A Rant About Job Hunting

ROSE Blog: Rikki's Open Source Exchange

This morning I had coffee with a former colleague from my days (gasp! more than two decades ago?!) as a young record store employee. We talked about how times have changed since our afternoons spent thumbing through cassettes and LPs, reminisced about the first few CDs that trickled into our store, reflected on where we went after we quit pushing The Pretenders on vinyl, and shared stories about how we stumbled into the wonderful world of open source. (And then we got into a discussion about how cool we really are even if our kids don't know it, but that's an entirely different blog post.)

My friend is job searching. He's looking over his resume with years of Linux experience and wondering what it takes to get potential employers to acknowledge ever receiving it. He's considering getting some certification of some sort, thinking maybe those additional letters on his resume are the missing piece – or is it something else?

Does his resume need a rewrite? Is his cover letter crappy?

I told him he's not alone. I feel for him and all my other friends on the job hunt. It's torture for me to write my resume, and I'd rather type out a new thesis than tackle a cover letter. And boy am I ever a horrible interview (just ask my current employers, who hired me despite my bad awful first impression).

I occasionally look over resumes and cover letters for friends and former colleagues because it's much easier to give someone else feedback than to critique your own career neatly laid out before you in a .rtf file. (Or should it be .txt, .doc, .odt, or .pdf? This was another topic covered over a single cup of coffee today.)

Let's assume you picked the right format for your resume, and you wrote a clever cover letter that clearly shows what a great fit you are for this open position. Then you reread your resume and realized you were being much too modest, so you rewrote it applying everything you ever learned about self-promoting, imposter syndrome, tooting your own horn, and asserting yourself.

You know that Clay Shirky was not talking to YOU in his rant about women because you did your homework, for crying out loud. So why aren't those employers calling you back?

I have too many friends with decades of experience, degrees, certifications, networks, skills, and connections who are not getting called back. They aren't getting emails back, or rejection letters, or any acknowledgment at all that their resume and cover letter was received and reviewed by a person somewhere out there on the wonderful world wide web. They are discouraged, and I don't blame them.

When it comes to the job hunt of 2010, what works for getting you work?

Do companies no longer send out feedback or a rejection letter if an applicant doesn't fit the role?

Do experienced professionals need to add certifications to their decades of hands-on experience? If so, which certifications are most practical?

Did you find a new open source-related job in the past 12 months? If so, what tips would you offer someone who's still on the search?

Do you look at local resources? Or are job boards better?

If you are a prospective open source employer, what tips do you have to help job seekers turn their resumes and cover letters into job offers?

And to my friend who stopped by for a surprise visit today and took me out for coffee: Thank you. I enjoyed our trip down memory lane at Pennylane, remembering the simplicity of those good old days back when a "bad day at the office" meant we were told not to smoke in the stockroom or the realization that we were too broke to buy the newest Tom Waits. Good luck on your job search – I'll let you know what I find out.

Comments