re: Question about sending one's resume to companies
Disadvantages to emailing your resume:
* Takes a lot of time
* Low return rate
* Makes your job hunting visible (I did a mass emailing and the manager at one company knew my manager at the time. Luckily, nothing bad came of the coincidence, but nothing good came of it either.)
http://www.petemoss.com/spamflames/ShifmanIsAMoronSpammer.html
heh. The person I work for is "famous" in his field. We get ~25 email a week from people offering to work for us for free. It was like that before the slump, it's stayed about the same, but we now get more from sales reps, programmers, etc. looking for paid employment than we used to.
I guess I'm old. I was hiring in a couple of industries before I got into IT. Back then, people had to land mail resumes with cover letters tailored to the recipient. Or, they hand delivered them. Sometimes they phoned, but, IIRC, phoning was considered the lazy way to do a job search. Back then employers had the upper-hand, too.
Today, email enables people to send hundreds of job inquiries and resumes at a time. It's also easy to quickly customize them with slightly different messages to those same hundreds.
The rules of the olden daze still apply I suspect. If the economy levels out and doesn't pick up, I imagine the rules of the employment game in IT/Telecom are going to look more like the rules of the game in conventional industries such as manufacturing.
Rule #1: you look for jobs by doing things that will get you noticed as different from the rest of the pack. In my estimation, emailing your resume does not set you apart from others. A telephone call to the appropriate office does, though you must be careful not to annoy or trespass on the land mines of subjective pet peeves. Sending a resume via land mail also tends to get you noticed more than an email--these days. Hand delivering your resume and chatting up the receptionist for klewX4's about current and future hiring will also get you noticed.
As I told Bonnie off list, were it me she contacted via phone, land mail, or even email (sans attachment), and were she polite and personable about it, I'd remember her. If I were impressed with her resume, I'd either look for a way to bring her on board when funds were available or send a head's up to colleagues who might be looking. However, since I'm in the information security business, an emailed resume in the form of an attachment indicates that the person is unfamiliar with what we do and is an unlikely candidate for any position with us. That doesn't mean I won't consider them at all. It just means that they are unfamiliar with some basic issues in Internet and computer security and that means more training (work) to bring them on board. But, alas, that's peculiar to the industry I'm in. Still, it's an example of the importance of following, to the T, any HR instructions for submitting resumes.
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