Someone commenting in an Ask a Manager thread linked to this article that purports itself to give readers four clever ways to get the attention of recruiters and hiring managers during the holiday season.
In brief their suggestions are:
write a “year in review” e-mail to highlight things you’ve accomplished this year
record a video that tells them why you’re excited about the role they’re looking to fill and send them that
get a few people to say nice things about you and why you’re the ideal candidate for the job, and e-mail them the quotes
send them a holiday e-card
Now, I’m not going to lie to you, I’m not a job seeker and only minimally involved in hiring new people, and my reaction to all of these suggestions was the same. what are you, high?
How do **you **feel about these? Would you take any of these pieces of advice as a job seeker? Would you encourage a job seeker you like to take any of them?
All of the ideas sound like advice for a millennial with no job skill. I wouldn’t follow any of that advise in the engineering field.
Instead of emailing a list of things you accomplished why don’t you find s hiring manager effected by on of the things you accomplished and get them to hire you?
I guess the video of why you want the job and would be great would be a modern cover letter but i still hate the idea.
Getting people to say nice things are your reference or a letter of recommendation getting those will matter much more then an email making up a quote by a made up person.
E card, e vites all go straight to the trash if i don’t know you personally and know you don’t mass mail crap.
That might not be a bad idea. I wouldn’t headline it as a “Year in Review”, but highlighting your recent accomplishments is important.
Unless you’re in a field like marketing or film, I think this would be ignored. You know how you feel when someone on the SDMB links to a video as a cite? That’s pretty much how I’d react to a video application/resume/pitch.
Everyone knows at least a couple people who will say nice things about them. This seems kind of cutesy and ineffective.
E-cards take absolutely no thought or effort. A paper card at least requires you to go to a store. Either way, I don’t see a hiring manager being moved by either. At least in my field (I.T.), we want skills, not gimmicks.
Not a bad idea, but not as an email. Part of interviewing is constructing the narrative of you, so putting a list together of things done in year X is helpful.
No
If you want somebody to do this, have them recommend you on your LinkedIn page. That’s what LinkedIn is for.
The only one I would consider is the year in review. It’d have to be done with a soft touch, you make it just like Cousin Sue’s* annual note and it’s going in trash long before they finish reading.
*Actually Cousin Sue’s annual notes are a highlight of the Christmas Card season, but the style won’t work for professional correspondence.
The most effective way to get noticed by a hiring manager is to write them a personalized letter asking them questions about possible openings and also highlight your own skills. You may not get anything right away but it will tend to bring you to the top of the interview list when something pops up. Qualified people are harder to find than you might think for most skilled positions and most hiring managers like to have a pool of potential candidates already in place.
If you have any sort of connection with them, ask for a Q&A phone session even if there is no job opening currently. You can ask them about the industry, trends and potential openings. Most of them will be happy to do it. Be careful though. This is essentially an interview in its own right so make sure you do basic research beforehand.
The video is a horrible idea. There are way too many protected categories that can be revealed in a video - gender, race, approximate age to name a few. As a hiring manager I would not watch a candidate video for those reasons. I gains me nothing beyond a what a written resume/cover letter would provide and sets me/my company up for a potential lawsuit if I don’t select that candidate to proceed. Yes, all of that will be revealed in a face-to-face interview, but that follows initial vetting and possibly a phone interview. By the time I give face-to-face interviews it’s down to the final few candidates and I’m looking for specifics about how well the candidate thinks on the fly.
I would probably ignore the rest as well. If it was relevant or important it should have been included in your resume and cover letter.
Actually, the video (2) and e-card (4) are on my “don’t do, it is harmful” list. Both involve a minor inconvenience. The video in particular but I thought e-cards involved clicking a link and viewing it on an external site. Is the site dodgy or legit? I guess I’ll be forced to make that decision. At best the card is in the email which means clicking “show pictures” on an email from an external-to-the-company address.
Maybe it is different in other industries, but for my cynical group of software engineers these are the sort of tone deaf technical decisions the chumps in marketing make. For me you’re making yourself start from a negative rather than neutral position. I kind of think you’re an idiot (the applicant, not anyone in this thread) and you know what they say about first impressions. It is an uphill climb from there.
(3) and to a lesser extent (1) are probably not as harmful but still come across as pretty clueless. It feels like an advertising gimic. I’m not naive enough to claim immunity to the powers of the advertising industry, but I do think most sophisticated people would be desensitized to the amateur effort produced by an individual job seeker.
I’m involved in the hiring of engineers for my company and it is pretty brutal for us in the Seattle area. If you’re even remotely qualified you’ll probably get to a screening telephone interview. That will be based on concrete experience and academic achievements on your resume. A well articulated interest in our specific domain would also help. Quite frankly it is so hard to find people right now that anything on that list is probably not a dealbreaker in itself, but if you got hired it’d be despite those actions not because of them.