Job Hunting
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Jay: Late
Good thing I called in sick for my appointment in the morning. I was supposed to have a superfluous blood pressure check with the nurse at 8:15, which I earned by being stressed, having been spotty about taking my pills, and being angry with the doctor at my last visit four weeks ago. That last has subsided but not completely gone away, since I am completely incapable of holding a grudge for extended periods. The nurse visits are weird. They are supposed to cost less than a full office visit, and incur no copay. However, the billing people convert them to full office visits and charge us the copays after the fact. That and the doctor sometimes spends more time with us on these visits where we are not supposed to see him than on one scheduled with him.
As you can see, it is 2:29 as I started this sentence. I am back at the computer, having yet to sleep. I finally made some real progress composing a resume, a targeted variant, before I fell out for the night, coinciding with Valerie being sick and up crying. Poor kid.
Now I am awake again, after just minutes actually spent attempting to fall asleep.
Monday, November 12, 2007
Jay: Decisions, Decisions
I have to decide whether I am willing to work in downtown San Francisco, no matter how cool the job sounds, even for the top pay I could expect. The area is nice enough, but commuting downtown… And the economics of the whole thing might not work well even at the top of the range.
But damn, it’d be a cool job, and I am interested in working with the folks in question, who are pursuing a compelling concept, in other ways, even if being employed by them isn’t in the cards.
Now. I really have to finish my resume! At least, a version relevant to the type of job in question.
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Jay: Contemplating
The possibility of a full time job centered around blogging, and how I would feel about that and regular trips to the west coast, or moving.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Jay: Human Duct Tape
It occurs to me that I could sum up much of my work with XTreme in those three words.
The confluence of my description of keeping the big client’s network cobbled together with duct tape and baling wire and my father referring to the eleven years of being in that business as “the lawyers” brought the thought to mind. While there were several clients and projects, enough of it was either for the one client or similar enough - including as applied to holding our business together, since any time I had chosen to leave it after 1997 would have probably ended it entirely - that it’s wonderfully descriptive.
Jay: It Impresses Me
That my LinkedIn connections include three of the twelve people I started with in Word support at Corporate Software in April 1994. We were the largest new hire class ever, and the place was so crowded we trained in a hotel conference room.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Jay: Size and Everything (Update, See End)
I’m holding a printed copy of a first pass at a master resume. Which isn’t really a mater resume, as it doesn’t include the jobs and experiences it could. It does go back to everything meaningful I did since 1990, and appears to go back to 1986 by including my little business that overlapped the end of college and the subsequent years wandering in the economic wilderness, lowering my lifetime earnings by hundreds of thousands of dollars while the economy writhed in agony and I regretted my degree. Which did help me land work in 1994 making almost what I should have made in 1988, but hey, who’s counting.
Anyway, it is three pages. Nice and neat. Three pages, and not quite as much white space or large type as I prefer. If I put on my “someone handed this to me and I shake your hand twenty seconds later” hat, I get nothing. The summary doesn’t get more than a skim and a few words reach out. The titles of the two jobs on the first page are what leap out, and they say nothing to me.
Which isn’t where I was going with the post; rather I was bringing up the perennial question of resume length, not to mention formatting - if you get it short but it’s in 8 point type, nobody will read it - and how it all works when your resume might be online as HTML, or as plain text somewhere. Then what about the length, and what of the formatting one might have used on paper to draw attention, or does that even matter, since that renders it searchable and is the equivalent of warm rather than cold calling.
I’ll probably through it up as HTML later, off of elhide.com/resume again, in this or similar form.
At least I seem to be down to finer points. I found myself going through the formatting and making substantial modifications to the text, tightening some things up. There will be more of that, and from there the idea of emphasizing more for one thing (management) or another (technical). What I always forget is the sheer amount of training I’ve done, and that I am good at it. Not only does it date back to Christy’s Markets, training new employees, but it even goes back to Halliday, where I worked starting in 1980. I will never forget the time I trained a guy at Christy’s and was his hero. When he was managing or assistant managing a store later (weirdly, I can remember the store number, 81), he got all excited when I stopped in one day, introducing me around enthusiastically as the guy who trained him, and thanking me profusely. I could almost emphasize that in its own right, not just as part of a managerial focus.
Anyway, thoughts on resume length and the internet age? On varying resume focus?
Update:
Here’s a Word version of the draft resume as it stands. It comes from Word 2000 and should be openable by Word 97 or newer, and anything that can open that format.
There were a couple minor typo corrections, but otherwise it is what I handed Deb, which she had some good ideas about, for when I dive back into it. Right now I am thinking about making baked macaroni and cheese for supper, and some apple cobbler, neither of which I have ever made before.
Jay: Side Businesses and Multiple Income Streams
The other thing I’d meant to post about, mentioned in the previous post, is employer attitudes toward side businesses or other multiple income stream activities. Where do things stand in general these days? Is there a lot of resistance or need to hide such things?
I ask because of two experiences.
When I worked at Halliday Lithograph, they paid okay, but not so much that side income couldn’t be helpful. It was made crystal clear that nobody was supposed to work a side job or have a side business, period. That was 1980 - 1982, and seemed primarily to be a thing with my otherwise Best Boss Ever, who was an old guy near retirement.
At the time, I technically still had a side job mowing lawns and such, and I did continue to do some of that, but let it trail off in no small part because of the attitude. I tried to avoid the fact being known. A guy I worked with, named Kenny, had a full fledged side job at, as I recall, a lumber company. That fact was top secret from the company, though I’m not sure how, since we all knew about it. It was secret because it was frowned upon to the point of risking your job.
When I started at Corporate Software in 1994, one of the items on my resume was my own business, and it was current at the time, if not its heyday. When I was interviewed, it was stressed that I “would no longer be doing the business, right?” It was fairly low key, but they made it crystal clear it was frowned upon, at least.
I drifted out of doing what little of that remained, in largest part because I was sick of the seasonal stress of doing taxes, but in some part due to the “you will give this up” that I had encountered. I don’t even remember exactly when that was. I had labeled the business as ending in 1994, but I may have actually continued to 1995.
I’d like to believe that attitudes have changed, and unless a company is paying well enough to practically own you, it shouldn’t matter. I suppose it depends.
Jay: Year or Month - Year?
I have two variations, with the current resume being in month and year format and the older one being in year-only format.
My main concerns with month and year are when I remember the year but not the month, which is only true of one relatively insignificant position, and space, where I just ended up with a line that has position and date range wrapping to a second line. That’s going to require reformatting, rephrasing, or changing to year. That’s to the extent the job may even appear, since this is my master resume and variants are unlikely to include it.
Actually, my other oddity is with XTreme. Technically, I am with it until we formally dissolve or I officially leave but it still technically exists with the other two partners, which isn’t going to happen. Technically, my work is not done until I have filed the last 1065 and canceled the sales tax account and such. Technically, even though there’s not revenue after what’s waiting for me to collect when I get to it, or if I attempt to go after other money for other past work, and even though the effort involved in winding things down will be modest, the end date on that should be “present,” not “October 1997,” which would render saying “1997” actually more accurate. In an ambiguous sort of way.
I don’t think it would be that odd that, if I leave Stream as multiple positions, those would be:
1997 - 1999
1997
1996 - 1997
1995 - 1996
1994 - 1995
Anyway, thoughts on the display of dates in a resume?
I may have used just years originally to sound better. Renovator’s Supply was 1990 - 1992 and that made it non-obvious that between it and Tranti Systems, 1993 - 1994, was a year and fourteen days unemployed. Which is further obfuscated if there’s the Arisia volunteer work and the low level side business that mainly involved doing taxes mentioned in there, bridging years and years.
Which brings me to another thing I’d meant to post about… And which would also make a good LinkedIn question.
Jay: Is It Gout…
Or is it weather change arthritis-like pain? Perhaps a combination? Sigh…
Sleep-deprived or not, at least I’m getting in a near-final burst of activity on my resume this morning.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Jay: Resume Discussion
This is a post for comments on my resume in progress, or the care and feeding of resumes, or job hunting more generally.
Alternatively, feel free to e-mail me, jay at this domain, jay at elhide, or marshe at elhide dot com. As I post this. I am about to update; I just needed this link to include. How very circular.
Update:
The trouble with editing things in w.bloggar that are meant to be pages instead of posts is that you have to remember line breaks won’t happen automatically…
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