Job ads

[Phillip Mills]

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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