The main reason I think ignoring stuff from 10+ years ago is people change and in my case (the computer industry) business changes too. If you are hiring someone who is 40 years old for a job in the computer industry then what they were doing 10 or 15 years ago probably has no impact on their ability to do the job I’m hiring them for. More often than not they would have been sales reps or in a field completely unrelated as not too many people have been in the industry for 15 or 20 years.
I’ve never looked at hobbies either. I try to not to gain an opinion of the persons personality from a resume. During the interview (if they have the skills I need) I’ll find out what their personality is like and whether it meshes with what I need.
fwiw, I’ve never put hobbies or interests on a resume and I’ve very rarely seen it on anyone elses.
Ooooohhhh… an A-Oprah-Phil-theist, eh? Pardon me as I step aside whilst you’re being smoted. I just got my suit clean, see, and I don’t want any errant mixture of auntie em and glurge to splatter on me.
[sub]Personally, I like “Philtheist” when labeling his followers. Sounds naughty.[/sub]
I can’t believe I’m the first one to say this, especially given that I’ve been lurking on the last two threads, but here it is.
Post the letter. Enquiring minds want to know.
I have two secretaries over whom I have no hiring/firing power, who, as we used to say in Louisiana, “couln’t spell ‘cat’ if you spotted them the K and the A.” I also have a filing postion open.
Send me this woman and I will give you 15% of the webcam rights when I set up my “Big Brother: office idiots edition” streaming feed.
I have this constant fear, you see, that anybody I’m blasting on the SDMB will somehow stumble not only upon the SDMB, but upon the very thread in which I speak harshly of him/her, and then come to kill me.
(Actually, it’s happened before, sort of, only in these cases it was my best friend, to whom I recommended the SDMB, and she never did kill me.)
I figure if it happens in this particular case, I can still get away with pretending that I was talking about some other applicant who submitted a 5-page application. If I post a letter verbatim, however, I have no shield against her wrath (and a lawsuit?).
Wow. This woman really is empowered. She’s got me and my boss afraid to cross her!
Fair enough. The computer industry is very different to the area I’ve been involved in and was thinking of when I worte my last post (the Arts). Experience in the computer industry (I would venture) is more easily quantifiable. If you’re a programmer for instance, you either know a language or you don’t - simplified I know but you know what I mean…
In the Arts however, membership of say orchestras, choirs, theatre-groups, and other voluntary work (particularly if applying for a job in the education and outreach area of the Arts) can give an indication of how committed you are personally to this area as opposed to another candidate who may have similar administrative experience in another field. This is especially relevant when you’re dealing with people such as agents, artists and other interested members of the public - you won’t get much respect from them if you don’t show some ability to empathise and understand where they’re coming from i.e. you not only want to be a competent, efficient and reliable administrator but you have to be able to come across as though you’re not completely ignorant of what they’re talking about. (Especially since you’re often dealing with ‘fragile’ egos - sad but true :rolleyes: )
Of course job experience is most important but it’s not the be all and end all of the situation.
Also as regards the fact that you say you’ve never seen a resumé with interests/hobbies listed - well, I guess that’s just a cultural difference. Here we have a CV or Curriculum Vitae which I think is generally longer than a Resumé and almost always will include a short section for Interests, Achievements and Memberships of Organisations (obviously you edit them to only include ones that are relevant to the job you’re applying for).
My rule is to re-write/re-arrange your CV for every job you apply for, concentrating on the most relevant things for that job.
(FYI my BF is a computer programmer - I’ve seen his CV and it doesn’t have much in the way of ‘interests’ on it (though it does include some), but in the Arts sector people do put these things on their CVs and they are taken into account).
Yep, thazz right . . . Oprah Lady came for her interview, and apparently impressed my boss with her forthright nature. The other candidates had equal experience but, he said, she just seemed like she wouldn’t take a lot of shit (mostly from clients).
I shouldn’t be surprised by this–when he hired me, he told me that other candidates had had better experience than I in terms of this particular job, but that I seemed like far less of a tightass.
This will ensure our continued entertainment. I’m sure she’ll be a sparkling addition to the cast of characters in your office. You’ll have to keep us updated on her quirks and such.
A run-on sentence? That’s a miserably inadequate run-on since, certainly not a run-on sentence in the sense of runnning-on for many dependent clauses without or at best with minimal punctuation not to mention not coming to a point I agree that with your points about presentation but it seems to me that you’re too highly skilled in the language to create a true run-on by the way I’m glad to see you’re posting about your work again it will keep us entertained at least for some time although without the same sense of dark mystery that enthralled us so with MC but try again with the run-on and don’t confuse using sophisticated, complex language with a true run-on.
A run-on sentence? That’s a miserably inadequate run-on since, certainly not a classic run-on sentence in the sense of running-on for many dependent clauses without–or at best with minimal-- punctuation not to mention not coming to any sort of point whatsoever I agree that with your points about presentation but it seems to me that you’re too highly skilled in the language to create a true run-on by the way I’m glad to see you’re posting about your work again it will keep us entertained at least for some time although without the same sense of dark mystery that enthralled us so with MC but maybe try again with the run-on and don’t confuse using sophisticated, complex language with a true run-on.
Part of being professional and putting together a bang-up cover letter/resume is getting advice from competent people. Or at the very least buying “Cover Letters for Dummies ™”. This means that she is responsible for knowing what is and is not appropriate in a resume and cover letter, and this is not hard to find if one possesses even the most basic research skills. If I was the boss, and she’d called me bitching about gender discrimination, I would just have told her, “I’m sorry, but since you couldn’t be bothered to do a spellcheck on your resume, you obviously don’t possess the attention to detail that I’m looking for in an employee.” Lawsuit, schmawsuit. It would never get to court. I can’t believe Em’s boss even interviewed her, much less hired her. But I’m not entirely surprised. But this should provide for some good posts–I look forward to hearing about auntie em’s new best friend. Does she quilt, I wonder?
