Job ads
Phillip Mills
pmills-Zd07PnzKK1IAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Mon Aug 23 14:50:46 UTC 2004
On Aug 23, 2004, at 10:15 AM, talexb-SBdzbUvMQDunS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org wrote:
> The intelligent job seeker will use a cover letter to explain that
> while
> their resume says ThisDatabase 7.1, version 7.3 (what the employer has
> specified) is almost identical in functionality .. that's exactly what
> a
> cover letter can be used for -- to fine-tune the resume to target a
> specific employer.
>
> And if the only thing separating you from getting a job is a
> difference in
> SQL flavours, that's really not a big problem unless you're expected
> to do
> some Pretty Magical Things with the system tables. For the most part,
> SQL
> is SQL.
Yes, in a practical world, I agree with both these concepts. The
problem is when the requirements are used as a literal filter function
so that the cover letter or logical explanation never gets to the
decision maker.
When I last hired people (1996, I believe), I was looking for Java
programmers. This was before there were any great number of those
available, so I was being flexible...OOP skills or C experience and
some idea of structuring code was fine. (Our project was one of the
first ever to get Sun's Pure Java certification.) I was seeing 300
applications for job postings, including some where the closest match
to requirements was carpentry. As I understand it, job ads in Toronto
today garner numbers closer to 2500 if they're widely distributed. The
point being that, since some kind of semi-automatic filtering is
necessary, the organizations should be more careful about criteria and
focus on true requirements instead of superficiality.
(BTW, another ex-VAX person?)
........................
Phillip Mills
Multi-platform software development
(416) 224-0714
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