Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Jobhunting with Less Pain, Part 2

The first part of this art­icle dealt with my motiv­a­tions for writ­ing it (very meta, eh?) and the basic steps you should take before start­ing out on the path to find­ing a new job — decid­ing what job you want, and pre­par­ing a CV that doesn’t suck.

The CV sec­tion alone turned into a colossal beast of a thing, such that the ori­gin­ally envis­aged single art­icle turned into a multi-part series, the true extent of which will only be known once I’ve fin­ished writ­ing it. In this second instal­ment I’m going to dis­cuss cover let­ters, the “hunt” itself, and per­haps round off with some words about recruit­ers, if you’re lucky.

Covering let­ters: Following on from the earlier dis­cus­sion of CVs, I made men­tion of their coun­ter­part: the cov­er­ing let­ter. This is a let­ter (as the name sug­gests) that often accom­pan­ies your CV, par­tic­u­larly when send­ing it to a poten­tial employer as part of a “cold” approach (e.g. apply­ing dir­ectly to them for a pos­i­tion, as opposed to being con­tac­ted by a recruiter act­ing on behalf of that com­pany). The cov­er­ing let­ter intro­duces you, sum­mar­ises your pro­file and explains why you’re apply­ing to the com­pany or oth­er­wise look­ing to work for them.

When build­ing your CV, you should be pre­pared to write a cov­er­ing let­ter to go with it. The neces­sity of this depends largely on how you plan to find oppor­tun­it­ies (more later), but if you’re apply­ing to com­pan­ies dir­ectly, you’ll 100% need a cov­er­ing let­ter, and it will need to kick 110% ass.

Many com­pan­ies value the cov­er­ing let­ter far more than the CV they enclose, as the 37signals art­icle I men­tioned in part one illus­trates. An employer look­ing at half a dozen CVs for an open pos­i­tion will likely be faced with half a dozen sim­ilar skill sets, and will rely on dif­fer­en­ti­at­ors like the cov­er­ing let­ter to help reach a decision. Your let­ter needs to con­vey genu­ine enthu­si­asm, interest and suit­ab­il­ity — be abso­lutely sure that it does.

As with the CV, the cov­er­ing let­ter should be format­ted immacu­lately — search online for English letter-writing guides if you’re not con­fid­ent doing this your­self. If you’re pre­par­ing tailored let­ters for each com­pany you apply to (and you really, really should — being found out after send­ing the same let­ter to ten com­pan­ies would be a major fail), be sure to keep the ver­sions sep­ar­ate and use the right names/addresses for each.

After read­ing the cov­er­ing let­ter, the poten­tial employer should be left in no doubt as to what sort of per­son you are and what you’ve been up to all these years — sub­sequent read­ing of the CV should only flesh out the details for them.

Finding oppor­tun­it­ies: Now that you’ve done all the prep work, the next stage is to find some jobs. Sounds simple enough, but there’s a lot to this part — it can be the crux of the pro­cess, or not much at all, depend­ing on your industry and how lucky you are in attract­ing offers. There are vari­ous meth­ods by which you can con­nect your­self with avail­able jobs, and you should be aware of the rel­at­ive mer­its and demer­its of each.

Use a ded­ic­ated job site: If you work in an industry where skills are eas­ily meas­ured quant­it­at­ively (e.g. IT), this will prob­ably be the best approach. Sign up on a job web­site; I recom­mend Jobsite if you’re in the UK — I believe it’s the largest such site, and of all the sites I tried it gen­er­ated the highest-quality leads and was among the easi­est to use effect­ively. Create your pro­file, post your CV, then sit back and wait for the phone calls and emails. Alternatively, search the site for open pos­i­tions and respond to them your­self. My engage­ment with Jobsite was zero once my pro­file and CV were pos­ted, and I got around five new leads every day for two weeks from the day I pos­ted. I cover advice on deal­ing with recruit­ers later on.

Apply dir­ectly to com­pan­ies you’d like to work for: This approach involves the most work, but argu­ably gen­er­ates the most valu­able oppor­tun­it­ies. The com­pan­ies you apply to may or may not have spe­cific vacan­cies advert­ised. You should always try to estab­lish con­tact with a spe­cific indi­vidual inside the com­pany in order to get your voice heard — search their web­site for a PR/HR Manager or phone their switch­board. Sending your CV (with cov­er­ing let­ter, of course) by snail mail is a sure­fire way to stand out from the email crowd.

Search job forums/classified ads: There are innu­mer­able for­ums and dis­cus­sion boards online where job oppor­tun­it­ies are pos­ted daily (Craigslist being one such example). Most news­pa­pers and magazines also carry a sub­stan­tial clas­si­fied ad sec­tion where open­ings are advert­ised. Often over­looked as an old-fashioned plat­form, these ads can often lead to valu­able leads.

Agencies: You can also sub­mit your­self to a recruit­ment agency and let them do the leg­work of intro­du­cing you to a job. Disclaimer: this method is the one with which I have the least exper­i­ence, and addi­tion­ally you can find your­self with fin­an­cial liab­il­it­ies towards the agent that places you. Proceed with caution.

Word of mouth: Worth a men­tion — ask around friends, fam­ily and (with cau­tion) col­leagues, and see if any­one knows someone with a pos­i­tion to fill. The value of this approach largely depends on the nature of your con­tacts, but it’s always pos­sible that you’ll strike lucky.

Discussions with recruit­ers or poten­tial employ­ers should always take place over the phone in pref­er­ence to email, as they’ll be able to get much more of a feel for your per­son­al­ity, and you will prob­ably find you can express your­self a lot more flu­ently and con­fid­ently without sound­ing as rigid and formal as you might in an email.

Recruiters: I’m con­stantly in two minds about recruit­ers — on the one hand they can be extremely use­ful, know­ledgable and bene­vol­ent people doing a lot of work to link you up with exactly the right role; on the other hand they can be dis­in­ter­ested, insin­cere goons who’ll pitch you any job going to get their com­mis­sion and move on. I was for­tu­nate enough to come into con­tact with one of the former, who ended up very pro­fes­sion­ally pla­cing me in the job I’m now lucky enough to have. Your mileage, as they say, may vary — so bear in mind the fol­low­ing tips.

Only deal with recruit­ers that spe­cial­ise in your industry. That way you vastly improve the odds that they’ll know what they’re talk­ing about. This equals bet­ter under­stand­ing of your skills and whether or not you’d be suited to the jobs they might have on their books. When you speak to them (prefer­ably by phone), pay close atten­tion to how they describe the role they’re offer­ing. From the IT-centric per­spect­ive, I learned a lot from the con­fid­ence (or lack thereof) in the recruit­ers’ deliv­ery of the tech­nical descrip­tion of the role, par­tic­u­larly in how they grouped the vari­ous acronyms together. If you hear implied group­ing of acronyms and terms that refer to dis­son­ant sub­jects, alarm bells should ring. A recruiter that knows their stuff will con­fid­ently reel off ter­min­o­logy in appro­pri­ate groups. A bad recruiter will try to sell you jobs that aren’t at all suit­able — this is a time-sink.

When you’re con­tac­ted by recruit­ers, log their details and brief inform­a­tion about the role in a spread­sheet so that you can eas­ily keep track of them and their status (e.g. “needs follow-up”, “declined”, “inter­view sched­uled” etc). After a while every­one sounds the same on the phone and you’ll struggle to remem­ber who’s who, par­tic­u­larly as most agen­cies seem to have names based on three-letter acronyms. Additionally you may be con­tac­ted by more than one per­son from the same agency. For each lead, ask them to email you a copy of the job spec so that you’ve got a canon­ical copy of the details to hand.

If the recruiter has come across you on a job site, offer to re-send them a fresh copy of your CV, as they will often be look­ing at a ver­sion that has passed through their internal sys­tems and been badly mangled as a res­ult. This was the case for most of the recruit­ers I spoke with dur­ing my search — in a couple of cases, parts of the doc­u­ment were miss­ing entirely. Make sure they’re get­ting the com­plete pic­ture — this goes for employ­ers too.

Recruiters are usu­ally fright­en­ingly enthu­si­astic, and most will do their utmost to get you to agree to set up a phone– or face-to-face inter­view imme­di­ately. Be polite but firm. If you think a job is worth it, accom­mod­ate it in your sched­ule. If you don’t, say so. Most of the time the recruiter would far rather you spoke your mind up front than pre­tend­ing that you’re inter­ested out of good manners.

Don’t allow your­self to be pushed into inter­views for jobs that you don’t think you’re suit­able for, or that don’t interest you. The recruiter will argue that they’re good prac­tise — and they are, but only if you need it. I didn’t do any, hav­ing been to what I con­sidered to be enough inter­views pre­vi­ously. There is, after all, a bal­ance between prac­tise and wast­ing your time.

Lastly, be sure to estab­lish early on what the fin­an­cial arrange­ment is between you, the recruiter, and the com­pany on whose behalf they’re work­ing. Make sure that, if they’re paid a find­ers’ fee or com­mis­sion, it’s the respons­ib­il­ity of the com­pany and not you.

That’s it for now. Check in tomor­row for the third and (hope­fully) final part of this art­icle, where I’ll attempt to cover inter­view tech­nique and wrap up.