Sunday Open Thread

[lannamichaels]

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Sunday Open Thread! This is a weekly place for open discussion about how things are going right now.

And if you don't have anything going on right now you'd care to talk about, our alternate discussion topic is: What is a nifty thing you've done that has really helped you with your job hunt?

Have any suggestions for future open threads or ways to make this comm better? Leave them in comments! :)

Comments

[lannamichaels]

Right now I am revising my resume (of course) and going to apply to a couple jobs I found! \o/ I suffer from "must revise my resume!1!!!", even though what I have is a resume template and then I change the bullet points for every job I apply to. I still seem to be prone to thinking that having a side-bar or not having a side-bar will make all the difference in the world. Ah, trying to control things you can't control.

The most nifty thing that has helped me is having a Job Search Master Spreadsheet, in which I have things like lists of all of my jobs, with exact start and end dates (which, for an internship, requiring digging up old academic calendars, very fun), my exact start and end dates for uni and grad school, etc. This makes it really easy to copy/paste into job applications, especially that lovely place that wouldn't let me ever save one, but, nooo, always tried to recreate it from my uploaded resume, which meant that every time I applied, I had to fix absolutely everything. So frustrating.

I also have a Bullet Points For Resumes sheet, which has bullet points I can/have used, which makes it much easier to customize to hit keywords. I am also currently employed and what I do is every week, I send myself an e-mail of what I have done this week. This makes it easier to create bullet points for the future.

[x2xbandgeekx2x]

Oh wow, I think I need to steal your spreadsheet system! The bullet points for resumes sounds particularly useful.

[lannamichaels]

Here's the listing of the relevant sheets (aka, not the ones specific to my stuff):

1) Jobs applied to: (Job title, Where, Link to job description, Job description, Date applied to, What heard back, When heard back, Comments) -- yes, I copy and paste in the entire job description. I also save the page to my computer for reference
2) education (What, University, Start date, Graduation Date, Degree, Location, GPA, Notes)
3) employment history (Job title, Job start date, Job end date, Employer, Location, Salary, Supervisor/Boss, Comments)
4) References (Name, Title, Relationship, Address, Phone, E-mail, Other contact)
5) mailing addresses I have had -- this was necessary for when I had to fill out a background check paperwork
6) bullet points for resume (Job, Bullet point, Comments, Keyword/Category, temp - include in this resume?, temp ordering)

[amie]

Good luck!! I totally update my CV ALL the time. It's kinda fun and a tad obsessive.

The spreadsheet sounds useful - I should definitely do that.

[msilverstar]

What's helped me so far is finding the internal recruiter who can bypass the software. Outside recruiters have no flexibility. Tracking them down on LinkedIn seems to work.

[x2xbandgeekx2x]

I'm not job hunting just yet, but working on getting a proper portfolio together so I can start. Some days I deeply regret being a designer... I would much rather just rewrite my resume and go, instead of making sure I have a website, projects to go in said website, and some way of showing said portfolio in actual interviews. :(

[amie]

I'm kind of dreading this, right now I'm just working in admin/office type work while I'm studying but eventually would like to get into web/software designing/developing (I'm so undecided! probably web though) and am kind of stuck on where to start in terms of portfolios/displaying my work. Maybe it'll become clearer to me when I get some real experience :) good luck!