What do you do?

Borzak_sl said:

Not a fan of recruiters. I guess it varies by the industry and the recruiter. The ones that have contacted me in the past ask dumb ass questions like "They said they need someone with petro chemical experience, do you have any". No fucking Exxon is not in the petro chemical business and neither is Dow, BASF, etc....One last told me she didn't know what petro chemical was.

The last job I talked to a recruiter on they didn't know either. After I talked to them I printed out my resume and sent it via snail mail. It didn't take 5 seconds to figure out which company it was when she named the town of 20,000 lol. I got a call from the president of the company saying he got the resume and we talked for about 2 hours. By the time I started they had ended their dealings with that company. They never got my resume thru the recruiter they were dealing with.

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This is why I'm incredibly hesitant to deal with them. I've never had to in the past, so it's all new. My only real reason for wanting to speak to a recruiter is to ensure that I'm approaching a shift in my career trajectory in the right way.

So far, I've found it difficult to translate what I do in academic research into what companies are looking for. I have the skills they want. Hell, I teach those skills to grad students who they eventually go on to hire. The box I don't tick, and never can, is "must have 5+ years in industry facing roles..." because I've been busy doing academics for the last decade. My research portfolio is pretty damn deep, but I'm having to go back and rephrase things in a way that business understands. Formative evaluation becomes agile development, accessibility testing becomes multivariate or A/B testing, or clickthrough analysis, or one of a million other methods we call something else.

This portfolio thing is the most frustrating bit, because I keep a text CV already that is 50+ pages deep. What I do is not visual, but I'm being forced to turn a decade of research into easy to digest snippets with pretty pictures because some HR idiot back in the mists of time asked a researcher for a portfolio without realizing her mistake.

They could just be desperate, or maybe you're that much of a badass. I would definitely call and speak with the manager and let them know that before accepting the offer you want more information. I wouldn't really be worried, you could even talk with the manager about how you got the offer so quickly. I'm sure they just need to fill the position quickly.

btw if anyone is an IAM with a TS/SCI in the NOVA area and wants to be my boss, send me a pm.

Get me a good boss who gives me the same freedom my current (until 5 today) boss gives me and I'll let you ban whoever you want for a week. shhh Tuco will never know. Draegan can know, he'll just think it's funny.

Jobs in this area also have a habit of acting as if they are the ones in control. You often see discussions around offers circle around that. I've been a part of them and I am sitting there thinking "this guy is going to have other offers on the table, act you fools" but some people don't think that way.

No help here., I have to pull teeth from a company that offered whatever to put it in writing. I think they are good for it, but it never hurts to get it in writing.

One owner said write it down and send it to me and I'll sign it. Was tempted to throw in all kind of crazy shit to see if he read it or hold it over his head later.

Every place I have worked since high school has had a crawfish boil each spring. Normally knock the shop off at noon and invite some customers and everyone ate crawfish and drank beer on a Friday afternoon. Most shops sold their scrap and used it to pay for a boil. The places without a shop just invited customers and family to the boil and knocked off early one day.

I've probably made a 100 of these in different varieties. Or the gold old newspaper on a table works well too.

It's good for morale, and everybody owns a crawfish pot and boiler. Sometimes had a 1,000 pounds.

I'm up to my eyes in job hunt prep at this point, and if there's one thing I keep having to remind myself it's this: Don't get hung up on one specific job ad. I find myself falling into an old bad habit where I fixate on a specific job as the one i hope I get, when really I need to be peppering whole industries with my resume. It doesn't mean I shouldn't apply to the ones I want the most, but I also need to stop being nervous, pull the trigger, and send them my stuff.

Also photos. Dammit I hate taking photos.

What do you need the photos for?

Everyone will me I'm crazy, but I've never sent a resume in the last 20+ years that didn't get a call back on. That includes ones out of my area of specialization and in regions of the country that don't even have petro chemical where I thought I might like to live like Eastern TN.

I look up and see who the boss is, either the GM, owner, head of the department I would work in, president of the company, etc... and send it snail mail. The larger the business this probably wouldn't work. I get great response from people who may not know they were even looking but were tired of the people that latched onto one or two phrases from a recruiter. I also send along a lengthy cover letter.

In one case it not only led to a job offer they fired the HR lady apparently who wasn't doing her job. Skip the middle man if you can.

Edit - I can't imagine getting a resume with a pic on it. I've gone thru a shitload of resumes in the last month. If I get one that's too "frilly" I chunk it right off. No time for that lol.

People include photos with their resumes? Are you applying to modeling agencies?

Although I don't have a photo attached to my resume it isn't that uncommon. I think the idea is that it makes the resume more personal and less (excuse the pun) faceless. It is harder to say no to someones face than to someone's wall of text. If it actually works in practice who knows.

I guess it varies by industry. It's good for a laugh from the HR lady before she gives them to me and I chunk them.

Not to mention if a minority sent in a resume with a picture on it I can't imagine the shit that could ensue later for throwing it away immediately. It kind of goes with saying you are gay in an interview. I really don't care, but don't put the person hiring in a bad situation from the start.

Not that hard for me to say no to. Like I said I guess it varies, I'm a pretty no BS person as is the entire industry. I'm more about the text on the resume or cover letter. I've chunked resumes of people who sent resumes in with odd fonts, odd watermarks, and some on non white paper/odd colored paper. I do read that the point is to stand out. Like I said, guess it varies by industry.

The photo is for LinkedIn and my portfolio website, not the resume itself. It's all pretty tightly interwoven.

The company I most want to interview with places a VERY heavy emphasis on the cover letter, so I'm spending a lot of time on that. They hire less than 2% of applicants, so standing out is key. I just don't want standing out to mean quirky or strange formatting.

This is all circling back to Cad's soon-to-be sexratery. Cad make sure she includes a picture. Pref of jugs. Share on rerolled. It all works out.

You're looking in the wrong places Cad. I am sure you could find a 21 year old hot bitch with giant ass and jugs starving to work for a money bags