Job Fairs

It is a unique thing to be an employer at a job fair... it's where everyone goes to look for a job. It's where you see the best and the worst the job market has to offer. I stand for four hours, shaking hands, listening to people and explaining what our company does and what the position they're interested in entails. When I leaves, my voice is shot from talking over all the ambient noise in the room and my feet and back have had enough. By the time the last person comes at the end of hour four, I have to sit down, even if I feel rude doing so.

For me here in Central Florida, I get a ton of people with "Customer Service" experience (which helps me not a bit), people looking to jump ship from Disney because there's no real $$ there and nowhere to move up, or former Real Estate agents who have found themselves hard up since the housing market flattened out (Hello?? No one who lives and works here in Florida could afford those prices - did anyone really think the market would remain like that?).

These are all good people, and in my heart I'd hire them all if I didn't work for a company that only has just under 50 employees. However some people just need to think about what they're saying to me: Don't tell me that you're the salesperson I'm looking for if you are a) wearing glasses from 1984 with those fabric glasses straps/holders than cover the entire length of the arm of your glasses, b) aren't professionally dressed, c) spend more time interrogating me about the salary/commission structure than you do selling me on how good you are or d) have little to no bottom teeth and the ones you do have are tarnished by tobacco. I can't send you out to multi-million hotel properties or to Corporate America to convince them to spend $10,000 to $500,000 on their special events and parties!! It's a jungle out there and damn if most of the people who approach me about their sales experience look less like hunters and more like prey.

Nevertheless, these are usually an interesting four hours of my life where I learn a lot about other companies, other types of jobs and what else is out there in the world that I do not want to do for a living....

Read your Resume!!!!!

A while ago, I had stopped paying attention to articles on how to properly present your resume. After all, who doesn’t know by now how to properly present themselves a potential employer? I think they taught us resume writing in 8th grade, for the love of Peanut Butter….

But sadly the world keeps spinning and more and more people do the strangest things. Here’s my list of the interesting things so far:

1- Your resume should start with your name, not your address and phone number followed by your name. I will not hire based upon what street you live on or if I find an amusing symmetry or repetitive pattern to the digits in your phone number.
2- Don’t list your elementary school and middle school on your resume. Please, for the love of all that is good, do not do it. You might as well write “I’M CLUELESS” in big red print on the top of your resume. Seriously.
3- If you’re going to list your job responsibilities/experiences in a narrative form instead of bullet form, please make sure that all the narratives are written in the same format and use a past tense if they’re not your current job. Your job that ended in 1998 should not start with “For the last four years I have been responsible…”
4- If you are going to list your job responsibilities in a bullet point format for each job, then PLEASE don’t use NUMBERS! Use bullet points, dashes or stars. Do not do not do not do not number them. And if you do number them, then please use the same numbering system for each of the subsequent jobs. Don’t switch up your formatting by making the first job have bold numbers and then the second job have non-bold numbers and the third job have dashes. You’re pretty much wasting your efforts if you send a resume like that.
5- Please, Please, Please realize that the person reading your resume has about 5-10 seconds to look at it. If you send a resume via e-mail, include something that resembles a cover letter. If a company is advertising for one position, assume that they might have another job opening also and that the hiring manager or HR person should not have to read your entire resume to figure out which position you’re looking for. Personally, if I have to write you back or call you to figure out which position you’re applying for, I’m going to be particularly disinclined to do so. You’re supposed to be selling me on you, not making me hunt you down.
6- Figure that major misspellings in your resume will count you out for the big positions at most companies. Not knowing the difference between “then” and “than” or “duel” and “dual” pretty much tells the readers that a) You didn’t pay attention in English class or b) you didn’t have anyone else proofread your resume. While I do enjoy a good laugh, a good laugh from a grammatical error will not get you an interview.
7- Do not try to use HTML formatting on a resume that you send in the body of an e-mail. Impressed as I might be that you might have a basic grasp of HTML coding, I also have HTML knowledge too and I know that not every E-mail client and web-based e-mail reader interprets HTML the same way. Web-based e-mail clients add their own code to the body of the e-mail so that it displays on the web. This can and will wreak havoc on your formatting. Just send your resume in Microsoft Word format (and if you can’t afford Microsoft Word, just use Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org/) to save your resume in Word format. Even better, PDF your resume. Those are always so nice because their formatting never changes.

I can’t stress it enough: Hiring Managers and HR staff have to look at several thousand resumes a year. You need to look neat and professional or you may not get anything more than a passing glance.

I’m going to keep republishing this blog every time I get a real winner…