Get Your Resume Noticed (By Us)
Five days ago we placed a post on craigs list for a virtual office manager / administrator. Since then we have received well over a hundred responses. Many we threw away immediately, others we filed for later. Some merited an immediate response directly from my personal iPhone. So, what was the difference?
I would never have guessed before hand, but it seems like experience had very little to do with whom we chose to interview. So many people were incredibly qualified, we had to turn to other selection criteria.
When we sat down to go through the first wave, Peter & I made three piles : Delighted, Satisfied, Unsatisfied. Then we began to sort.
The Big No-No’s
Go directly to unsatisfied. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Lose 3 Turns.
Here are some things that can make or break your resume:
1) Say hello to us. It’s polite and we like it. It lets us know about you and shows a touch of people skills. After all, you are supposed to represent us to the world. If you send an email with no message at all or “Please consider me for this job, here’s my resume”, then you pretty much got tossed. It feels like you don’t care and we just got spammed.
2) By the 70th resume, if anything was hard to read, you were out of luck. We would like to congratulate Jocelyn Whidden for having the most beautiful (we are a design company), clean, easy to read 1 page resume we have ever seen.
3) Spelling & Grammar are not optional. Have someone proofread the email and resume a few times before you send it. I sympathize as a linguistically challenged chap. That said, one of the primary responsibilities of an admin is to ensure the quality of everything that goes through their office.
4) You MUST include a resume. Sending an email asking if we want to see your resume is … well, enough said.
5) If you already have a full time job, a part time job and just want to squeeze in work into that final hour you have left while you are eating and washing yourself, you might want to be a bit more subtle about it. No one likes to feel like you’re their last priority.
6) It clearly says: Must be willing to drive to Santa Cruz a minimum of once per week. That means if you live in Pennsylvania or India and you respond, we will hold you to it. And no, we won’t pay your gas money.
Moving from Satisfied to Delighted
In the end, it was primarily about presentation, credibility & personality.
1) Three of our nine picks for the first interview round included great letters of reference. And they absolutely made a difference, especially the reference sent by Angela Williams. All of you wish you could get a letter like this one to flaunt. Recommendation Letter (Thanks for letting us post it).
2) All our picks wrote interesting, clear, concise introduction letters that gave us a peek into their personality, where they are coming from, and had a spark of enthusiasm & energy. Your ability to clearly convey a message is at the heart of what you will do for us. Communication is key for a remote team. More than anything, we are looking for someone that matches our culture and way of thinking. The better you show who you are, the easier it is for us to recognize you as our dream admin.
3) An intrinsic sense of organization. Beyond neat and organized. Two of our picks had letters/resumes that screamed a passion for precision. And that is why we are looking for support.
I could probably come up with more (but the call of work is strong in this one). Please let me tell you – this list is not to discourage you. If you are not passionate about detail and your strengths lie elsewhere, just tell us what those strengths are. If you don’t have the reference letter from the messiah himself, so what? I don’t either. This is meant to give you ideas and improve your odds if you haven’t sent in your letter yet. We are so grateful for all your messages and wish we could meet you all personally.
I will definitely add a post later today on how to interview with us.
We look forward to seeing your resume.
The big thing I want to bring up is that we are all just people. A lot of times I recall applying for work and not having a sense of the humanity on the receiving end.
As soon as you open a channel of real communication, you have been moved to the top of the stack.
That said, a phone call is not the way to do it when we are getting 100s of responses, but a personal note via email will be revealing (a good thing if you have nothing to hide).
-p
Oh – good point on the phone call. Though we highly appreciate the sentiment and in normal cases would love to chat, those of you who called found us grumpy. For that I have to apologize, but we just don’t have the bandwidth for that now.
It’s what we need you for.
Thank you for posting this great advice. I have questions: What email mode I must send, HTML or PLAIN TEXT? May I attach pdf/doc resume on email and how about the size of attachment?
Well, I live in different culture to apply job as freelancer or fulltime employee, most still snail-mail. I don’t know how to make good resume for native english speaker especially by email.
I hope you could give me an advice. Thank you, Shane.
Nurasto – These are great questions!
While I don’t know about most companies, I think our team would not mind an HTML email, as long as it remains easy to read. The only caution I would add is the human tendency to complicate things. The goal of using html styling would be to improve the reader’s experience, allowing them to quickly scan more effectively.
As for the format of your resume – PDF is preferable. Then Rich Text (rtf). Then Doc. The reason being that office documents are notorious carriers of viruses.
As for snail mail, with a small company like ours, by the time we get it, the job would probably already be filled.
Because we’ve started interviews, we’ve struck the idea of posting a How To on interviews until we’re done.
Gotta keep an even playing field.
Hi, Shane and Peter. Thanks for the info on getting noticed! I’m reading along and thinking to myself, “Okay, I did that and that and that so why haven’t I been called?” Then I read about the personality thing…I should have know with your website being unique and showing personality, which I stated was important to me in a previous post, my email cover letter should have shown you a bit of mine.
It’s tough coming from our end to know just how much personality to put into an email when requesting a job. Too much and some people might think your a bit odd – too little and folks might think your stuffy.
With that said, I would appreciate you taking another look at my resume – I have the qualifications – and given the chance to meet, I can show you my true personality!!
Thank you for ‘listening’.
D. L.
Hi D.L.,
Yes, we are looking for go-getters who match our culture and personality. We have had hundreds of resumes at this point and are sorting through them carefully. I can’t believe the number of incredibly qualified people. (Our thanks to the mortgage industry)
I know, blogging about the hiring process while in the middle of a hiring round is a touch unorthodox and risky, but we embrace the open communication.
Thank you for your comment.
Hi Peter & Shane:
I have guessed by now that I am not in any of your piles. but that is okay – I thought your blogs were quite insightful. I have to admit that I never did receive an acknowledgement from you. The craiglist ad email bounced back so I went online and emailed you both personally.
There is an interesting movement starting in the bay area, another word for “telecommuting” but targeted at office managers, personal assistants,legal and real estate assistants. It’s called Virtual Assistants. I started my own business a year ago, but my main focus is working with one company at a time either to clean up messes or start with a start up company creating process and procedures, acting as an HR generalist, Event planner for marketing, sales and training and office manager for day to day operations. After all systems are in place, I then help hire someone who can take over where I left off.
I applied for this position because I love working for software firms. I used to work for Oracle, SAP, Palm Computing before it was purchased by 3Com. I love the energy in the environment and working with diverse people.
I am looking for long term, for one company, as a virtual assistant. My husband surfs in Santa Cruz on a weekly basis, and I love the area, hence, I would drive up on Mondays and Fridays if I worked for your firm.
I wish you and your firm the best of luck finding the right fit. Please think of me for small projects, or to help out with overflow.
Your company sounds fabulous to work for, and I hope to one day have the chance to work for you.
Sincerely,
Ana Lucia Novak
650-771-0777
Hi Ana,
I’m so happy we decided to share our process in this manner. We are very new to the whole H.R. process and learning enormously. I can’t tell you how much we appreciate everyone’s comments. It’s kind of wild and unorthodox, but so far so good.
As for the receipt confirmation, you are totally right. Peter is setting up an auto-responder right now. Our email server actually went down for the first few hours after the ad was posted (to our personal horror). We are searching for a new host as a result. By the time we got around to getting everything organized, we found ourselves buried under so many resumes we are treading water. Actually this is the whole reason we need an admin!
I think your business idea is really well timed. Peter & I honestly believe in the contractor model of business. Thanks for the note.
First off, I want to appologize for the phone call. I got a little ahead of myself with excitement. I just want to thank you for this post. My resume stinks. In my effort to come off as capable and professional, I have rendered myself, (ugh!) booooorrrring! Qualified but putty colored, like a 15 inch CRT monitor. I know you are in the final stages of your search but I’ll send you my new resume…. as an homage! You guys deserve a great team member. Good luck with your search.
Patti Martin
good advice for sure, and I didn’t see the actual post…however, like most job postings on c-list, they are minimal if at all professional…it seems if you are seeking specifics in response to your ad you might have done everyone involved a huge favor by noting those specifics up front:
-cover letter required
-letter of rec a plus
-must be local
-etc.
-no transp reimbursement
that would certainly have cut down on your pool but very likely improved it quite a bit
the majority of the complaints you had seem like they could have easily been avoided with some pre-planning