If you're smart and talented, but you can't get hired, then you are either not as smart as you think, or you're doing it wrong.
My bets are on You're Doing It WrongTM. You may know how to rewire a circuit board, but you have never sifted through a pile of boring, insubstantial CVs.
Traditional CVs Are Broken
The MS Word abominations most people refer to as "résumés" are full of lies, irrelevant buzzwords and horrible spacing. The road to any 20-page résumé is thin, thorny and overgrown with average. Read What Colour Is Your Parachute? on how to write a CV, then don't write it.
You may have sent your CV off to ten companies on CareerJunction or even personally filled a recruiting firm's spam folder with your hand-crafted "résumé". By doing the same thing everyone else is doing, you have consigned yourself to a sheepish crowd of mediocrity. Stop wasting your time.
To paraphrase Spolsky's post on Careers 2.0 and CVs:
...you would send a "resume" to a "recruiter," as part of the esoteric resume ritual with information like foreign languages spoken, whether or not you play ultimate Frisbee and your Microsoft-veteran status. This "information" was utterly useless at determining whether you could program or not, but if you spelled everything right and used suitable fonts, you could come in for a day of interviews at which you would be asked to perform mundane programming tasks on a whiteboard."
CVs are not completely useless, however. Having sifted through piles of mind-numbing CVs of prospective interns, they are useful for training my spam filter. If your CV looks like a lost kitten ad, it says a lot about why you're still looking for work. If the application email you sent me as a "cover letter" with your CV reads as follows [sic]:
Dear FreshCode Software Development
Application for Internship. I am <name omitted>,student in uwc.I saw the advert of Codding and that is what i was doing in my honous mathematics. here is my cv and the cover letter.
...there is a 100% likelihood that you are an idiot. I can't make this stuff up.
The Perfect CV is No CV Required
I get enough work via referrals and my websites that I have never had to apply for a job in my life. Being able to show that you know what you are talking about goes a long way toward automatically getting job offers.
"Oh lawd! But I ain't got no experience?"
Get some experience. Whatever trade or profession you are applying for, if you don't have any experience, you shouldn't be applying for a job. You should be out getting experience.
- Plumber? Plumb.
- Teacher? Teach by giving free math lessons.
- Programmer? Code something and put it on your website. Don't have a website? Wait. What?
- Writer? Write a blog about finding a job.
- Receptionist? Sorry, you're screwed. Too many of you.
- Whatever your job is, go do it and write a blog post about it.
After you've done something relevant to your trade, show me your Pokemans. Then we can talk about a job.
Being approached for a job is far better than applying for a job, but competitive markets (read: be really good or choose an unsaturated market) may require that you apply first. In the next installment, I will tell you step-by-step how to apply for the the job you want.
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