Looking for a job in IT
As I'm looking for a new job, one of my colleagues points me to a job offer published on monster.
In order to apply for that job offer, I updated and reactivated my resume on monster, but then I remembered some of the things I didn't like when looking for a job on recruitment websites.
First, since my resume is now online on a job searching website, I'm getting more mails than I can read (if I want to read them carefully). I'm not complaining about that, I prefer having to many emails than getting nothing, but I can't answer to everybody.
Most of the emails I get are from IT consulting companies, and most of them are requiring me to send my resume in Microsoft Word format.
It's a shame that a company doing IT consulting is not able to read documents in other formats like PDF or ODF which are open standards. I don't want to buy Microsoft Word and I don't want to use it (and it does not run on Linux). OpenOffice allows export to Word file format, but the export does not always work well and I still don't have Word to check if my converted resume is still fine.
And some of them are asking for Word resumes but in fact their resume database software understand only .doc files, newer versions of Word files (.docx) are not supported (which is, unfortunately, also a standard file format).
I'm looking for a company who wants to invest in their employees (like Toyota for instance) and looking to be the best (best = doing good stuff, not being the best money maker). But I got emails starting like that:
Dear Candidate
or worse:
Bonjour, CV nº 8yv8sdfkjh7icin2v9
I usually don't speak to my computer, why should I write to yours? Please, I understand that finding good people to hire is difficult so you have to contact a lot of people to get someone, but try to find a way to do your job the right way. Send me real emails, specific to me, not a copy/paste from your usual template. I'm not going to answer to people who don't respect me enough to take the time to write me an email and prefer having a computer doing it for them.
Speaking of copy/paste, lots of the emails I got contain a detailed description about their company. Frankly, I don't read it. It's too long and usually it does not contain valuable information. Write about your company, 2 or 3 lines, not more. In any case, if I want to know more, I can visit your website and you are going to tell me the same stuff If we decide to have an interview together. And during that interview I will be able to ask you what I want to know about your company.
When working for an IT consulting company, you usually don't work for the company paying you, but for a client of your company. In some mails, the IT company tell me about the client they have and how I might be interested to work for that client. They tell me that the client is a reference in its domain, stuff like that. But guess what? They omit to tell me what is the client's domain. Telecoms, banking… I don't know.
So nothing about the functional part, and some pieces of information about the technical part. But sometimes there is also nothing about the technical part. So the email could be shortened to: "Would you like to work for one of our clients?".
In my resume I think I made it quite clear that I'm looking for a job in an eXtreme Programming team, but I got some mails with jobs description looking like a big waterfall project. Note for Human Resources Directors: people usually do a better job when they know what they are working on.
I think there is something fundamentally wrong in the way monster is working. I entered my resume on monster, I answered several more questions about what kind of job I'm looking for, how much I would like to be paid, if I mind traveling… Then people sent me emails, each time asking me to send them my resume and answering some questions… all that is already on monster and they contacted me through monster!
Looks like a lot of information loss, duplication, inefficiency…
Don't get me wrong, some mails I got were good. But the average quality was not very high.
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More stuff:
I love interviews. In the last one, for a software development job, I got several questions related to a specific part of the development, I can summarize the questions to that:
"- Do you know how to write documentation?"
Well, I thought the aim was to write software, as far as I know, users don't do their job with documentation but with software. They might rely from time to time on some sort of documentation, some other kind of documentation may be useful sometimes for other teams having to work/interface with the software. Of course there was mostly no questions about my abilities to write a working software doing what users want.