4 ms·

Is it really a tough market? I worked for a marketing & web-design firm in Baltimore, and they were readily hiring and growing when I left. You can try this "

by teej 17y ago

Is it really a tough market? I worked for a marketing & web-design firm in Baltimore, and they were readily hiring and growing when I left. You can try this "hack" that my friend tried to land a job a few years ago. He scraped craigslist job listings in his area, plugged them into a script that took the job requirements and inserted them into his cover letter & resume mad libs style. He just waited for the responses to come in and picked the best opportunity.

jdale27 17y ago
If I understand correctly, your friend submitted resumes and cover letters claiming that he had skills/experience he didn't have. Is that correct? So what did he do when he got called in for an interview where they were expecting him to have certain knowledge that he didn't have?
- nostrademons 17y ago
  It's possible that he filtered the postings down to those that he actually had experience in first and then inserted the particular job requirements into the resume. So every job that he'd applied to would be something he had skills for, but not every skill he has appears on every resume he sends out. I usually tweak my resumes for the particular job I'm applying for - don't most people? So I'll downplay or omit skills that aren't relevant for the particular job, but that doesn't mean that in a pinch, I couldn't use them. For example, I'm quite capable of writing a PHP or JSF app, and would probably be better at it than the median candidate in the job market. But I left those as one-word mentions on my last set of job apps, because I really really didn't want to do PHP or JSF development. If I got desperate, though, I'd send out resumes to those firms, and it'd be nice to have a script do it for me. I only applied to 3 companies my last job cycle, so my applications were quite manageable, but somebody who applies to 50-100 can waste a lot of time with little tweaks.

by teej 17y ago

jdale27 17y ago

If I understand correctly, your friend submitted resumes and cover letters claiming that he had skills/experience he didn't have. Is that correct? So what did he do when he got called in for an interview where they were expecting him to have certain knowledge that he didn't have?

nostrademons 17y ago
It's possible that he filtered the postings down to those that he actually had experience in first and then inserted the particular job requirements into the resume. So every job that he'd applied to would be something he had skills for, but not every skill he has appears on every resume he sends out. I usually tweak my resumes for the particular job I'm applying for - don't most people? So I'll downplay or omit skills that aren't relevant for the particular job, but that doesn't mean that in a pinch, I couldn't use them. For example, I'm quite capable of writing a PHP or JSF app, and would probably be better at it than the median candidate in the job market. But I left those as one-word mentions on my last set of job apps, because I really really didn't want to do PHP or JSF development. If I got desperate, though, I'd send out resumes to those firms, and it'd be nice to have a script do it for me. I only applied to 3 companies my last job cycle, so my applications were quite manageable, but somebody who applies to 50-100 can waste a lot of time with little tweaks.