RE: Applying On-Line

["David Knopf" <david -at- knopf -dot- com>]

David Wood wrote:

| >| It's pretty funny/ironic that a writer who has (I'm guessing
| >| here, but I
| >| feel pretty safe) sold more copies of technical books than
| the rest of
| >| this list put together would not make it past the initial
| >| resume screening
| >| process maintained by many members of this list.
| >|
| >| Like Laura said, your loss.
| >
| >I'm not dumb. If Laura Lemay ever decides to submit her
| resume to us, I
| >will certainly interview her. But that's because she's Laura
| Lemay. Not
| >all candidates have that advantage when submitting a resume.
|
| I think the point was that with this strategy, you could discount or
| penalize a candidate *equally*as*competent* as Laura Lemay
| without ever
| knowing it, simply because she or he didn't use styles.

Absolutely, and I said as much in the very same post. However, since
I've never had any trouble filling an opening with a highly qualified
writer, what's the problem? Does it matter to me if I missed a qualified
candidate as long as I ended up hiring a qualified candidate? Not
really.


| The
| focus should be
| on the resume's content & grammar, the candidate's
| accomplishments, and
| compatibility with your organization.

Well, yes and no. I put the focus on whatever the writer chooses to send
me. As I mentioned, I don't specify a submission format for resumes, but
if a candidate decides to submit a Word document, the second I open it,
I will see if it was properly constructed. It doesn't take any extra
time or effort on my part. (I don't perform a detailed analysis of the
style usage, for goodness sake, but I can immediately tell if no styles
at all were used, and yes I do take that as a bad sign absent
information to the contrary.)

This is not a screening process I'm recommending to others, nor is it a
particularly important factor in our hiring process. I'm much more
concerned with other things, frankly. (Ironically, we seldom even use
Word for the projects we do.)


| The candidate may have
| unknown and
| valid reasons for not using styles (like the person who wrote
| in HTML/CSS
| and imported to Word),

Absolutely. And if those were explained, or if I were having trouble
finding good candidates for a position, I might overlook the formatting
issues. And, of course, I can't see issues like this if someone submits
a PDF, plain text, or faxed resume.


| but there is no excuse for bad grammar
| or poor content.

I agree. Unless, of course, the resume came from an agency, in which
case I wouldn't necessarily assume it was the writer's error. (We don't
accept resumes from agencies, though, so this hasn't been an issue.)


| (That said, I'm a realist and am going to check my resume to
| make sure it
| uses styles only; :-) but I don't necessarily agree with this as an
| important criterion.)

This couldn't take very long, and it certainly couldn't hurt.

Regards,

David Knopf (mailto:david -at- knopf -dot- com)
Knopf Online (http://www.knopf.com)
Tel: 415.550.8367

RoboHelp MVP & Certified RoboHelp Instructor
WebWorks Publisher Certified Trainer
Member, JavaHelp 2.0 Expert Group
Member, RoboHelp Community Advisory Board
Co-moderator, HATT & wwp-users


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