Exactly. In sales, you want aggressive sharks who don’t hesitate at trying to close a deal. Taking the initiative for a sales position is as much a demonstration of the necessary skills as submitting a writing example is for a copywriter position. It is not necessarily a desirable skill for other positions.
Like I said in an earlier post, I do not have a sales mentality. In fact I usually try to stay as far away from sales as I possibly can. This is a bit of a hindrance in the job market, as it seems every other job is a sales job (and the rest are medical, freaking Phoenix).
This T-letter idea is great! I don’t think it f’ing nuts at all but brilliant!
Looking back, I’ve always done a version of this in my cover letter…I took what they wanted and made sure I covered it in the cover letter…the idea of doing it up-front like this in 2 columns with no resume could very well work!
Plus, it helps them eliminating you from consideration for trivial/irrelevent/stupid reasons.
Huh, this could explain a lot. I have been looking for work for 7 months. Mostly through job boards, but all have been online. State, federal, city, county jobs, state job employment agency, you name it, I get on it every day.
They all require me to fill out some asinine application form as well as upload my resume. WTF is a resume for if nobody even looks at it?
I used to write a detailed cover lette (about 3-4 paragraphs), but after not getting any bites, and taking the advice of my last job (which was in an HR), I cut it down to one paragraph (or two small ones). Still no bite. I was spending so much time custom making cover letters and generic ones weren’t cutting it, so I just stopped with the cover letters. I got two interviews with no cover letters (zero with cover letters). Take that as you would.
I’m still not employed though. I think I might link to my website once I get some evidence it does something other than look pretty. (most of the development is back end admin type stuff, I can’t just let anybody log in and mess it up).
ETA: Love the idea of a t-letter. I’m gonna set one up now.
It comes from the lines you draw when setting one up by hand. One horizontal line to separate the headers of the columns from the content, then a vertical line down the middle to divide it into two columns. I actually remember doing something similar now in my freshman business classes, though I can’t remember what the objective there was.
They may not be as interested because they have to apply at 200 places a week, which is just as annoying as having to screen 200 resumes.
Also, even if they aren’t interested enough to put a meaningless cover letter, they might be the best candidate for the job (I know a lot of places don’t even read them, hence the other strategies for getting people to see your resume, like a “value proposition”)
Since I hire people to work on my team as Dev or QA, I’d first be looking at your resume for your attention to detail. Any resume I get with poor formatting or poor spelling gets chucked immediately.
Plus, I very much need to see what languages you’ve programmed in, as in all of them, not just the ones in the job posting. A natural progression with pieces missing, or listing experience with technologies that have been replaced w/o also listing experience with the technology that replaced it, are both telling.
Finally, since (believe it or not) software development is a relatively small industry, one in which I’ve been employed since 1992, I will know quite a bit about you based on what companies you worked for, when, and for how long.
What format do you prefer? Just out of curiosity. I have a pretty generic one, I’ll PM it to you if you are interested (I have it in web format actually). I’m 32 but am pretty new to resumes, as I worked in Warehouse/production before college and was largely unnecessary.
Also, I noticed before that the format I chose didn’t have supervisor or contact info for the jobs, and was wondering if that was why I didn’t get replies. I added it to the resume, but I have no idea on what kind of reception that is going to get. (also, do you only put pertinent experience to the job you are applying for?)
Makes no difference to me. By the time they get to me from HR or wherever, it’s a hard copy.
By formatting I mean are there obvious spacebars instead of a tab or hard right-margin, or a hanging bullet, or curious uses of different fonts for no discernable reason, or silly point-size changes between lines, or strange uses of text formatting, or poor paragraph spacing…basically if you couldn’t use your own damn resume app successfully enough to show me you know what you’re doing, why would I waste my time asking you to write / test my app?
And on a related note, one of my favorite “cover letters” from Daily WTF.
