Here are four simple tips that will help you jump ahead of nearly half the competition in your search for a new job.
Include Your Resume in Your Email to a Possible Employer
When replying to a job opening by email always include a text version of your resume in the email. Attached resumes create all sorts of headaches for hiring managers — everything from formatting issues to time-hogging downloads. Avoid any potential problems simply by including a readable text version of your resume at the bottom of your email. If you’re stuck on attaching the email, do both.
Tailor Your Email Response to the Actual Job
This drives me nuts. Too often I receive an email from a qualified applicant who hasn’t even thought about the job they’re applying for. “To get a full-time job” is not a mission statement. “Award-winning writer with a comprehensive knowledge of a variety of design software applications seeks employment at a publication that fosters growth” is more like it. This mission statement clearly outlines both what the person will bring to to the company and what kind of job they’re looking for. Make yourself more than another blank face.
And for those of you who respond to job openings with a blank email and an attached resume, you’re not getting responses for a reason.
Use Proper Grammar
It’s amazing how many responses I skip over, because they include run-on sentences, flagrant misspellings, etc. Your initial email job response is often your first and only impression that a hiring manager has of you. You need to demonstrate right off the bat that you know how to communicate effectively. In this day of age, when more and more of customer support is done by email, proper grammar goes a long way, and bad grammar guarantees an easy decision for the hiring party.
Only Include Relevant Work Experience
Only include relevant work experience unless you are accounting for large gaps in work history. Hiring managers are busy folks, and they often don’t have the time or patience to read about your McDonalds’ summer job from six years ago.
These few tips will help you jump ahead of a large portion of the competition. In this often clogged job market, you need to make sure not to hurt yourself with simple mistakes.
So I’ve decided to jump into the already saturated pool of work-at-your-own-desk in-your-own-home with-your-own-hours web jobs. I like making my own things, hours and money. Most of all, I like being able to control the direction my work goes in every project I take on. So creating my own web design business was a natural next step.
The Other Design House is the blanket name I’ll be using to create websites, logos, postcards, magazines and whatever else comes my way for small businesses in the greater Pocono area. Here’s an example of two sites I’ve created in the past — Alternative Remedy LLC and Cournalist.com. I also handled all the logos and graphics for both sites.
And here’s a few print ads and fliers I created for the Cournalist:
If you’re interested, you can check more of my work out on the site. Cheers!
• Dec. 14, 2009 — Moved into Christine’s place. Four girls. Smiles, pep and a menagerie of animals. Dogs, frogs, hamsters & a wily rabbit eat, sleep and shit along with the rest of us. It’s good. It’s winter though. The Poconos get blistery cold. The wind blows across frozen concrete and forest. No green; everything’s dead. Need to make a big oak fire, sip on matcha tea and practice no-think.
Top songs of late:
- What Would I Want? Sky — Animal Collective
- Fire It Up — Modest Mouse
- Kids — MGMT
- Take It or Leave It — The Strokes
- Spitting Venom — Modest Mouse
- After the Curtain — Beirut
- I love my car — Belle & Sebastian
- Electric Feel — MGMT
- Blue Ridge Mountains — Fleet Foxes
- Young Folks — Peter Bjorn and John
- Float On — Modest Mouse
- Nantes live in Paris — Beirut
- Last Night — The Strokes
- Postcards from Italy — Beirut
- Reckoner — Radiohead
- There There acoustic in Paris — Radiohead
- Cuckoo Cuckoo — Animal Collective
- Two Weeks — Grizzly Bear
This is a short by a wacky, up-and-coming illustrator named Pendleton Ward. Cartoon Network has announced it will premiere a series inspired by the short in early 2010. Can’t wait.
If you’re interested in checking out more of Ward’s stuff, go to his personal website, BuenotheBear.com. And for those interested, here’s a not-so-recent interview with him. Dude’s got a grizzly beard.
A day of quiet gladness
Mount Fuji is veiled
— in misty rain
- Basho
Clouds will separate
the two friends, after the migrating
wild goose’s departure.
- Basho
In my medicine cabinet,
the winter fly
has died of old age.
- Kerouac
And finally one of my own. Easily inspired by the previous greats and the once limitless wonders of our great backyard, Nature — now terminally threatened by all of us. I wrote this under the great blank Colorado sky on a summer night a few years back. As I sat in a jacuzzi with Christine and her mum, we counted stars racing across the sky like rockets in space with nothing on our minds and our senses in bliss.
Under the empty sky
my mind grows still
— the new moon
“How to meditate”
— lights out —
fall, hands a-clasped, into instantaneous
ecstasy like a shot of heroin or morphine,
the gland inside of my brain discharging
the good glad fluid (Holy Fluid) as
I hap-down and hold all my body parts
down to a dead stop trance — Healing
all my sicknesses — erasing all — not
even a shred of a “I-hope-you” or a
Loony Balloon left in it, but the mind
blank, serene, thoughtless. When a thought
comes a-springing from afar with its held-
forth figure of image, you spoof it out,
you spuff it out, you fake it, and
it fades, and thought never comes — and
with you joy you realize for the first time
“Thinking’s just like not thinking —
so I don’t have to think
any
more.”
HINT: It has something to do with your subscription to US Weekly!
COMING TO GRIPS WITH APATHY, CELEBRITY AND REALITY TV
The more I delve into radical works of the past whether it be anarchist, socialist, Buddhist or Hindi, I realize that the common plight of man and his sisters has more to do with himself than his oppressors. The ones who make a difference and change the world, as we know it, bringing down the despots, tyrants and more recently, corporations in step, always withstand indifference. But unfortunately, they’re not part of the status quo.
There’s a shocking though precedented collective indifference that permeates through the masses, their daily lives overwhelmingly controlled and directed by a privileged few who care little for their plight. We are the masses after all, and they are the few, but still we sit idly by, especially in the present, and allow this privileged minority to divvy out gross injustices unpunished. Haven’t we lived this before? Haven’t the masses stood as one and risked themselves as individuals with the hungry belief that they together would prevail over this tiny class of oppressors, and ostensibly won before? Didn’t the French Revolution teach us anything? What of the American Revolution?
Because we’ve tuned out of reality and tuned into reality TV, celebrity gossip, full bellies and bank accounts, we’ve allowed society to once again fall into a reprehensible battle between the haves and have-nots. As our appointed leaders (laughable that so many people think that we live in a true democracy with directly elected officials) engage in negligent and nefarious wars abroad with our money, which makes us accomplices by the way, albeit unconscious ones, we continue to shovel their shit, support their faceless and inhumane corporations and fund their wars, their opulence and their ruthlessness. We sacrifice our sons and daughters in these efforts and turn our shoulders to the slaughter of hundred of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the displacement of millions more who overwhelm neighboring countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan with people they can’t feed or clothe.
And all of this is happening on our dime! You’d think we’d take responsibility for the lives we’ve destroyed in pursuit of dubious desires such as oil. Still, we drag on shoveling their inorganic hamburgers, fries and milkshakes into our sick stomachs careless to the devastating effects it has on our health. And we do the same for our children. Worse yet, we cast our only real vote, the mighty dollar, for the same few corporations, government heads and billionaires who thrive off our inequalities and disorganization.
My largest fear is that all of this is being swept under the rug. No one talks about it. College classrooms are overwhelmed with YouTube, Jessica Simpson and Keystone Light. Most people can’t point Iraq out on a map.
Where does the answer lie save for revolution (a pitiful hope in these clued-out times)? I don’t know. But the first step is to pull out a good book, preferably one not stuffed down your throat in high school English, and learn. Learn about the world around you, learn about the plight of millions and learn what people have done in the past to fight tyranny. Mass awareness is our only real hope.
