11.24.2002
I just saw the oddest thing...
It was in a job ad on PJ Scout, and in the ad, it said that it was important that you NOT be posted on any of the major job boards or you couldn't apply. Weird. It was for a higher end architecture job for some classified government contract. Strange. If Big Brother can have me in their database, I might as well be listed anywhere else in the world! I've never seen that before; usually recruiters have such a difficult time finding good people that if you're not listed in Monster or Dice, forget it; they'll never find you. So, it's OK to be listed on an obscure site? This is even weirder than the new requirement that recruiters are only looking at currently employed candidates. Well, with Job Fairy help, it's easy enough to get around that. :)
Congratulations to the Leather Fairy - she just had stomach reduction surgery done a couple of weeks ago, and she's already dropped a couple of sizes! Plus, she remains very employed in the bitter Seattle job market. She's doing great in every area... and we're all very proud of her. (Once she can squeeze into those teeny little leather skirts, watch out, Washington!)
Congratulations to the Teal Fairy... she got hired! I'd love to reveal more details, but I can't. I'll just settle for publicly congratulating her on her exceptional sales skills! Sometimes, you have to be more than just a code goddess. Fortunately, she is. :)
A little thing, but such a large result...
I was helping a friend rewrite her resume this weekend, and as we were going over her jobs, I kept pumping her for more details. How did you stage these machines? Did you use Ghost? How else did you push software? Perl scripts? Kixtart? SMS? She would then tell me. Then we were talking about financial systems - she had done tons of support with one of them at her last job. But she couldn't remember what it was. So I started off with my list. Was it Peachtree? Great Plains? "Yes!", she said. "How did you know?" That's when I realized that there's something I do at every job that I might have forgotten to list on the site... something that's so second nature to me I probably didn't even think to mention it. But it's simple, and it's called inventory. When I've been on the job a couple of weeks or so, depending on whether it's a short term contract or a longer term "permanent" employment, I do a search on my computer's hard drive for everything named *.exe. I sort it by directory (make sure you select a detailed view). I take a piece of paper and write down all the programs I use. I note the operating systems in the environment. Then I note roughly how many servers and domains there are (Network Neighborhood). I make a list of all the hardware used in the environment - what the servers are (i.e. Sun? Compaq? HP? Macintosh?), what the network is, what the routers are (Cisco?) and what they're running. Are they using Oracle? MySQL? Linux? If there are web servers, what are they running? Apache? IIS? This is your environment, and these are your buzzwords. These are all the technologies you use in the course of your work, and you are entitled to use them in your resume. If you're a support person, and this woman is, the size of the environment counts too. 50,000 users? 750 users? How many states or time zones did you support? Don't be shy. You can't describe what it is you did in general terms. Your resume is searched using buzz words, so forget the verbs and concentrate on the nouns. Writing down everything about your environment helps, because memory will fail you, and if you get let go unexpectedly, you won't have time to do it then. Make a commitment to doing this every month or two, then updating your resume with your new skills, hardware, and software. It pays off!
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