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Jason Fried: Never Read Another Resume
- blizkreeg 16y agoWhat are the elements of a truly good cover letter? Stuff beyond the cliched advice you get such as showing interest in the company/position and so on. Are good cover letters "from the heart" (so to speak)? Is semi-formal but well-written language better?
- patio11 16y agoThis is just as compelling an argument that you never write another resume. Or, to make the conclusion a little less doctrinaire, spend more time on networking and creating things that you can present to prospective employers to convince them to employ you beyond the confines of the 1-2 page resume that nobody reads anyhow.
- aarongough 16y agoI must admit that these days I pretty much refuse to supply resumes. I really don't feel like a resume reflects at all who I am or what I can do...
- jarek 16y agoA resume is supposed to reflect who you are and what you can do. If yours doesn't, you are doing it wrong.
- aarongough 16y agoThat's quite probably true. But I am a web-developer, not a resume-writer. If I don't give someone a resume, they can't make any assumptions based on it. If instead I send them to my personal website, or to my GitHub account then they can ony make assumptions off of the concrete things that I have done. That's very much how I prefer it...
- btilly 16y agoI disagree that nobody reads the resume. Last year I was looking for a job. During interviews I received enough detailed comments on things in my resume (see http://elem.com/~btilly/BenTilly.pdf http://elem.com/~btilly/BenTilly.pdf for said resume) that I knew that people had read it. Furthermore they had followed through and actually read things I linked to in it! That said, it took a lot of work to get my resume to the point where that happened. And you have to be able to back up your resume.
- ramchip 16y agoThat's an interesting resume. Gave me some ideas to improve mine. Thanks!
- anigbrowl 16y agoAh, the joys of grammatical ambiguity.
- tome 16y agoIf we're going to be picky, isn't it orthographical ambiguity? [Edit: rephrased]
- tome 16y agoHaving read RyanMcGreal's comment above I now realise there is grammatical ambiguity as well as orthographic :)
- yellowbkpk 16y agoIs there a word for ambiguity ambiguity? (i.e. Which type of ambiguity?)
- pigbucket 16y agoAmbiguity ambiguity sounds like semantic ambiguity, but there are lots of different kinds of that. There's a book that disambiguates ambiguity ambiguity, by W. Empson (math geek turned lit prof), Seven Types of Ambiguity.
- ramchip 16y agoYou just reminded me of why the Internet is an incredible invention.
- RyanMcGreal 16y agoHaving read tome's comment above, I went and looked up "orthography". :)
- RyanMcGreal 16y agoI'm having second thoughts about the small stack of resumes by Jason Fried that are still sitting on my desk.
- tptacek 16y agoBroken down to bullets: * Don't hire until you've had to endure the pain of doing the job well yourself. If you don't know how to do the job right, you don't know how to hire for it. * Don't hire just to capture talent. You'll only end up alienating the talent. * Stay as small as you can. * The resume form makes everyone look good, which means it doesn't tell you anything useful. * Cover letters on the other hand tell you lots, and, incidentally, also tell you how well people can write. * Sometimes the best candidates distinguish themselves with effort. Their most recent designer hire made this mini-site while applying: http://jasonzimdars.com/svn/ http://jasonzimdars.com/svn/ * Questions are good, but beware people who ask too many "how do I...?" questions as opposed to "why...?" questions. * Test drive if you can. They hired designers for 1-week projects at $1500 before extending FT offers. * Be flexible about where you hire (they're all over the place), if you can.
- tptacek 16y agoOf these points, #2 squares particularly well with my experience (there is a constant gold rush for top talent in software security), but the "how" vs. "why" thing rings false; all sharp questions are good, even if they're draining. Glad to hear someone well-respected sticking up for cover letters, since there appears to be some controversy about whether they're valuable.
- tome 16y agoCover letters on the other hand tell you lots, and, incidentally, also tell you how well people can write. Also: if in doubt, hire the better writer.
- tptacek 16y agoI probably didn't include this (and I should have) because it's my least favorite of his hiring ideas. Being able to write intelligibly is critical and mandatory. Being able to write well is great. But there are other things that are equally great.
- cstuder 16y agoAlso: If applying for a job, hire a writer.
- tjmaxal 16y agoit does seem a little short sighted to pay entire depts lots of over time because you can't find the perfect hire. This is what my current employer does and I'm always amazed at the practice. Isn't paying out twice as much in overtime more expensive than just hiring more people?
- kalid 16y agoThere are lots of costs with hiring another person (benefits, facilities, hr/legal, etc.) -- the fully loaded cost of a person may be twice their salary.
- blacksmythe 16y agoYes, if you can hire people as good as the ones you already have. This is frequently not the case.
- GFischer 16y agoMaybe in the U.S... in parts of South America and Europe the administrative overhead of hiring new people (and the hefty penalties for firing) means that hiring has to be really, really well justified. That of course makes for a less mobile market, a stagnation culture (IMO), and less entrepreneurism I suspect (though getting a state-paid job that can realistically mean 20 hrs/week of actual work and doing jobs on the side is very common).
- btilly 16y agoI know a company that was outsourcing work to Argentina and was not entirely happy with said work. But they had a lot of knowledge sunk there. Argentina decided to respond to the downturn by bringing in legislation that would make the cost of firing people even higher. That fact pushed the US company to fire the Argentina employees right away rather than waiting for it to get more expensive. Unintended consequences and all that.
- edw519 16y agoAnother rule of thumb: When in doubt, always hire the better writer. OK, I'll bite. Why?
- modoc 16y agoCommunication skills are always important in a business, and often if people can write clearly and coherently about a topic it means they understand the topic clearly and coherently.
- brown9-2 16y agoBecause people that can express their ideas well are "better" than people that can't express their ideas as clearly. ...where "better" means any number of subjective things - easier to work with, capable of getting more done and faster, etc.
- adamhowell 16y agoI agree with the "exhibits clear and concise thinking" points below, but I also think it has a lot to do with being a distributed company. They communicate via email and Campfire all day, and their main marketing channel is their blog - which multiple people write for - so being able to write is of even greater importance for them.
- axod 16y ago37signals is a PR company first and foremost. Programming seems a secondary concern.
- puredemo 16y agoThey say 3 million people use their software.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- luckystrike 16y agoAlmost all the suggestions on hiring in this article are pretty good. The one where I would differ is: We're happy to skip over the perfect catch if we don't have the perfect job for the person to do. If you already know the person is 'perfect' for your organization, and have the financial capacity to hire him/her, you should go for it (IMO). I would think of it as an investment that would help my business in the longer run. Right now, a company might be content with their current suite of products, but constant innovation is required in our industry to stay ahead. It could be in the existing products or coming up with completely new solutions. If people working on existing products have their plates full most of the times, they 'might' not be able to devote as much time as they would like on coming up with newer things, that could further improve the bottom line.
- danudey 16y agoI'm going to second this. If you hire mediocre people without enough work, you'll waste money, it's true, but consider Google. They hire brilliant people, and through their 20% time they end up with amazing things (I think Gmail and Maps are two examples). Now imagine what an excellent employee could do with 100% time and support from the rest of your organization.
- tptacek 16y agoHere's one strong possibility: noodle, get bored, then quit. Consider the adverse selection problem here. People who can do valuable things with "100% time"? They're inherently valuable. Since they usually need to be pretty smart to be that valuable, they know they're valuable. Therefore: they are probably not looking for a W2 position as a base of operations. Lots of people, many of them very smart, will salivate over the idea of a 100% self-directed R&D position. But smart or not, most of those people are not going to do well in that role, because: see last paragraph.
- dannyr 16y agoI think it's a selfish act to hire somebody just for the sake of that person being perfect for your organization. Primarily, that person would not have ownership of anything for the immediate future. Other companies may be perfect for this person and may actually have better work for him/her to do now.
- siculars 16y ago"What we do look at are cover letters. Cover letters say it all. They immediately tell you if someone wants this job or just any job. And cover letters make something else very clear: They tell you who can and who can't write. Spell checkers can spell, but they can't write. Wordsmiths rise to the top quickly. Another rule of thumb: When in doubt, always hire the better writer." Writing is critical in today's technologically, geographically dispersed world. Those who can write well can communicate their ideas and intentions well to their team and to their clients. There has been some ink covering the subject in various outlets over the last year or so.
- papachito 16y ago> Finally, we never let geography get in the way. We hire the best we can no matter where they are. We're based in Chicago, but we have programmers in Idaho and California, system administrators in North Carolina and downstate Illinois, designers in Oklahoma and Colorado, a writer in New York City, and others in Europe. This obviously wouldn't work for customer-facing folks, but for most everyone else, it does. The best are everywhere. It's up to you to find them. This is so true, I don't understand tech companies from London or Miami or whatever that do not accept telecommuting and require someone from their own city. They're missing out on the best just so they can have face to face? Face to face is not required in programing!
- informant2 16y agoI generally agree with this advice, but it doesn't always scale.
- queensnake 16y agohttp://www.inc.com/magazine/20100601/never-read-another-resume.html http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100601/never-read-another-resu... Link with ads so they can get some small money for their content.