FAQ?

[athelind]

Last week, I applied for a job that included a "supplemental questionaire" about my background in cartography. I found that I was able to "sell myself" much more by answering those questions than I ever have writing cover letters or even resumes. I also realized just how much I have done and have accomplished and how much ass Your Obedient Serpent actually kicks.

I should have been writing my cover letters like this all along. I just didn't have the framework to build on. Now that I do, I can sit down and rewrite my "boilerplate" cover letter template -- I have a continually-evolving "stock" cover letter than I tailor for each job.

I should also look over my resume with these new revelations in mind, and revise the phrasing and presentation.

And now, the part where I solicit feedback.

An important part of getting hired, I hear, is to insure that your resume stands out, that something sets you apart from the crowd. Heretofore, I've just tried to create neat, legible resumes, using a clear typeface that faxes and copies well and a format that shows that I spent some time thinking about presentation.

I have, however, heard tales of people who got jobs because they used radically unconventional resume formats.

I'm considering the possibility of drafting a Frequently Asked Questions About EWD, and submitting that as a resume. The idea of an advertising brochure approach (What can EWD bring to YOUR Company?) has also crossed my mind.

So -- what do people think?
[Poll #273811]

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Comments

[cargoweasel.livejournal.com]

It depends on the job and the company. Since most recruiters filter your resume through a database of some kind, and output the same thing for all candidates, the formatting is usually rarely seen by the hiring manager in my experience - putting your resume on fancy paper or doing layout tricks is generally a waste of time. Now, if it is a job at an ad agency or something, maybe.

The content of the resume is more important than the layout. Arial 12 pt is fine. And I'm a graphic designer.

[pathia.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm sure you can guess what I voted for without even looking at the results =)

Out of the jobs, internships and chats with various managers at speaking events at my school. The following has been done, demonstrated or explained as the normal operating procedure for resumes in today's business.

Dump anything not 'normal' into the trash without even reading it.

Of course, we're probably not going after the same type of job =)

[taral.livejournal.com]

I like my resume. It's in PDF. :)

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Ooh, nice trick. Wish I had Acrobat.

[taral.livejournal.com]

I don't. I used pdftex.

[araquan.livejournal.com]

   Well, if I may offer what little advice I've found to work from my own shattered career search... One thing that's important to remember about a resume is that its purpose isn't to get you a job, it's to get you an interview. The difference may not seem like much but it can help you focus on what you really ought to have in there- and what you can leave to an interview. And it's in the interview that you try to reel the job in. The resume is just casting out the hook.
   On the subject of wildly unusual resumes, I guess that depends on the place you're sending it to. It's true that most places of any size will just feed it into some kind of text database anyway so presentation may not matter except as a hinderance to OCR systems. This is also why many places insist on MS Word format for digital submissions I guess- easier for the drones to know how to handle (how you can not know how to open a plain text file is beyond me, but then I've found out that many idiots savants in computers think "plain text" means "MS Word in Times New Roman with no graphics" rather than "ASCII"... but that's a whole other discussion...). Then again, some places may value someone who thinks out of the box- depends on the place and what job you're going for. Research into the company can be key here. It was right about a year ago that I submitted that resume for a Perl programming job at a graphics printing place- submitted in the form of a program that, when run, printed out a formatted resume of the more traditional variety. In the end, as you may recall, the job turned out to have somewhat different responsibilities than what they'd advertised and I wasn't as qualified as I'd hoped... But that unusual resume did get me an interview, with extreme prejudice.
   For PDFing things, OpenOffice's Unix ports can generally output most documents to PDF and PostScript formats, so I do that when I need PDF sometimes. I presume that the Windows version has the same capabilities.