14 Comments to “A Beautiful Day and Career Counseling from the Pointy-Haired Boss”

1. West End Bound Posted: Apr 30th, 2007 at 6:27 am

   1 Glad you and Pam got to get out­side and enjoy the week­end — It was per­fect, eh? Sounds like your career-help agency is pre­sent­ing a few chal­lenges. I sure hope it ends well for you. Safe trails to Pam!

2. Scot Herrick Posted: Apr 30th, 2007 at 3:25 pm

   2 Fol­low­ing up on your about page and list­ing e-mail addresses. Cou­ple of items you could do: One, place an image of your e-mail address in the con­tact sec­tion such as I have done here: http://cuberules.com/blog/contact-scot/ It was a free image and you can see the site by click­ing on “Pro­tect your email address, make it an image!” below my PS. You can also get a plu­gin called “Obfus­cate E-mail” by Mike Smullin that takes any source code email and turns it into hex char­ac­ters mak­ing it vir­tu­ally unrec­og­niz­able to machines. I’d put in the sec­ond link, but spam com­ment soft­ware will often take the com­ment away. But, e-mail me if you need the link. And, since I hate spam.…I use both! ========================= The real ques­tion to ask on the resume is who they believe the hir­ing audi­ence is going to be for the resume. I have tech­ni­cal peo­ple, but you have to get past me in order to get to the nitty gritty tech­ni­cal stuff. I can tell when a tech­nol­o­gist is pulling wool over my eyes, but not all of the specifics. My peo­ple can. So, do you need a nar­ra­tive resume that out­lines what you actu­ally accom­plished for your com­pany and that’s the pur­pose of this resume? Or, do you have a tech­ni­cal resume that just shows how much you know and how you imple­mented what you know into projects? The hir­ing man­ager will be inter­ested in accom­plish­ments. The tech­ni­cal peo­ple will want to make sure you know your stuff — so they won’t have to carry you along… ;>)) Nice blog…Scot

3. ddrucker Posted: Apr 30th, 2007 at 10:08 pm

   3 Author Comment Bob –Pam thanks you for the best wishes. Scot — Thanks for the sug­ges­tion. I’ve actu­ally had to employ 2 dif­fer­ent meth­ods for each of my blogs in order to keep them from the Spambots. For this one, I’ve used the site ‘Con­tac­t­ify’, which pro­vides a free con­tact form (because the Free Web Host­ing I’ve been get­ting from i6 doesn’t appear to let me do a form that sends mail.) On my other blog, I’ve been try­ing to get the Con­tact Form plu­gin from Mike Cherim to work, but that seems to be hav­ing some ‘type mis­match’ prob­lems (have con­tacted him about it, and hope­fully will get some guidance). As for the Obfus­cate Email plu­gin, I’d like to insert the address in my con­tent (rather than in the tem­plate itself) so that sounds promis­ing. Don’t worry about the address — you’ve prob­a­bly pro­vided enough infor­ma­tion for me to be able to to find it through Google. By the way, I tried to con­tact you, but the link on your page doesn’t appear to work, and I can’t see the email image you are refer­ring to… Argh, what prob­lems these SPAM­bots have caused us all! Re. the resume, I think you’ve nailed it. I believe that they are tar­get­ing upper man­age­ment, rather than a tech­ni­cal man­ager to see this resumé, although I have to say that even with ‘The Peter Prin­ci­ple’ taken into con­sid­er­a­tion, they seem to be aim­ing pretty low on the know-how scale. About the ‘nar­ra­tive’, this is part of their ‘method’. I’ve had resumés which showed what I did for com­pa­nies, but this company’s for­mat is very much based on a struc­ture that is some­thing like: ‘For X’ (which is optional), ‘did Y’, which resulted in ‘impres­sive met­ric Z’. I can see the value in that. What I was not so hot on was chang­ing terms like ‘Web Appli­ca­tion’ or ‘Intranet Por­tal’ to ‘Web Site’, which strikes me as both vague and sim­plis­tic. But per­haps I’m being too tech­ni­cal here to see the for­est for the logic trees. Thanks for read­ing and con­tribut­ing! Nice to know that I’ve got folks out there check­ing it out!

4. Jan Karlsbjerg Posted: Apr 30th, 2007 at 11:05 pm

   4 By all means, do the “X: Y lead-to Z” thing, but keep the “web appli­ca­tion”, “intranet por­tal” etc. Those key words are going to make a dif­fer­ence to the hir­ing man­agers and the techies alike. “Web site” is about as unspe­cific as “IT thing” these days.

5. Nancy (aka 'money coach" Posted: Apr 30th, 2007 at 11:06 pm

   5 Ouch! I say, next time, go for the lunge! And until then, I won­der — is there such a thing as an ‘adden­dum’, a one-pager at the back of the resume that you could title, some­how, to be for the eyes only of the geeks in the dep’t? sort of a lightly-humourous acknowl­edge­ment that you’re in a spe­cific (read: elite) cadre, but don’t want to bore/confuse the rest of the world?

6. ddrucker Posted: Apr 30th, 2007 at 11:20 pm

   6 Author Comment An update: Got the con­tact plu­gin to work. It was just a bone-headed con­fig­u­ra­tion error on my part. Good thing, too. Jan — I agree — Web Site is a no-no and I’ll insist on that. Nancy — That’s an inter­est­ing idea. Not sure if it’s cov­ered by another sec­tion of the resumé, which they deem ‘skills’ (where some­one might put ‘SQL Pro­gram­ming’ or ‘UNIX Admin­is­tra­tion’). Iron­i­cally, my ‘skills’ usu­ally look too soft to be tech­ni­cal! (‘Con­cep­tual Map­ping’, ‘Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture’, ‘Pro­to­typ­ing’, ‘Require­ments Gath­er­ing & Analy­sis’ and ‘Usabil­ity Test­ing’ are not terms typ­i­cally used by most IT Staff, even if that’s what I do for them). So I find myself (as often hap­pens) in this strange gap between being unde­ci­pher­able to both tech­ni­cal and non-technical peo­ple. An attached sheet might do the trick, although there’s a chance it could get sep­a­rated and lost.

7. Anne Posted: May 9th, 2007 at 8:35 am

   7 Hi Dave. I thought long and hard before com­ment­ing, because I don’t have com­plete info, but it doesn’t sound like the agency you’re with knows what to do with you (duh), and they’re try­ing to force a round peg into a very square hole. (And if you strip out all the tech­s­peak from your resume, what does that leave you with?) Unless you really want a career in upper man­age­ment, it doesn’t sound like they’re help­ing you much. Do you have other options? –Anne H.

8. ddrucker Posted: May 9th, 2007 at 11:13 am

   8 Author Comment Hi Anne, I agree with you, and this issue caused things to come to of a head yes­ter­day. I tried to frame it as ‘Let’s get another pair of eyes’ to look at this resumé. I said ‘You’re not in the Tech Indus­try, and I’m not exactly sure what to put here, but why don’t we go to some­one who is and per­haps they can offer some insight. The strate­gist said ‘Well, it would be some­one like me who would be look­ing at this resumé. I am the one here who looks at tech hires for this com­pany.’ To which I wanted to say ‘Gee, that would explain a lot, since the com­pany is woe­fully behind in appli­ca­tion of tech­nol­ogy (IMHO, each client should have their own Wiki/blog with a some added struc­ture so each strate­gist could keep tabs on how their progress is going, the tests that they give could be inter­nal rather than out­sourced — and the results lost, as they were in my case), but I held my tongue. No point in mak­ing a direct insult when things clearly weren’t going well. Finally, after I must have said ‘I’m not com­fort­able with about 3 or 4 times, (includ­ing call­ing a ‘Web por­tal’ an ‘Online appli­ca­tion’ and replac­ing ‘Per­son­al­iza­tion’ with ‘Cus­tomiza­tion’) we had an awk­ward moment and then she just pasted what we had done so far into a new doc­u­ment and said that she would mail it to some­one else. I knew this was the way we are head­ing, and it’s a shame it has come to this. Part of the prob­lem is that I am look­ing for more of a man­age­ment posi­tion. It’s what I was head­ing for when I left my con­tract in Fidelity back in Boston (had I stayed there, I’m guess­ing that even­tu­ally it would have turned into a per­ma­nent posi­tion, but that wasn’t offered in 2005 so I had no teth­ers to keep me there). But just because I’m going to be doing more man­ag­ing and less designing/architecting doesn’t mean that I can shed those words from the resumé. It became clear, yes­ter­day, that I had lost a lot of con­fi­dence in my strate­gist, which is some­thing that I sus­pect hap­pens from time to time. I’m sure I’ll be labeled as a ‘prob­lem case’ by them, which I think is unfair. I had put my con­cerns into my feed­back to them. I felt that this lack of under­stand­ing of what I do could end up mak­ing us miss pos­si­ble tar­get com­pa­nies, could keep my col­lat­eral mate­ri­als from being up to snuff, and seemed to miss the cul­ture and expec­ta­tions of Tech Indus­try peo­ple. I even men­tioned that the resumé tem­plates that they gave me were embar­rass­ing and even broke some typo­graphic rules of thumb (ALL CAPS HEADERS for all sec­tions) and had some crude meth­ods of keep­ing every­thing on a page (one big table for all content). At any rate, we’ll have to see how this plays out. Thanks for your com­ment. I’ll let every­one know how this turns out. Cer­tainly instruc­tive for any­one in tech who is think­ing of using a career man­age­ment com­pany to help them get a new job.

9. pingback: Posted: May 9th, 2007 at 12:20 pm

   9 Loud Murmurs » Back in Town & Tips to US Visitors […] the com­ments on my post: A Beau­ti­ful Day and Career Coun­sel­ing from the Pointy-Haired Boss have sug­gested, my work with the strate­gist at Career Man­age­ment com­pany have had hit a rocky […]

10. isabella mori Posted: May 13th, 2007 at 4:53 pm

    10 hey dave as a for­mer full-time and still part-time employ­ment coun­sel­lor, i got quite antsy when i heard about the advice you got. first of all, and cor­rect me if i’m wrong, it looks like you have one or two resumes. in my expe­ri­ence, a suc­cess­ful resume is ALWAYS tar­get­ted to a spe­cific job/situation. for an upper man­age­ment job you apply upper man­age­ment speak, for a techie job you plug in some­thing else. if you were to look at one of my research resumes as opposed to one of my man­age­ment resumes, you’d think it’s a com­pletely dif­fer­ent person. (i once had a client with whom we man­aged to get the tar­get­ting of resumes and cover let­ters down to such a fine art that she would get inter­views for almost every one of her applications) i com­pletely agree with jan. a resume that would use the word “web site” would be embar­rass­ing. same thing with caps. geesh. and the attire? again, what you wear needs to be appro­pri­ate to the indus­try. i’ve seen some employ­ment coun­sel­lors seri­ously sug­gest­ing to con­struc­tion work­ers to show up in a suit and tie for an inter­view. you can image the results! a good rule of thumb is to wear indus­try and job spe­cific attire, with just a touch more neat­ness or for­mal­ity. it just so hap­pens that for a lot of jobs that ends up being suit and tie — but not for all. ok, i’ll get off my soap­box now.

11. ddrucker Posted: May 14th, 2007 at 9:12 am

    11 Author Comment Hi Isabella - Thanks for the advice. I think that part of the chal­lenge that we are fac­ing is that my role is some­where between a team leader and an inter­nal con­sul­tant (go-to guy) for User Inter­face. That’s a posi­tion that has some man­age­ment (or at least, project and team man­age­ment) aspects to it as well as some ‘in the trenches’ design work. The idea of doing 2 com­pletely dif­fer­ent resumés here might not work, since I will need to demon­strate if not equal parts tech and peo­ple skills, some degree of each of them. Not sure that I can tai­lor the resumé to each job appli­ca­tion, but there have been rel­a­tively few that are a good match for me lately, so it might be pos­si­ble if there aren’t many of them. I grit­ted my teeth and did the suit test for them. I doubt if I’ll wear the same dark suit for a real inter­view — I’ve always fol­lowed the same rule you described for inter­view dress (same as indus­try but a bit neater and more for­mal, and cer­tainly not off the scale in for­mal­ity, as it just makes you look silly and the hirer treat you as such). Why do they do still do it? I sus­pect it’s because many of their other clients have been new immi­grants who are not at all famil­iar with the sub­tleties of busi­ness dress (like one who appar­ently showed up for this lit­tle ‘test’ with a dark suit…and white socks.)

12. Pete Posted: May 22nd, 2007 at 2:53 pm

    12 sounds like you should trust your gut and get a new advi­sor. how is a techno illit­er­ate going to help you get a job at a tech com­pany? most of those hir­ing WILL under­stand technology. if you show up at an inter­view for a tech job with a suit and tie( unless it’s sell­ing tech to large cor­po­ra­tions ) you’ll prob­a­bly get laughed at or have your resume tossed in the cir­cu­lar file. If you’re look­ing for work and make it hard for poten­tial employer to con­tact you like this con­tac­t­ify thing does, they’ll be less likely to hire you. since you’re essen­tially say­ing my need to pre­vent spam is more impor­tant than my need to make it easy for poten­tial employ­ers to con­tact me. once you have a job then go nuts on the anti­spam stuff but what’s more impor­tant, get­ting a job or reduc­ing the spam? you could do some­thing as sim­ple as putting an email me line and post­ing a gif file of your email so peo­ple can read it and type it in but spam­bots can’t har­vest it. you also don’t have a phone num­ber listed.

13. ddrucker Posted: May 22nd, 2007 at 11:14 pm

    13 Author Comment Thanks for the feed­back, Pete. I’ve done a lot of what you say. I’ve sent a very strong email to the com­pany demand­ing that I be assigned to a dif­fer­ent strategist. As for the con­tact stuff, only this blog needs con­tac­t­ify; I’ve added a more stan­dard con­tact form to my busi­ness blog. No recruiter will be vis­it­ing this blog (and I’m fine with that — not ashamed, but this is my per­sonal live, not my busi­ness blog). For the most part, I’ll be con­tact­ing employ­ers, not the other way around, so I’m not too wor­ried about the con­tact forms. Now, as for my online port­fo­lio, that’s some­thing alto­gether dif­fer­ent. That is going to require a com­plete rework, as a talk I went to tonight at the STC made clear to me.

14. carolbrowne Posted: May 24th, 2007 at 12:04 pm

    14 I just found your post about look­ing for work. If you’re still look­ing for work, we recruit for sci­ence and high tech peo­ple at our agency, but are only able to help peo­ple who’ve col­lected E.I. in the last three years or who are cur­rently col­lect­ing. Have a look at our web­site at http://www.fwt.bc.ca if you’re inter­ested, give me a call. As for dress­ing in a suit and tie?? The small and mid-size IT com­pa­nies that I help recruit for expect more busi­ness casual — more like khakis and a dress shirt (nicely pressed, of course). But the big­ger guys (like ActiveS­tate or Busi­ness Objects) it may be bet­ter to go more formal.