Job Hunting - Tumblr Posts
Writing a CV:
The perfect resume for someone with no experience (by businessinsider)
Guide to writing a CV
Common grammar mistakes to avoid on your CV
How to explain a gap in your CV
How to overcome common CV issues
What not to do on your CV
Should I include hobbies and interests in my CV?
CV layout: dos and don'ts
Free CV template
School leaver CV template
CV templates and tips
More free CV templates
Example CVs
How to tailor your CV to different industry sectors
Writing a Cover Letter:
How to write a cover letter
How to overcome common cover letter problems
Graduate cover letter template
Career break cover letter template
School leaver cover letter template
Free cover letter template
Referencing:
How to get a reference
References: workers’ rights
How to deal with employment references
How to include references on a resume
Interviews:
How to answer common interview questions
How to prepare for an interview
The interview itself
Advice to help you ace the interview
Answer curveball interview questions
101 Interview Questions You’ll Never Fear Again
Second interview questions and answers
Telephone interview questions and answers
Questions you should not be asked
What to wear to an interview: bloggers’ top tips
Group interview tips: do’s and don'ts
Interview questions for employers: What you should be asking
What not to do at interview
What job can I do?
How to decide what job to look for
How to find a new job
How to search for jobs online
Jobs in the retail industry
Jobs in the engineering industry
Jobs in the fashion industry
Jobs in the IT industry
Jobs in the motoring industry
Jobs in sport
Jobs in the education industry
Jobs in the energy industry
Careers with animals
Jobs in the media industry
Jobs in the leisure & tourism industry
Jobs in the catering industry
Jobs for history lovers
Jobs for geography lovers
Jobs for English lovers
Jobs for maths lovers
Volunteering:
7 Simple ways to make the best of volunteering
Benefits of volunteering
Benefits of mentoring
Volunteer Abroad
Resignation:
Resignation letters: What you need to know
Resignation letter templates
How to resign
How To Resign & Hand In Your Resignation Letter
Redundancy /Job Loss:
Deal with redundancy
Things to do if you lose your job
Claim Jobseeker’s Allowance
Jobseekers allowance (UK) overview
15 tips to survive a job loss
How to Cope With Job Loss and Move On
At work:
How to start a new job
How to have a good first day
How to hold onto your job
How to handle bullying in the workplace
Commuting: how far is too far?
How to get a promotion
Summer workwear advice
Office Style Trends 2015
What You Can (and Can’t) Wear to Work
Dealing with stress at work
How to deal with a brutal boss
Dear internet,
Please give me all the advice you have on writing cover letters. Like, the closer you can get to literally just writing a cover letter for me, the better. Ok bye.
Satelliti, everyone. What an album... essential listening, I dare say, for people with an inclination towards jazz/electro/idie/fuzz/prog, any of those things, really.
More pics to follow soon.
I crafted my application for this job last night to get this response today. Said job is no longer being recruited for yet still remains on Indeed and their careers site today. I give up with job searching, it's just getting stupid now.
Does anybody have a place where they are hiring people right now. I need a job right now. Respond if you know anybody
I... hope what this job posting means is AUTOMATING verifying light outputs... I... I don't want to be hired as a guy in the corner who points at a LED and yells "THE LIGHT IS ON!" all day....
What is even some companies websites...
Jobhunting is WILD! Your self confidence is just on a roller-coaster. One minute doubting yourself because of the ghosting and rejection (Yes, big professional companies behave with all the maturity of a 14 year old boy starting online date and being very bad at it) and the next I see shit like this... And I am CLEARLY very competent compared to whoever did... this... I am not taking that picture out of context, that is a picture on the website of a electronics firm that intents to convey (checks notes)... enviromentalism.... Which perfectly explains the well dressed sitting dude with the birdnest with eggs he clearly stole from some birds, winking at me and making fingerguns... Did someone go to their companies unused stock photo assets and hit random? What is happening??? Source:
Designing systems with bad Implicit requirements. (Or "How to hire people")
So I have now been searching for a job for half a year. And my conclusions are: 1: Firms have no idea what they are doing. Everyone seems to make decisions based on "What does everyone else seem to be doing" and "How do we usually do it" 2: Your ability to do the job you are applying for have just about 0% relevance in your ability to GET the job you are applying for. I am a system designer. And when I get exposed to the same system many times, I start analysing it... it is basically habit at this point. And so, I analyse the hiring system. And so far, in all the interviews I have been to I have been asked 0 technical questions about the position I was interviewing for. 0! And the little feedback from my many many rejections, was that I am not experienced enough. That is weird. Because they are making a judgement on how skilled I am... while not at all asking about or testing my skills. And yesterday I finished my internship (Which is a polite way of saying "Whored myself out for 0 pay in desperation"), and I was in a room with 6 other developers, who was all programming in C++ And I now know that I was the best person at C++ in that room. Better at designing with C++, building architecture with it, knowing the intricacies of the language, and knowing tiny weird little details of the language. (Most of the others had different things they were better at. More experience working with the specific hardware and codebase at the job, better at 3D simulations and so on) So I know for a fact I am skilled. But the system that is build with these interviews mean that skills do not count. Someone with terrible skills who had done bad work at their student job for a year or two, is considered better than someone with great skills who have focused on their studies and not yet worked. Or said in another way. There is an implicit specification in the system design that "Being good at the job, does not matter" So since that is frustrating as hell, and I need to interact with it to stop my brain exploding, lets design a better system. First of all, the OBVIOUS (That... I have seen exactly 1 firm do):
Blind recruitment.
The system will have to have humans make the judgement of who to call into interviews, and who to hire. And humans are stupid little monkeys with brains with software that is just layers covering for the flaws of other layers. Yes, that also means you. And yes, that also means me. We are biased. You can try to constantly evaluate yourself, be aware of your biases and minimize them, but they cannot be removed. Science ( as in, the entire field , have tried for several hundred years and is only "meh" at it So how do we deal with that? We remove the info that is not needed, and can ONLY lead to bias. A person making a judgement if a candidate should be called in for a interview should not know the candidates gender, name, age, skin color, religion or any other information we can remove that have no value when it comes to figuring out if that person will be good at their job. You may think "Hey wait a minute. Age DOES have an influence!" but it really does not. EXPERIENCE does, and SKILL does, and PERSONALITY does. And yes, age can corelates with that. But that is it... it MAY corelate with it. We want to value 2 people with the same skills, and the same experience in the relevant fields equally, if they are 25 or 40.
Throw the letter of motivation in the trash where it belongs
Does the job you want someone to do involve writing 1 page marketing nonsense, that follows standards that is never specified? No? Then stop making people write those to get the job. Letters of motivation should only be required for jobs where the skills you showcase by WRITING such a letter is relevant.
Throw the CV in the trash where it belongs
There is NO agreement on what a CV should contain. You can find people claiming that THEY know, and that you should ignore the thousands of others who say the exact same thing but disagree on what it should contain. You may be able to boil it down to "relevant skills" and "relevant experiences"... but now you are having the person who have no information about the job or the inner workings of the firm guess what skills and experiences are considered "relevant". So unless the job you want them to do involves blind guesswork, don't do that. Simply have a website that asks the candidates the relevant questions. Write down the very specific skills you want (Embedded C++, Javascript in React, Kotlin for Android etc) and ask the candidate if they have those. Simple yes/no questions. And for each of them, have a more general question (Low level programming, front end web development, Android development). Now, ask the candidate the general question, and if they say yes, ask them the specific questions that relates to that. Do the same for experience. A specific question could be "Do you have 1 year or more experience working with relational databases via C# ?" and a more general question could be "Do you have more than 1 year or more experience working with C#" or "Do you 1 year or more experience working with relational databases?". And yes, you can also have them write a paragraph about their extra experiences: "What hobby or work in other industries have you done that have help you develop as a worker?" "For how long did you do that?" This is essentially the specific bits you are interested in from the CV. And basically, anyone in the codeblr community could make this website in a few days, AND have it output files that is nicely formatted. Give them a few more days, and they will have a website for setting up the interview question website so it can be done quickly and efficiently.
You CANNOT know if a person will work well in the firm, or in the team
What to ask at interviews have been studied a lot. And we have data to at least make SOME statements. One of which is that it is IMPOSSIBLE to determine if a person will work well together with a team based on interviews. People simply do not act in a way at interviews where you can judge it. No amount of personality tests that con artists have sold your firm will help, and no, people cannot figure it out just by talking to someone (People however THINK they can. Which is worse that simply not being able to). The only way to find out is to hire people. We can do a middle ground technique and hire people for a trial Period. Which is NOT a guarantee that they will KEEP working well with the team... but it is MUCH better at predicting it than people who think they are somehow better at psychology than the entire scientific field of psychology. And yes, this costs money. But it costs LESS money than the alternative.
Either know what you want from a interview, and be able to test it, OR, throw the interview in the trash where it belongs
Interviews are THE most expensive part of hiring someone. And I have yet to be at a interview where ANYONE asked themselves "Why are we doing this?". I would say, in 8/10 cases, they are wasted. If you need someone to do design, architecture or development or other work where thinking in creative but structured ways are required, then you can gain some value. Either ask questions that 100% of candidates should be able to answer, and then dig into the "why" of their answer. For example, ask a software developer to name a software pattern they are relatively familiar with. Then ask them what that pattern does, and when it should be used. And when it should NOT be used. You can also give people homework to do before the interview. Again for programming, FizzBuzz is a great choice. Why? Because it is a solved problem, that is solved in a unsatisfying way. The problem is basically: "Make a program that takes a number to count up to as a input. If the number is divisible by 3, have the program output "Fizz", if it is divisible by 5, yell "Buzz". If it is both, yell "FizzBuzz"". Basically, you will quickly find the optimization that you never check for "FizzBuzz!". You just check for the two other things and output the relevant word. If both are true, then FizzBuzz will appear. So you make your 3 checks into 2 checks.... and then you are stuck. There IS no way to optimize further. Ask the candidate what extra information they would want to solve this test better. You can ask this at a interview or again, via a website that also gives the candidate the problem. Because fun fact, if you know if the program should be optimized for Speed (IE CPU efficiency) or how much space the program takes, or both, then you can actually make the program a LOT better. And knowing to ask the right questions when you are given requirement to your program IS a very great skill to check if the candidate have. You can also check the code. Was it easy to read? Is it easy to modify? Did they do anything cleaver like use linear programming to make it run faster? Did they do clever optimization tricks? (If they did that is good... but it DOES also mean they might pre-maturely optimize, which is a deadly deadly sin in software development.) I went through that in detail, because it showcases HOW to approach designing questions and tests for a candidate for a specific job.
And if you think it is too much work, or if you cannot come up with relevant questions and tests... THEN DO NOT DO INTERVIEWS. If hiring someone without an interview feels like a blind shot. You are correct. But it is LESS of a blind shot than hiring a candidate based on random and irrelevant skills. And it is a shit-ton cheaper.
GETTING A JOB CHEAT SHEET!!
perfect resume for someone with no experience
A+ advice on writing cv’s
a guide to writing your resume
how to get a job fast as hell
resume writing tips
jobs and careers masterpost
how to answer interview questions
career and employment masterpost
strong words to use on a resume
34 crucial tips for your next job interview
how to write a cv
resume cheat sheet
how to write a cover letter
job hunting resources
Find a job in your field
7 questions you should ask at the end of every interview
how to get a job before you graduate
how to be good at interviews
other cheat sheets
How to put “wrote fan-fiction” on your résumé:
Leveraged an inventory of established fictional character and setting elements to generate a disruptive custom-curated narrative entertainment asset.
Two job-hunting resources that changed my life:
This cover letter post on askamanger.com. A job interview guide written by Alison Green, who runs askamanager.
I'll take "Not Only No, But Fuck No" for 1000, Alex
Being unemployed in 2024 is just like. Okay. Guess it's time to throw myself in the wood chipper, I guess.
Yeah, give me "Fucking Yikes" for 800, Alex
And fifty percent of the time the job isn't even fucking real
And the ones that are still had their job descriptions written by fucking AI
I hate job hunting because every time I open a description for a job the first five paragraphs are always meaningless “Scrimblo Industries is committed to synthesizing a dynamic approach to diversity and learning from–” drivel, and then at the bottom they tell you they will pay you in grass clippings and you STILL don’t know what the job is about
It's a hellish time to be unemployed.
"AI" has enshittified already-terrible ATS (applicant tracking system) software, making it even harder to get your resume seen by a human.
Text-generated AI spam applications means that new jobs are being posted for 2 days before being closed because they're being flooded with hundreds of fake applicants.
HALF of hiring managers admit they think it's acceptable to post fake jobs, and two fifths say they've done it in the past year.
So it's no surprise that nearly 4 months after being laid off, my job hunt is Not Going Well. And today I broke 3 digits on job applications!
My job hunt in 2022 was hellish - 127 job applications and 17 companies interviewed with to get my last job. And yet, I'd give just about anything to go back to THAT job landscape and not this enshittified nightmare fuel hellscape.
Got this form rejection email from a job I applied to back in July:
Go to update my job hunting spreadsheet, see that they ALREADY REJECTED ME A MONTH AGO. Which feels very
so that's fun