Advice on Advice

One very important item we would like to broach. We had some apprehension prior to implementing a facility to upload your resume to the web. We know exactly what it takes to get a great job in a fraction of the time it would normally take. A catch all resume is not the answer. However, we also believe in serving our customers and giving them the features they ask for. We were torn between our solution to get a great job and responding to our customer requests.

In the end, we knew we had to respond to our customers, but not because we want to blindly satisfy our customers with facilities that we believe are ineffective. We knew we had to respond to our customers, because we had to honor the best advice that we can ever hope to give anybody,

"Take 90% of the advice you receive."

Taking 90% of the advice you receive also means, "Do not be afraid to think for yourself." If our customers, the taberatti, have some marvelous, stroke of brilliance as to how to get their dream job and we deny them the facilities to carry it out well, that is anathema to us. So, if a job seeker sees some clever way to get a great job as a result of uploading something or changing their resume to do this or that and then uploading it the web - we have to let them do it. We feel good about that.

To illustrate with a real world scenario, when applying for a job one of our clients would submit his cover letter and resume accompanied by a listing of how their experience directly related to the posted job requisition. This was innovative and pertinent. Now this is not related to uploading anything to the web, but it is an example of thinking outside of the box and this we encourage everybody to do.

Alas, taking 90% of the advice you receive also means taking 90% of the advice you receive. So, if everybody is advising you to use action verbs to describe your accomplishments then you should probably do so. If everybody is advising you to demonstrate your impact on problems by quantifying them, (increased sales by 17%, reduced defects by 12%, etc) then you should probably do so. In conclusion, working within the guidelines of generally accepted job searching norms is a good idea. In the same vein, thinking for yourself and taking action on your ideas is good advice as well.

See Also

Resumes: Uploading Resumes to the Web