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Subject:Forget about resumes? From:geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA Date:Fri, 21 Feb 1997 13:23:04 -0600
Tim Altom made a very important point: it's a lot easier to
get an interview if the person doing the hiring knows about
you from your various networking activities. It's also a
truism that some of the best jobs simply aren't advertised.
(I got my current job when a colleague informed me that the
company was moving to a new building; I wrote to ask
whether they were also expanding and in need of staff, and
it turned out that they were. They'd heard of me through my
work at my former employer, and were interested enough to
invite me immediately to an interview. You know the rest of
the story... but it's worth noting that they still wanted a
resume to look over before the interview.)
However, Tim overstated his point a bit. What about when
you're moving to a new city or country? Techwhirlers know
something about me from my frequent posts (plus a few
articles I've written), but I don't have any networking
contacts in Redmond (Wash.), Austin (Texas), or Cupertino
(Cal.)... and forget about Europe and Asia. I don't have
much prospect of getting any contacts there either, given
my travel budget. (I will attend every STC conference I can
afford--hope to see some of you in Toronto!--but that's not
the optimum solution because it's infrequent.) If I choose
to relocate to any of these places, a resume is pretty much
my only entree into the job market.
The moral? If you're staying local, you probably can
survive purely on the basis of networking, but even then
you're still going to meet folk who don't know you and who
want the resume or who do know you and want to refine their
impressions of who you are. If you're relocating, you
probably can't get by without a resume. In both cases, the
networking helps, but it's not the only solution or even
necessarily the most important.
--Geoff Hart @8^{)} geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Disclaimer: Speaking for myself, not FERIC.
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