Are cover letters a different thing in the US? Over here mine have always been pretty minimal and a brief summary, and your CV is the bit where you make yourself sound like the greatest thing since sliced bread.
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Drake ChambersLay out my formal shorts.Registered Userregular
I have an otherwise awesome coworker who has hideous bad breath. If you're in a car with him it fills the interior to the degree that if you sit behind him you're still not safe.
I am resigned to never be able to do anything about it.
Do ... Do you work with me?
Maybe? My door is open now - look for the office with Epic Handshake in chalk just inside the entrance.
At the moment, I'm at my folks' helping to attend to my father's not-stroke, so I'm not in the office.
Also I don't have a job right now.
Just get super paranoid about coffee breath and onions on my sandwiches and things like that.
Then, good news! It's not you.
+3
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
I'd probably say my biggest gripe with job hunting is cover letters.
I continuously hear that hiring managers find them useful but it is one of my least favorite things to do in the universe.
Here's a page of me trying to sell you on me? Time for me to brag for a page about how awesome I am? I thought that my resume was designed to do that?
I guess I can't say cover letters are the least favorite thing.
That belongs to personality quizzes.
I ain't even give a fuck about cover letters any more. I used to find them really hard but after a few years copywriting I'll knock out a cover letter in five minutes that'll have you inviting me to the christening of your first born. Other things that got knocked out of me: any reticence about arbitrarily describing myself as "passionate" about absurd job concepts that no one is passionate about.
Would you say you're passionate about writing cover letters?
No, I'd say I'm passionate about the creation of peer-to-peer marketing materials that provide vital enablement for the recruitment team.
I'm a fucking monster, I don't give a fuck anymore, someone should put me in the ground.
Yeah I'm a fucking piece of human garbage. Any time you're helping another department to do something, it's enablement. If you're creating a document, you're creating enablement materials.
Are cover letters a different thing in the US? Over here mine have always been pretty minimal and a brief summary, and your CV is the bit where you make yourself sound like the greatest thing since sliced bread.
The resume is where you put all the stuff you've done, the cover letter is where you tell them why you're the best candidate for the job.
Are cover letters a different thing in the US? Over here mine have always been pretty minimal and a brief summary, and your CV is the bit where you make yourself sound like the greatest thing since sliced bread.
I'd say they serve substantially the same purpose, but that people will scrutinize them more carefully, and generally expect way more ass-kissing, research effort, and personal promotion.
Similarly, there's a whole lot of resume sculpting and stuff that's just expected over here that I wouldn't have bothered with in the UK.
I think my 'cover letter' for my UK job was literally an email that said "hey you guys do cool stuff and I'm interested in cool stuff, let me know if you want to talk".
Drake ChambersLay out my formal shorts.Registered Userregular
We're probably still more than a year out from when my wife will start applying for jobs again but she's expressed anxiety about how difficult it might be to get back in to the job market after having taken a roughly 8-year hiatus as a stay-at-home-mom.
Anyone here have any experience or advice in that area?
In other news, my practice now has more women than men.
Not in the highest position though, don't be daft.
But in a few years who knows.
+15
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Kane Red RobeMaster of MagicArcanusRegistered Userregular
Someone just sent me a link to a 29MB Excel file that was a table with maybe three lines of data. They extended the table to infinite length for "future entries."
+48
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
So someone in our financial division emailed the president about being upset by being thrown under the bus as essentially "part of an environment of corruption" which is the legal stance the administration us using to cover up the fact 5 executives misappropriated funding. As legal has over 100 employees, one imagines how absolutely pissed off folks are about being lumped in with that in writing and press releases.
His response was to stamp it as received, then send an open letter back to the person (name removed at least) saying "I'm sorry you are offended" (verbatim) and then just to repeat the same line the lawyers have been pushing.
This morning I attended a breakfast for Black History Month, he hijacked introducing the plenary speaker to talk for fifteen minutes about how he is a great leader for us during these troubling times.
+3
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
In other news, my practice now has more women than men.
Not in the highest position though, don't be daft.
But in a few years who knows.
That's one of the shitty things in architecture. University, like 60% women, offices, maybe a 50-50 split, but as soon as you look at positions above maybe team lead it feels like 90% men. The whole field is at least partially stuck in the middle of the last century.
This morning I attended a breakfast for Black History Month, he hijacked introducing the plenary speaker to talk for fifteen minutes about how he is a great leader for us during these troubling times.
I subscribe to the Tywin Lannister Theory of Leadership. Anyone who must proclaim their own effectiveness as a leader is not, in fact, an effective leader.
This morning I attended a breakfast for Black History Month, he hijacked introducing the plenary speaker to talk for fifteen minutes about how he is a great leader for us during these troubling times.
I subscribe to the Tywin Lannister Theory of Leadership. Anyone who must proclaim their own effectiveness as a leader is not, in fact, an effective leader.
Would it bum you out to know that this was cribbed from Thatcher
This morning I attended a breakfast for Black History Month, he hijacked introducing the plenary speaker to talk for fifteen minutes about how he is a great leader for us during these troubling times.
I subscribe to the Tywin Lannister Theory of Leadership. Anyone who must proclaim their own effectiveness as a leader is not, in fact, an effective leader.
Would it bum you out to know that this was cribbed from Thatcher
Eh. Broken clocks are right twice a day. Sometimes.
This morning I attended a breakfast for Black History Month, he hijacked introducing the plenary speaker to talk for fifteen minutes about how he is a great leader for us during these troubling times.
I subscribe to the Tywin Lannister Theory of Leadership. Anyone who must proclaim their own effectiveness as a leader is not, in fact, an effective leader.
Would it bum you out to know that this was cribbed from Thatcher
Nah, because somebody undoubtedly said something to that effect before Thatcher, someone else before that, etc and on and on.
Dance just said it wayyy better, and on a more widely viewed medium. So it belongs to him now.
We're probably still more than a year out from when my wife will start applying for jobs again but she's expressed anxiety about how difficult it might be to get back in to the job market after having taken a roughly 8-year hiatus as a stay-at-home-mom.
Anyone here have any experience or advice in that area?
What field of work is she thinking about working in?
My inability to give directions has reached a new low.
Previous nadir was directing someone to the centre of town, three km away, instead of the place they actually wanted to go, which was about 50m around the corner. Just now, someone asked me how to get to "[x] Hall", and as usual I blanked on all locations, directions, and my own name, so in the interests of safety I told him to go a bit further and ask someone else.
After I walked 20 feet I realised that we were actually in "[x] Hall".
(Another time someone asked me how to get to Building Q and I told them we didn't have any cows on campus, but that was in germany and in german those are almost homonyms.
As an added bonus, I worked in Building Q).
I gave up on doing cover letters or tailoring a resume, at least for the bigger coporations. It seemed like the effort involved vs. the chance a human actually read them was not a great ratio. Plus lots of the big companies store your resume in their system anyway, so when you apply to multiple positions you can just point to the one electronic saved version, rather than re-entering fields or writing and uploading a new one.
I didn't see any noticable change in response rate. It either passed the algorythm/HR and I got a call or it didn't.
I have once, and only once, cold-emailed a company with no listing for my experience but still got a job offer. This was a very small startup (<10 people), in a country where my engineering degree was difficult to find (they had imported half their staff from out of country already).
I would never expect a big, or small but well known, company do anything but spam filter unsolicited employee offers.
In other news, my practice now has more women than men.
Not in the highest position though, don't be daft.
But in a few years who knows.
That's one of the shitty things in architecture. University, like 60% women, offices, maybe a 50-50 split, but as soon as you look at positions above maybe team lead it feels like 90% men. The whole field is at least partially stuck in the middle of the last century.
Yes! It's really pretty shocking when you think about it, you get to the top and suddenly it's a sea of old white dudes.
+2
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Drake ChambersLay out my formal shorts.Registered Userregular
We're probably still more than a year out from when my wife will start applying for jobs again but she's expressed anxiety about how difficult it might be to get back in to the job market after having taken a roughly 8-year hiatus as a stay-at-home-mom.
Anyone here have any experience or advice in that area?
What field of work is she thinking about working in?
Her professional background is in office management. She last ran the administrative side of an academic department of a university, primarily dealing with budget, schedule, and university policy compliance.
That said, I don't think she'll be super picky. She'd embrace the dream of being able to Work From Home! if it were possible. She's a fantastic writer.
One of her concerns is that her best references are going to be professors that have since retired. Does that have a significant impact on the value of the reference?
David_TA fashion yes-man is no good to me.Copenhagen, DenmarkRegistered Userregular
There's a thing regarding my department that'll be announced, I think, on the 18th. It's a rather big thing that's been a well guarded secret when our Chief Financial Officer isn't taking loud phone calls about it while wandering the halls. It has three different code names. We still refer to it as just If, because nothing has been signed yet so it's If. It's a thing.
The board of our Irish parent company visited today and the chairman got up in front of everyone during lunch to give a speech about how happy they are with how the company is going and in the middle of it, he just casually mentions If. Just dropped it in, like it was already announced and everyone knew. Just dropped it like my jaw. Literally the only saving grace is that he did it so casually that I don't think anyone actually noticed.
Took every inch of willpower not to just go
+11
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Drake ChambersLay out my formal shorts.Registered Userregular
My inability to give directions has reached a new low.
Previous nadir was directing someone to the centre of town, three km away, instead of the place they actually wanted to go, which was about 50m around the corner. Just now, someone asked me how to get to "[x] Hall", and as usual I blanked on all locations, directions, and my own name, so in the interests of safety I told him to go a bit further and ask someone else.
After I walked 20 feet I realised that we were actually in "[x] Hall".
(Another time someone asked me how to get to Building Q and I told them we didn't have any cows on campus, but that was in germany and in german those are almost homonyms.
As an added bonus, I worked in Building Q).
In order to avoid embarrassment in these cases, I automatically adopt a character before I respond as an "excuse" for why I don't know where the hell anything is (when in fact I should).
+1
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L Ron HowardThe duckMinnesotaRegistered Userregular
My inability to give directions has reached a new low.
Previous nadir was directing someone to the centre of town, three km away, instead of the place they actually wanted to go, which was about 50m around the corner. Just now, someone asked me how to get to "[x] Hall", and as usual I blanked on all locations, directions, and my own name, so in the interests of safety I told him to go a bit further and ask someone else.
After I walked 20 feet I realised that we were actually in "[x] Hall".
(Another time someone asked me how to get to Building Q and I told them we didn't have any cows on campus, but that was in germany and in german those are almost homonyms.
As an added bonus, I worked in Building Q).
In order to avoid embarrassment in these cases, I automatically adopt a character before I respond as an "excuse" for why I don't know where the hell anything is (when in fact I should).
I sometimes think about prefacing my directions with "Just so you know, I have some kind of situational dyslexia that literally only kicks in at moments like these" but I suspect that's far more conversation than most people want.
"I don't know" is safest, but kind of dispiriting on a personal level.
In more professionally relevant ineptitude, I've now ordered the wrong sized breakout adaptor twice.
Vacillating between trying again and hoping it's a goldilocks situation, or just slinking off in embarrassment and wiring it all by hand.
In other news, my practice now has more women than men.
Not in the highest position though, don't be daft.
But in a few years who knows.
That's one of the shitty things in architecture. University, like 60% women, offices, maybe a 50-50 split, but as soon as you look at positions above maybe team lead it feels like 90% men. The whole field is at least partially stuck in the middle of the last century.
It's waiting on the current era of presidency and c-level positions within the architecture and engineering firms to finally fuckin retire or die. Seemingly the folks just below that layer get that changes absolutely need to happen. But the top layer is still insisting their world view is correct and its holding back the promotion of women beyond a certain level almost across the board. It's pretty fuckin infuriating to watch sometimes.
Most hiring is kind of a crapshoot and with small companies they may not have a real discipline in it and thus not post jobs properly, so reaching out in the dark isn't the worst play.
Also, tomorrow is technically my 2nd day on my new job and I'm already straight to meeting one on one with c suiters. Oddly enough it's the same one that laid me off. Well, let's hear it for professional adventure.
My inability to give directions has reached a new low.
Previous nadir was directing someone to the centre of town, three km away, instead of the place they actually wanted to go, which was about 50m around the corner. Just now, someone asked me how to get to "[x] Hall", and as usual I blanked on all locations, directions, and my own name, so in the interests of safety I told him to go a bit further and ask someone else.
After I walked 20 feet I realised that we were actually in "[x] Hall".
(Another time someone asked me how to get to Building Q and I told them we didn't have any cows on campus, but that was in germany and in german those are almost homonyms.
As an added bonus, I worked in Building Q).
In order to avoid embarrassment in these cases, I automatically adopt a character before I respond as an "excuse" for why I don't know where the hell anything is (when in fact I should).
I sometimes think about prefacing my directions with "Just so you know, I have some kind of situational dyslexia that literally only kicks in at moments like these" but I suspect that's far more conversation than most people want.
"I don't know" is safest, but kind of dispiriting on a personal level.
In more professionally relevant ineptitude, I've now ordered the wrong sized breakout adaptor twice.
Vacillating between trying again and hoping it's a goldilocks situation, or just slinking off in embarrassment and wiring it all by hand.
So in other words we need to promote you to Executive Vice President of Direction Giving yesterday based on your extensive direction giving experience.
+6
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Drake ChambersLay out my formal shorts.Registered Userregular
It has just barely started snowing here.
I'm tempted to leave the office real soon for fear of my commute being 4x if I wait until 5.
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The Escape Goatincorrigible ruminantthey/themRegistered Userregular
Also, tomorrow is technically my 2nd day on my new job and I'm already straight to meeting one on one with c suiters. Oddly enough it's the same one that laid me off. Well, let's hear it for professional adventure.
Are you back at the same company or is this some Twilight Zone shenanigans where they'll always be one step ahead of you?
In other news, my practice now has more women than men.
Not in the highest position though, don't be daft.
But in a few years who knows.
That's one of the shitty things in architecture. University, like 60% women, offices, maybe a 50-50 split, but as soon as you look at positions above maybe team lead it feels like 90% men. The whole field is at least partially stuck in the middle of the last century.
Yes! It's really pretty shocking when you think about it, you get to the top and suddenly it's a sea of old white dudes.
I think it's called networking. :rotate: If you're feeling irrationally charitable.
Drake ChambersLay out my formal shorts.Registered Userregular
So I left work and now I'm working from home. Wife and littlest are out picking up little, so it's as quiet a home office as I'll ever have for the next 45 minutes or so.
When I started writing at Penny Arcade there was a meeting where I was asked "hey, for Acq Inc we want like a super over-the-top corporate vibe. Are you able to write like, incredibly bland, wordy marketing bullshit that's totally unintelligible to normal humans?" and I just sort of stared into the distance for about ten seconds and then flatly said
In terms of cold calling, I've actually had a lot of success sending resumes to companies that didn't have postings up. Maybe....half my jobs have been that? A quarter referrals, a quarter actual postings. One came from explicitly showing up and doing a resume drop with a secretary. Rarely have I worked somewhere with a staff larger than 150-250 though.
Cold calling a random employee though with a resume? Haha, nope. I'd usually go for an HR e-mail, and if none existed, reach out to the general inbox instead.
Follow-ups are something I usually do after the given response time (e.g. being told I'd hear back in two weeks, then not hearing back at all) to try and nudge HR along. Which worked! ........and should have been a red flag in both occasions when I had to do a couple of them, joined the companies, and surprise surprise - both were serially mismanaged.
Also resumes, cover letters and interviews become a thing that you can pull off ridiculously easily once you've done them enough. Turns out after you hit your 60th or 70th interview it becomes incredibly hard to give a fuck about your replies to any of the questions, which just makes you seem infinitely more confident and cool.
We're probably still more than a year out from when my wife will start applying for jobs again but she's expressed anxiety about how difficult it might be to get back in to the job market after having taken a roughly 8-year hiatus as a stay-at-home-mom.
Anyone here have any experience or advice in that area?
What field of work is she thinking about working in?
Her professional background is in office management. She last ran the administrative side of an academic department of a university, primarily dealing with budget, schedule, and university policy compliance.
That said, I don't think she'll be super picky. She'd embrace the dream of being able to Work From Home! if it were possible. She's a fantastic writer.
One of her concerns is that her best references are going to be professors that have since retired. Does that have a significant impact on the value of the reference?
Hmm, I don't have any experience in office management or being a stay-at-home-mom.
Two pieces of advice that I can give are:
1) A friend told me about Informational Interviews, in which he asked friends, acquaintances, and professional contacts for a more informal meeting where he could learn about the company and the demands of jobs within the company and where the company could learn about him. This seems like a more low key way that your wife could get her self out there; framing it, and using it, as a way to get up to date to on the current job market and demands of different positions. He was able to land jobs twice using informational interviews.
2) I had a work gap, though much briefer, that I had to overcome when I was recently looking for a job. Something that I encountered, was that during the period I was not working none of my self worth was wrapped up in being employed. I was enjoying myself doing other things. However, when I had difficulty getting back into the job market my self worth began to drop and that kinda blindsided me. Even though I didn't think I drew much self worth from a job, our society and culture values work a lot and, as much as I like to think I am counter cultural in ways, it is still very much my culture and its values still affect me . Even though one might be doing valuable things, like say raising kids and building a family, I think that the struggle to find a job, especially after a hiatus, can be depressing, and even crushing.
I don't know if your wife will have the same struggle I did, but if so, she should remember to remind herself of what she is, or was, doing that is/was worthwhile, enjoyable, or gave her self worth and confidence during her 8-year stint as a superhero, err... I mean stay at home mom.
NebulousQ on
+2
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
Also, tomorrow is technically my 2nd day on my new job and I'm already straight to meeting one on one with c suiters. Oddly enough it's the same one that laid me off. Well, let's hear it for professional adventure.
Are you back at the same company or is this some Twilight Zone shenanigans where they'll always be one step ahead of you?
Ha! Same company. They ended up creating the group I had been advocating for, so I applied and got the job.
Also, informational interviews are magic and easiest way to bypass bs HR practices. Two reasons:
1. Managers hate those practices more than you do.
2. No one ever asks you about what you do, so someone willing to sit and listen that then wants to do it with you goes a long way in the Goodwill Dept. Even if it doesn't sound good, you leave knowing something you didn't and neither of you waste time on a bad fit.
It also saved me from my first layoff as I was just ok on paper but had an instant connection with the manager.
In large companies it's the best way to expand your network and jump business units.
@Moriveth drove my car to Wendy’s (a mile from us) and he drove at about 15 mph and my car was still skidding all over the place.
I do actually want to do work this week! And I can do *some* from home but I’d prefer to be in the office. But unless this snow melts by tomorrow (unlikely, it’s already dropping to a low of 15 Fahrenheit/-9.5 degrees Celsius) I’m not going to be able to go in tomorrow and more snow is forecast for Thursday and Friday...
Posts
Then, good news! It's not you.
you deserve it just for "enablement"
Yeah I'm a fucking piece of human garbage. Any time you're helping another department to do something, it's enablement. If you're creating a document, you're creating enablement materials.
The resume is where you put all the stuff you've done, the cover letter is where you tell them why you're the best candidate for the job.
I'd say they serve substantially the same purpose, but that people will scrutinize them more carefully, and generally expect way more ass-kissing, research effort, and personal promotion.
Similarly, there's a whole lot of resume sculpting and stuff that's just expected over here that I wouldn't have bothered with in the UK.
I think my 'cover letter' for my UK job was literally an email that said "hey you guys do cool stuff and I'm interested in cool stuff, let me know if you want to talk".
Anyone here have any experience or advice in that area?
In other news, my practice now has more women than men.
Not in the highest position though, don't be daft.
But in a few years who knows.
His response was to stamp it as received, then send an open letter back to the person (name removed at least) saying "I'm sorry you are offended" (verbatim) and then just to repeat the same line the lawyers have been pushing.
This morning I attended a breakfast for Black History Month, he hijacked introducing the plenary speaker to talk for fifteen minutes about how he is a great leader for us during these troubling times.
That's one of the shitty things in architecture. University, like 60% women, offices, maybe a 50-50 split, but as soon as you look at positions above maybe team lead it feels like 90% men. The whole field is at least partially stuck in the middle of the last century.
I subscribe to the Tywin Lannister Theory of Leadership. Anyone who must proclaim their own effectiveness as a leader is not, in fact, an effective leader.
Would it bum you out to know that this was cribbed from Thatcher
Eh. Broken clocks are right twice a day. Sometimes.
Nah, because somebody undoubtedly said something to that effect before Thatcher, someone else before that, etc and on and on.
Dance just said it wayyy better, and on a more widely viewed medium. So it belongs to him now.
What field of work is she thinking about working in?
Previous nadir was directing someone to the centre of town, three km away, instead of the place they actually wanted to go, which was about 50m around the corner. Just now, someone asked me how to get to "[x] Hall", and as usual I blanked on all locations, directions, and my own name, so in the interests of safety I told him to go a bit further and ask someone else.
After I walked 20 feet I realised that we were actually in "[x] Hall".
(Another time someone asked me how to get to Building Q and I told them we didn't have any cows on campus, but that was in germany and in german those are almost homonyms.
As an added bonus, I worked in Building Q).
I didn't see any noticable change in response rate. It either passed the algorythm/HR and I got a call or it didn't.
I have once, and only once, cold-emailed a company with no listing for my experience but still got a job offer. This was a very small startup (<10 people), in a country where my engineering degree was difficult to find (they had imported half their staff from out of country already).
I would never expect a big, or small but well known, company do anything but spam filter unsolicited employee offers.
Yes! It's really pretty shocking when you think about it, you get to the top and suddenly it's a sea of old white dudes.
Her professional background is in office management. She last ran the administrative side of an academic department of a university, primarily dealing with budget, schedule, and university policy compliance.
That said, I don't think she'll be super picky. She'd embrace the dream of being able to Work From Home! if it were possible. She's a fantastic writer.
One of her concerns is that her best references are going to be professors that have since retired. Does that have a significant impact on the value of the reference?
The board of our Irish parent company visited today and the chairman got up in front of everyone during lunch to give a speech about how happy they are with how the company is going and in the middle of it, he just casually mentions If. Just dropped it in, like it was already announced and everyone knew. Just dropped it like my jaw. Literally the only saving grace is that he did it so casually that I don't think anyone actually noticed.
Took every inch of willpower not to just go
In order to avoid embarrassment in these cases, I automatically adopt a character before I respond as an "excuse" for why I don't know where the hell anything is (when in fact I should).
I'm playing catch up, but this is something to bring to HR and Management.
I sometimes think about prefacing my directions with "Just so you know, I have some kind of situational dyslexia that literally only kicks in at moments like these" but I suspect that's far more conversation than most people want.
"I don't know" is safest, but kind of dispiriting on a personal level.
In more professionally relevant ineptitude, I've now ordered the wrong sized breakout adaptor twice.
Vacillating between trying again and hoping it's a goldilocks situation, or just slinking off in embarrassment and wiring it all by hand.
It's waiting on the current era of presidency and c-level positions within the architecture and engineering firms to finally fuckin retire or die. Seemingly the folks just below that layer get that changes absolutely need to happen. But the top layer is still insisting their world view is correct and its holding back the promotion of women beyond a certain level almost across the board. It's pretty fuckin infuriating to watch sometimes.
So in other words we need to promote you to Executive Vice President of Direction Giving yesterday based on your extensive direction giving experience.
I'm tempted to leave the office real soon for fear of my commute being 4x if I wait until 5.
Are you back at the same company or is this some Twilight Zone shenanigans where they'll always be one step ahead of you?
I think it's called networking. :rotate: If you're feeling irrationally charitable.
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
yes
Cold calling a random employee though with a resume? Haha, nope. I'd usually go for an HR e-mail, and if none existed, reach out to the general inbox instead.
Follow-ups are something I usually do after the given response time (e.g. being told I'd hear back in two weeks, then not hearing back at all) to try and nudge HR along. Which worked! ........and should have been a red flag in both occasions when I had to do a couple of them, joined the companies, and surprise surprise - both were serially mismanaged.
Also resumes, cover letters and interviews become a thing that you can pull off ridiculously easily once you've done them enough. Turns out after you hit your 60th or 70th interview it becomes incredibly hard to give a fuck about your replies to any of the questions, which just makes you seem infinitely more confident and cool.
3DS Friend Code: 0216-0898-6512
Switch Friend Code: SW-7437-1538-7786
Hmm, I don't have any experience in office management or being a stay-at-home-mom.
Two pieces of advice that I can give are:
1) A friend told me about Informational Interviews, in which he asked friends, acquaintances, and professional contacts for a more informal meeting where he could learn about the company and the demands of jobs within the company and where the company could learn about him. This seems like a more low key way that your wife could get her self out there; framing it, and using it, as a way to get up to date to on the current job market and demands of different positions. He was able to land jobs twice using informational interviews.
2) I had a work gap, though much briefer, that I had to overcome when I was recently looking for a job. Something that I encountered, was that during the period I was not working none of my self worth was wrapped up in being employed. I was enjoying myself doing other things. However, when I had difficulty getting back into the job market my self worth began to drop and that kinda blindsided me. Even though I didn't think I drew much self worth from a job, our society and culture values work a lot and, as much as I like to think I am counter cultural in ways, it is still very much my culture and its values still affect me . Even though one might be doing valuable things, like say raising kids and building a family, I think that the struggle to find a job, especially after a hiatus, can be depressing, and even crushing.
I don't know if your wife will have the same struggle I did, but if so, she should remember to remind herself of what she is, or was, doing that is/was worthwhile, enjoyable, or gave her self worth and confidence during her 8-year stint as a superhero, err... I mean stay at home mom.
Ha! Same company. They ended up creating the group I had been advocating for, so I applied and got the job.
Also, informational interviews are magic and easiest way to bypass bs HR practices. Two reasons:
1. Managers hate those practices more than you do.
2. No one ever asks you about what you do, so someone willing to sit and listen that then wants to do it with you goes a long way in the Goodwill Dept. Even if it doesn't sound good, you leave knowing something you didn't and neither of you waste time on a bad fit.
It also saved me from my first layoff as I was just ok on paper but had an instant connection with the manager.
In large companies it's the best way to expand your network and jump business units.
@Moriveth drove my car to Wendy’s (a mile from us) and he drove at about 15 mph and my car was still skidding all over the place.
I do actually want to do work this week! And I can do *some* from home but I’d prefer to be in the office. But unless this snow melts by tomorrow (unlikely, it’s already dropping to a low of 15 Fahrenheit/-9.5 degrees Celsius) I’m not going to be able to go in tomorrow and more snow is forecast for Thursday and Friday...