project myself for "a case of beer" instead of actual real money.

I draw out some vague high level design and then he asks if I'd be willing to do whole project myself for "a case of beer" instead of actual real money.

Imported or domestic?

I just did a webinar on resume writing in my industry (legal-related) and the speaker specifically said to put that stuff on.

I was just looking through the resume book at a top business school, in order to steal the formatting. Every single kid had a very very silly section at the bottom, the "interests" or "skills" section. These are kids competing for the 150k jobs at McKinsey or wherever, the type of kids that have already founded and sold companies and done some crazy ####, and their excellent school apparently instructs them to advertise their interest in Wiffleball or visiting Presidential libraries or hiking the Appalachian Trail or rescuing guinea pigs or whatever.

When sending out resumes, what format do ya'll use? Up until a few months ago I'd just send the Word document of my resume. A co-worker told me he sends out resumes as a PDF or scanned JPEG (I guess it's worked for him because he recently got a better position in another company). So since then I've been doing the PDF/JPEG. Does it really matter?

They used to tell us (in high school, late 80s) to keep resumes to 1 page. Inone the age of the pdf there is no need, but noone is going to read page 4.

One thing that surprised me about myself reading resumes is that i seemed to overrate or read closer the ones who used a little color (like a header or banner). Just caught the eye, i guess


And as for recession -- not for software engineers, particularly front end guys. I have to import them. Everyone needs websites/apps etc.

zenbitz, if you ever have a position open with great salary and benefits that requires absolutely no computer abilities, I'm your man!

[165] Plain text, and I put an HTML version on the internet.

You can pretty much be assured that that resume is going to go into an HR app somewhere and be shown on a web page. They'll just scrape the text out of Word or a PDF and put it into their app.

Well, larger companies anyway. And I'm a tech guy, so places that don't like plain text seem weird to me. But for a smaller place, where a human might read it, I'd go with plain text, a PDF, or a shared Google Docs document.

Do employers tend to not want to hire out of towners? Do they usually pick up the expense if they fly you in?

They will pick it up, but if you want to impress someone with how eager you are to move, fly yourself in. That helped me land a job here, where many employers are rightfully wary of whether Mainlanders really are going to uproot themselves to come into what, for most, will be a very different culture and environment, far from friends and family.

It occurs to me that if this young woman had read this thread then she might have gotten the job with the Padres. Some would call this irony, but they'd be wrong.

A good cover letter is essentially worthless when hiring robot drones.