How to Not Get a Job Interview

This one goes all the people who don’t count as unemployed, the many more who are underemployed, and the millions more discouraged workers across the nation who don’t count as unemployed because they have given up on finding a job at all. May it also help those who are officially counted as unemployed.

Have you ever wondered why when you send a monster stack of resumes, you might only get a few replies? And why if you talk to company recruiters on the phone you then don’t necessarily get called in to interview? I’d like to give you a few warning flags that make a prospective employer put your resume on the bottom of the stack.

I barely know you.

Don’t follow instructions. If the ad says to send a resume with cover letter, send a resume with cover letter. Without a cover letter, your prospective boss does not necessarily know what job you are applying for. Even if all the letter says is that there is a resume, you are applying for X job, you can be reached by Y means, and are looking forward to interviewing, write it and send it! If it says fax, fax it. If it says e-mail, e-mail it. If they want it sent in the regular mail, do it. Never ever hand write your cover letter unless the ad specifically wants a hand-written cover letter — and then ask yourself why they want it hand-written.

Carpet Bomb the Universe with your Resume Back in the old days, sending a resume meant spending most of a dollar by the time you added the cost of a printed resume, a cover letter, an envelope, and a stamp. This made you really think twice about whether you stood any chance at all of getting that job, particularly when you have no job and income. Faxes and e-mail makes sending a resume virtually free. As a result, people have the tendency to send resumes for positions wildly above and wildly below their capabilities. Resist this temptation. The odds of the HR manager looking at your resume and saying both “This person isn’t qualified to be Information Technology Director!” and “But it looks like they would be great for that opening as a Computer Technician” is very low. By the same token, do not send a resume for a job that you won’t take if it is offered to you.

Don’t bother checking the grammar and spelling in your resume. Everbyody mkaes tupos own adn thn. I mean, Everybody makes typos now and then. However, a resume is a document that is supposed to sell you to a company. It has to be right. Anyone who looks at this document will be thinking about how it demonstrates your command of English and your attention to detail — in short, your ability to do the job well. If you happen to hit one of the hiring manager’s grammatical pet peeves, you can just forget getting an interview. In case you are curious, mine is s versus ‘s. Be sure to run that cover letter through the spell checker, too.

Go ahead and put your wildest dream job in the “objectives” blank of your resume template. Objectives are a great place for a candidate to shoot him/herself down. Why should I hire you if your goal is to go back to school across the country? Unless your job search focus is very narrow, it is very difficult to write an “objectives” statement that will mesh with even half the positions to which you may send your resume for consideration. Just delete that paragraph. Microsoft did you no favor by putting it in the template.

Don’t leave a way to contact you. Right now, double check that your current phone number and e-mail address is on your resume. It is not Human Resources’ job to track down your contact number. And remember to check your answering machine and e-mail regularly. Which brings me to the next point….

Don’t bother to return messages. You sent a resume. They called! They want to talk to you! But they just missed you. They aren’t calling again; it is your job to call them.

The Phone Interview

Treat it as no big deal. Even if the phone interview is nothing more than setting up a time for a sit-down interview, remember that your phone skills and ways of speaking are being noted. Oh, and try to talk from a quiet place. Turn down the TV. If you are out and about, do what you can, but nobody wants to listen to your shopping trip while asking you about your resume.

Get moral support Don’t ask people in the background to help you answer an interviewer’s questions. Odds are that the interviewer is not interested in hiring you and your friend. For that matter, if you need help answering questions on the phone, the interviewer will suspect you need help answering questions in real life. Like, say, at work.

Offer to stiff your boss. If you say you can take some extra time off for an interview, or that you can bring confidential materials from your current job, it is hardly a logical leap that you are willing to treat your next boss the same way.

You don’t need directions, you’ve got MapQuest! If the person on the other end of the phone offers directions, take them. Those internet mapping tools do not always know the best and easiest way to get someplace. On the other hand, the person you are talking to is sitting there, in the place you are going. He or she goes there every day, and knows how to get there and little details like “avoid such-and-such road because they are doing construction.” Go ahead and download a map in case you have a problem finding the place, but use the directions of someone who knows how to get there.

I hope this frees you to go that extra step and get that job interview… and give you the opportunity to embarrass yourself in person.

Ok, Now What?

So Real ID got passed, snuck into a must-pass military funding bill that nobody dared vote against lest the next opponent’s campaign flog the idea however false that they voted against our troops! It was put there specifically to avoid debate and ensure passage. Now what?

If you are not sure why Real ID is bad, you can start with this nice summary from UnrealID.com. Here’s security expert Bruce Schneier on why it won’t actually make anybody more secure (and might even make us less secure). Here’s Declan McCullagh on what Real ID means to you (short version, getting your license renewed becomes a multi-day DMV odyssey, or plan on never getting on a plane or into a Federal office ever again for anything. How quickly can you lay hands on 4 pieces of easily verified documentation of your name, birthday, citizenship, gender, picture, and street address? What about your 16 year old kid/grandkid?). If that is not enough, here’s what the ACLU has to say. The bit about the Homeland Security Secretary having the authority to ignore any laws he doesn’t like to secure the border is confirmed here by the Washington Post. The whole thing may even be a violation of international law. Of course you should feel free to read the actual text of the legislation.

But none of this answers the question of what to do now. I propose a three-front assault:

Contact your Representative and Senator. They passed this thing, and they can pass a bill that cancels it. Remind them of that whole getting re-elected thing.

Support the groups that are leading the legal fight against it. The required changes in ID rules need to be in place by 2008. There is still hope, and plenty of people fighting this thing. Give money, give time, write letters, write your local newspaper, blog.

Apply heat to State officials. State officials already don’t like this thing. It’s expensive to implement, imposes not a huge but rather a freaking huge bureaucracy, will multiply the amount of time certain basic state services take to deliver, and if that weren’t enough will decrease public safety. How? Remember that the original purpose of a drivers license is to say you can drive? Because drivers licenses will be harder to get, more people will drive without them — perhaps badly, definitely without insurance. Go ahead and use a multi-pronged approach and write your state representatives, senator, and governor. Contact information is easily googled.

Carry on. Nobody can fight for your rights better than you can.

More Details Reveal More Devils

Ok, this is just wrong:

Elderly people with low incomes may lose some of their food stamps if they sign up for the new Medicare prescription drug benefit, the Bush administration said Saturday.

You know what’s even more wrong? The New York Times was scooped by an astute guy with a blog.

But back to the issues at hand. The Food Stamp Program is designed to help some of the poorest Americans, those who can’t even afford food for their families. We’re talking about folks who have to think twice about paying full price for house brand macaroni and cheese mix. The purpose of the Medicare Drug Benefit was to make it so Medicare recipients didn’t have to choose between groceries and medication — both of which they need to stay healthy and alive. But if you want help paying for your medications, you may loose your help putting food on the table.

What happened? Did Big Ag not pay as much to the Administration’s re-election fund as Big Pharma did?

The official excuse for this robbery is that since these people will have lower pharmacy costs, they will have more to spend on food and actually come out ahead on the whole deal. Let’s look at the cited example:

The drug benefit will be available to individuals with monthly income of $1,197 or less and married couples with income of $1,604 or less.

The guide gives this example of how the new law would affect a hypothetical Medicare beneficiary, Mrs. Smith, who receives $798 a month in Social Security. She does not receive Medicaid. She now pays $147 a month for medical expenses, including $51 for three prescription drugs. Her monthly rent is $421.

Under the Medicare drug plan, Mrs. Smith will not have to pay a monthly premium or a deductible. She will have a $3 co-payment on each drug, for $9 a month. Her medical spending will decline to $105 a month, from $147, for a saving of $42.

But Mrs. Smith’s monthly food stamp allotment, $27, will be reduced to $10 a month, because her “out-of-pocket medical costs have gone down.” The administration says she will come out ahead because “she still has $25 more cash in her pocket – $42 medical savings, less the $17 decrease in food stamps.”

Forgive me for pointing out that Mrs. Smith is paying far too big a percentage of her income in rent each month. Well over half her money goes to rent, when she should really spend no more than a third. Now, I don’t think you can find a decent place to live for $266 a month, so she might consider a roommate.

My second point is what 3 prescription drugs could she possibly be taking that add up to only $51 per month? Remember, she doesn’t have any coverage for that in the “before” scenario, so she’s paying full price. Even generics are going to run more than $17 each for most things that anybody would need to buy monthly. Oh, and keep in mind that last year prescription prices went up between 4.1% and 7.1% depending whose figures you like.

Finally, according to the official “after” numbers, Mrs. Smith is ahead $25 per month. That’s about 3% of her income. Of course she’s still spending over half her money on rent and 15% of her income on medical expenses. Economically she is still behind the 8-ball, particularly if she owns a car.

But hey, maybe she can afford to go crazy and buy a can of sale-priced tuna to go in her house-brand mac-n-cheese.

Another Hole in the Wall

I have for many years had an interest in education and the educational system. I think it may have started with a copy of Why Johnny Can’t Read or The Closing of the American Mind found on a discount book rack when I was in college. The one incontrovertible conclusion I have come to is that absolutely everything that happens in a school needs to be measured by two yardsticks: Does it promote student safety? and Does it educate students? Once we have established that it is safe and educational, then we can start asking more difficult questions, such as what it teaches and how well it does so. If it isn’t safe and educational, it doesn’t belong in school. The end.

Perhaps my ideas on education and education reform are biased by the fact that I read downright subversive things on the subject, such as the writings of Etta Kralovec and former award winning teacher John Taylor Gatto. Kralovec speaks to me about what schools should be like; Gatto speaks to that part of me that realized many years ago that most teachers are not out there to teach independent thought. There are of course many excellent exceptions to this idea, but they are yet a minority. Perhaps one in ten of the teachers and professors you remember wanted you to truly think beyond applying a narrow classroom concept to a narrow classroom example.

Nevertheless, I read a news item last night that caused my jaw to drop open. It involves a series of experiments in India involving unschooled children and unsupervised computer use. This IT expert set up computer kiosks in areas of poverty, positioned so that only kids could use them. And then he set the kids loose. The results are consistent:

With the computer switched on, the children press all the keys and every mouse button.

But Sugata has noticed a pattern emerging after the first initial chaos.

“You find that the noise level begins to come down, and from somewhere a leader appears.

“Often his face is not visible in the crowd, but he is controlling the mouse because suddenly you see the mouse begin to move in an orderly fashion.

“And then suddenly a lot of children’s voices will say ‘Oh, that pointer can be moved!’ And then you see the first click, which – believe it or not – happens within the first three minutes.”

Narput Singh has the mouse and takes control. And within three minutes he has clicked and, to his surprise and pleasure, inadvertently opened a game.

He doesn’t distinguish between educational games and those that are just for fun, and he is soon learning English words through a painting game with colours to fill in.

Whilst he is picking up the use of the computer directly, others around him are absorbing what he does.

For Sugata, it is this group learning which is significant.

“We know that in nine months the entire group of children in a village would have reached approximately the level of an office secretary, which means they know dragging and dropping files, they know downloading, they can play video and audio and they can surf the internet”.

That’s right. Within 3 minutes, leadership evolves, and they figure out how to use a mouse. Mr. Sugata’s conclusion: “Groups of children given adequate digital resources can meet the objectives of primary education on their own – most of the objectives.” And remember, these kids started the experiment barely literate and with no computer experience whatsoever. Of course, his idea of “meet[ing] the objectives of primary education” may differ wildly from your or mine or the Principal of the local school’s idea, but the concept is intriguing, startling.

Maybe schools are the problem.

In closing, it is not too late to make noise about the Federal Government’s back door effort to put together a national ID card system at state expense. This thing goes beyond the stated purpose of trying to keep drivers licenses out of the hands of illegal immigrants. Remember, the purpose of a Drivers License is to show that you know how to drive. Just because it gets used as identification does not make that it’s primary purpose. The fact that non-compliant cards “could not be used as IDs for boarding planes, entering federal buildings or even to pick up mail at the post office” makes them an internal passport, required at checkpoints everywhere. And you won’t be able to challenge it in court, in person anyway.

I once watched a cashier refuse to take a check from a man because he had a state ID card instead of a state drivers license. He looked at her as if she were out of her mind and simply said “I am legally blind!”

Another bit of anecdotal evidence showing that we need more ability to think independently in this country.

Outrage Fatigue

It seems like every day there is something new to be outraged about. It’s very tiring, trying to keep track of all the things that are just wrong, let alone trying to do something about it. The scandal of the day is greeted by many people with a sigh, followed by “Well, that figures. Tell me something else.” Another obstacle is set in the path of Getting Stuff Done, let alone Getting Ahead and our inner cynic just says to keep going. We are desensitizing to the various manufactured problems.

I call this condition “outrage fatigue.”

This administration has already given us a Medicare Drug Benefit that has caused the price of medicine to go up and provides corporate welfare to a select group of wealthy, profitable corporations. They have given us a bankruptcy “reform” that makes it harder for ordinary people to get on with their lives, oh, and provides corporate welfare to a select group of wealthy, profitable corporations. They would like to give us a Social Security “Reform” that will gut the system, slash benefits, and provide corporate “opportunities” to a select group of wealthy, profitable corporations. And even now the President is getting ready to unveil an energy proposal that, while he admits it won’t reduce the price of gasoline (no, he has to go begging foreign princes for that), won’t increase efficiency (despite the fact that increased CAFE standards would save more oil than would ever come out of ANWR), but it will provide corporate welfare to some of the most wealthy, profitable corporations on earth.

President Bush has nominated — and gotten approved — an Attorney General who called the Geneva Conventions “quaint” and a Secretary of State who may or may not have “respect for the truth.” He did not manage to get an easily bought adulterer who hires illegal aliens as the Secretary of Homeland Security. As for making a bully who thinks the UN does not exist our Ambassador to the UN, the Committee is still out on that one. And remember, folks, even though a Republican is the one who stood up and said no, it’s the Democrats fault.

And this brings me to Justice Sunday and the Nuclear Option — oh wait, somebody did a poll and decided that people don’t like the term “nuclear option,” so we should use “Constitutional Option” (even though the Constitution has nothing to do with it) and blame the Democrats for coining the term “nuclear option” (even though Republican Senator Trent Lott came up with it).

For the benefit of those who are unfamiliar with this brouhaha, here is the short version. President Bush nominated a bunch of judges last year. Ten of them were rejected for a variety of reasons, including not having a license to practice law, being bought and paid for by special interests, or just plain being nutcases. Here’s one that claims “that people of faith were embroiled in a ‘war’ against secular humanists who threatened to divorce America from its religious roots….” I’ll get back to that attitude in a minute, but let me finish the story. So President Bush resubmitted 7 of these people as nominees, and they are having a tough time. The Democrats are threatening a filibuster — keep talking and talking until somebody is willing to take an idea off the table just to make it stop. That seems harsh, but it is a way to protect us from majority whim. Senate Majority Leader “Dr.” Bill Frist, who famously diagnosed Terri Schaivo based on a videotape, is now threatening to take away the right to filibuster and force “a straight up or down vote” on these nominees. In support of this, he staged an event last weekend called “Justice Sunday” wherein a taped message was run at a variety of churches, with the idea that Christians would support this erosion of minority rights. This is being supported by megatelevangelist James Dobson.

They want to make this into an Us-Against-Them Christianity-Vs-Evil thing, when it is really about things like competence. It is insulting to you, insulting to me, insulting to the Lord that their Churches represent. How dare these people be outraged about judicial nominees and not outraged that a gay male prostitute had seemingly limitless access to the White House. How dare they forget that Article VI Clause 3 of the Constitution says “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” How dare they forget how the Pilgrims and many other groups of people left their homelands to practice their religions without Government interference. How dare they forget that we have tried theocracy on this continent, and found it lacking.

Oh, and how dare the churches that ran this message forget the obligations inherent to their tax-exempt status.

OK, they’re “nutty”

Some delegates to an international telecommunications commission have been bumped because they or their employers gave campaign contributions to John Kerry. A White House spokesman was actually quoted as saying “We wanted people who would represent the Administration positively, and–call us nutty–it seemed like those who wanted to kick this Administration out of town last November would have some difficulty doing that.”

Now, I respect the idea that they want their position supported, but this is the wrong way to do it. If they want their opinion voiced in this international, non-governmental, industry meeting, they should send an FCC delegate. This decision instead sets the standard of quid pro quo, a big banner saying that governmental support is directly related to contributions. In politics, that is often considered a bad thing. Wikipedia goes so far as to call such things “a breach of the public trust and a dishonest circumventing of the democratic process for special interests.”

In a way, it is refreshingly honest to say up front that in the future, political contributions will be a matter of simple extortion, and that if you support a loser, you can expect political retribution.

Wait… did I just say that?

Security Theatre Act VIII

We can’t have any of that reading on an airplane!

Apparently there is at least one TSA agent who believes there is a limit to the number of books you can bring on an airplane. (Thanks to BoingBoing) Inasmuch as these screeners have the authority to make their own judgments about what might be prohibited items, he is right because he says so. But in what way is it potentially “dangerous” to have more than two books in your carry-on? How could you use a third or fourth book as a weapon?

And what exactly is to stop anybody from buying as many books as they can carry at the newsstand on the other side of the security checkpoint?

Seriously, most people are not going to begin a vacation looking to finish out a dozen books. But what about traveling salespeople, who must carry catalogs and literature about their products? He can’t check that because he has to keep track of it; he has to know where it is and that it will really arrive at his destination. What about people returning from conventions or other events where they receive or even buy books and book-like materials? Sure would be a pain to pick up the latest edition of, oh I don’t know, “Procedures for Primary Care Physicians” at the big AMA convention only to have it confiscated by the TSA. What about students looking to catch up on some studying when they go home for Spring Break? And how do they define a book?

I think most of us would be a little more tolerant of this type of behavior if the TSA were doing a good job, but they aren’t. Even conservatives are unimpressed. The British press reports “Gaping holes” in US Security, including but not limited to thousands of unauthorized airport workers (dozens of whom were illegal aliens), ignored risks at smaller airports, airport workers who cause security breaches, and a soon to be missed deadline for baggage screening.

Nope, we are too busy worrying about how many books you have in your bag.

In closing, kudos to Howard Dean for standing up and saying what most Americans think: “The issue is: Are we going to live in a theocracy where the highest powers tell us what to do? Or are we going to be allowed to consult our own high powers when we make very difficult decisions?”

Brother, can you spare a Yen?

“For the first time in 14 years, the American workforce has in effect gotten an across-the-board pay cut,” the Los Angeles Times reports, adding that not only are wages rising slower than inflation, but more healthcare costs have been shifted to employees.

Add to this that the tech industry is slashing jobs — you remember, those good paying high tech jobs that we were all told was the future of our economy? Another 60,000 of them went away in the first quarter of 2005 alone. And you can’t blame it all on outsourcing. Part of the problem is “good-enough computing,” a problem (a problem for hardware and software vendors, anyway) where companies simply say “what I have works fine, why do I need more?” Many companies over-bought and over-hired, either in the Y2K buildup or in the Dot-Com boom. They are still working through the hangover capacity. They see no compelling reason to upgrade, no compelling new products that will clearly pay for themselves. They aren’t fixing anything that ain’t broke.

How sad it is that coporate earnings growth is slowing! Why, the S&P 500’s earnings are only expected to rise 9.5% That’s still faster than double the growth of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the Consumer Price Index (CPI, the official inflation rate) combined.

One very big factor contributing to the effective pay cut for the American worker and the “slow” profit growth of American companies and the high price of oil and the record price of gasoline and the record trade deficit is very simply the price of dollars. The United States has allowed the value of dollars to slide sharply over the last 3 years in what I believe to be a giant game of chicken designed to make American goods cheaper overseas, force China to de-link their currency from ours, and (hey as long as we are at it) make a whole lot of money for big oil and oil services companies like Halliburton.

There is the potential for things to get worse. Asian nations have been propping up the dollar, mostly by buying our bonds and financing our debts, because they cannot afford to let their goods get too expensive for Americans to buy. Americans buy a lot of Asian goods, and it would be bad for their economies if we stopped. Imagine if the price of a Honda or Toyota went up 25%. Look around the shelves of any discount store or fashion retailer and imagine if the asian products were 25% more expensive. If Asian products went up 10% in price, you would notice. What happens now — whether the American economy and prospects for the dollar get better or worse — depends on whether or not everybody continues to play the game.

In the end, either they stop the car, we get out of the middle of the road, or everybody gets hurt.

Nauseating News

It would have been easy to miss this news item today. The United States military has freed 2 Iraqi women, a 60 year old and her adult daughter. A Lt. Col. Clifford Kent denies that they were hostages intended to force family members to turn themselves in. Please pay no attention the note left in the family home reading “Be a man Muhammad Mukhlif and give yourself up and then we will release your sisters. Otherwise they will spend a long time in detention.” Also please pay no attention to the phone number on the note that, when a Reuter’s reporter dialed it, was answered by American soldiers. Kent added that Americans don’t take hostages or “blackmail” people into surrendering. Bull! American forces have been doing that kind of nonsense for 2 years, and it’s still an outrage. Amnesty International points out that such tactics are against international law.

So the next time there are new casualties in Iraq, the next time there is news of an insurgent attack, the next time you are told they “hate us for our freedoms” or the freedoms we are supposedly bringing the region, remember this. This story is not likely to be an isolated incident. Maybe it isn’t our freedoms they hate after all.

Don’t get me wrong, there is some good news coming out of Iraq — including getting a new President — but that is despite American actions, not because of them.

It’s About the Money

To listen to various Bush Administration representatives, everything is fine with the economy. Granted, Friday we found out that 110,000 jobs were created in March — less than half what the experts expected, and less than what is required to absorb new entries to the job market, more than the 86,396 announced layoffs — but that’s “good” because it means there is less inflationary pressure and therefore Agent Greenspan will be able to keep interest rates low, low, low. Of course the international currency markets think interest rates are going up. The parade of bad economic news continues, and Bloomberg is nice enough to summarize for us: personal spending rose faster than personal income; first time unemployment claims “unexpectedly rose to 350,000”; factory orders did not meet the levels forecast in February; gas prices keep rising; disposable income up, but not as much as it was down the previous month; oh, and that may only be because of tax refund checks. It might also have to do with the fact that consumer debt outstanding rose $7.5 thousand million, and $11.5 thousand million the previous month.

Here are figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics This page may be updated with new information in the future, so let me give you some of the meaty bits. There are officially 7.7 million unemployed people by the narrow, Department of Labor definition, 21.5% of whom have been unemployed at least half a year. This does not count the 1.6 million people who are “marginally attached to the labor force.” The number of employed people, 140.5 million, remained unchanged despite our growing population. Although the official average hourly wage was $15.95 — a figure which is distorted by small numbers of high wage individuals — the average weekly wages were $537.32. That’s a typical workweek of 33.7 hours.

So wages aren’t changing much, employment is barely keeping pace with layoffs let alone new workers. Expenses are rising. Oil has been over $50 per barrel for a while now, and even Greenspan is concerned about the effect that will have on the energy markets and the economy as a whole. Inflation isn’t a risk; it is here. Gas prices are at a new high at a time when Americans are spending at least 20 minutes getting to work. So much for saving money by living farther from work.

That house “a little farther out” may still be at the outer reaches of the family budget, making the gas prices a far bigger deal. Mortgage companies have been bending over backwards to make home-ownership happen for people who can barely afford it. Some of the tools they have been offering, in particular Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs) and “interest-only” loans, are going to bite these people in the wallet in the next few years. Here’s two takes on the subject, from the L.A. Times and The Christian Science Monitor. For goodness sake, if you have an ARM call your mortgage company today about locking in a permanent rate!

Between the mortgages preparing to implode and the fact that personal debt is rising by billions of dollars a month, that bankruptcy reform bill will be a real disaster for the working class if it passes.

In closing, I’d like to say something to my Texan readers. Your junior Senator went on record as saying something so jaw-droppingly mind-bendingly stupid that you cannot and should not ignore it. You remember Tom DeLay saying the judges involved in upholding the Constitution (to say nothing of doing what most Americans thought they should) would “answer for their behavior”? And do you remember Senator Lautenberg politely reminding Mr. DeLay that threatening a judge is a federal offense? Now Senator Cornyn of Texas has said, in veiled language, that violence against judges is their own darn fault because they make bad decisions. That Federal Judge in Illinois who came home to find her family slaughtered? She was asking for it (by putting bad guys in jail)! If that’s true, then we are all doomed. Texans, this guy is a first termer. Replace him before he gets any kind of seniority. The nation depends on it.

And I thought Phil Gramm said stupid things.