Self Help of the Week: Get Your Resume Noticed

 

There are fewer things more frustrating to we, citizens of the first world, then a job search. And in today’s brave new world, they seem to be getting longer, more arduous, and more frequent. If you’re having trouble getting people to see your resume, if you’re losing hope, if your existential consciousness is slowly being crushed by the sobering realization that all you’re doing is throwing your resume around in cyberspace and screaming into your computer screen, not only are you not alone, you’re right.

Here is a tough truth about the modern job market: most resumes are never actually read by humans in an HR department, and when they are they only get six seconds of review time on average. In fact, most resumes are spit out before human eyes even see them. That’s because these days firms use computer programs to filter through resumes and look for certain key words. And if your resume doesn’t make the cut, more like then not it will never be seen except by cold, heartless robot eyes.

But there is good news: you can still get a real human person to see your resume if you know the right tricks.

1. Keep It Simple: Keep your resume’s formatting simple and easy to read. Resume filtering programs can’t handle documents with over-the-top fonts, letterheads, or graphical logos, and will chuck them automatically.
2. Paraphrase the Job Post: Rosemary Haefner of careerbuilder.com suggests using similar words and phrases as found in the job post itself to sneak it past the resumebot’s filters. ““The computer will then recognize them and move your resume toward the top of the pile because you will be a match,” Haefner points out. Just be sure not to actually copy and paste the job post in your resume; most hiring managers won’t take kindly to that and may consider it unethical.
3. Don’t bother with a “career objective”: Increasingly, articles and Human Resources wizards are telling frantic job seekers not to put a career objective on their resume for one simple reason: the prospective employer doesn’t care about it. Try replacing the career objective with qualifications that help the employer visualize why you’d be their best fit.
4. Use Industry Terms to Describe Experience: When listing your employment experience on a resume, don’t get flowery. Once you get past the firewall, The Merchant of Venice won’t be reading your application, but someone with industry experience is. Use common industry terms because those terms are likely what the software is being programmed to pick up on.

If all else fails and you still find yourself in the pit of despair, do whatever you can (within professional reason) to get your resume in front of an employer. A friend of mine from college landed her dream job because she drew a death-metal viking pony on her resume (in crayon, no less) and it got passed around the office (not recommending that, just encouraging you, dear reader, to be creative). Resumebot is ruthless and powerful, but its oppression can only go far. A little commonsense and thinking like a computer can get any resume around resumebots and into the hands of actual people who make actual decisions about actual jobs.

Best,

-G

Agreement Reached in COP 21 Summit

 

The COP 21 climate conference has wrapped up in Paris, and will likely go down in history as a historic moment for the international community and climate change; the question is what kind of turning point COP 21 will be. Barack Obama has said as much about the agreement, calling it a turning point for the world. China and India praised the deal, which is a major milestone in and of itself as they are set to become the world’s biggest polluters if trends continue in their economies. CNN even attempted to praise the agreement calling it “hailed as a milestone in the battle to keep Earth hospitable to human life.”

But there is plenty of skepticism over whether the agreement reached in Paris is going to truly be a step forward in “the battle to keep Earth hospitable to human life,” a battle too many are still mind-bogglingly against fighting. The big sticking point for most is that the agreement, while mandating bottom-up a system cutting of greenhouse gas emissions across the world over time, doesn’t contain any strong provisions for punishing member states who fail to abide by those emissions cuts. That may or may not be a fair criticism; there is no supranational legal body responsible for forcing sovereign nations to agree to the terms of treaties and if there was it would be less progressive and more Orwellian.

The rest of the media’s and various politicians’ opining on the agreement boils down to differing degrees of optimism on a single number. The Paris agreement is designed to curb global warming and keep it under 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. In short some think that is possible and some think it is not. Combined with the constantly evolving politics over climate aid to developing nations it’s a recipe for the kind of relatively information-free disagreement that the internet and mass-media were made for. For example Nick Dearden, director of what could be called for better or worse an international eco-socialist activist group called Global Justice Now, has said of the agreement, “It’s outrageous that the deal that’s on the table is being spun as a success when it undermines the rights of the world’s most vulnerable communities and has almost nothing binding to ensure a safe and liveable climate for future generations,” arguing that the agreement is simply not going to be held up by developed nations.

But even business groups in those developed nations are treating this agreement as something different. WBCSD, a sustainable business advocacy group, tweeted that “the transition to a low carbon economy is unstoppable.” If global warming to some degree is unstoppable, one can only hope so are its proposed solutions.

DSW staff are analyzing the details of the agreement reached and will continue to comment on this, the most significant development to date in our lifetimes in the battle to keep earth habitable.

 

2-Week Climate Talks Begin in Paris

 

Described by NPR as a mission to produce “a short simple agreement–maybe a dozen pages–that will satisfy nearly 200 nations”, the U.N. Climate Change conference , a two-week convention of world leaders on the subject, has just kicked off only a few weeks after the terrorist attacks in the same city. The conference has been framed in controversy even before it started, as 200 citizens were arrested in Paris during climate change protests. The state of emergency in the city since the terrorist attacks prohibits open public assemblies regardless of the reasons for them.

The talks, which officially started Monday and run through December 11th, are already being treated by some media outlets with more optimism then previous climate talks in the last decade. NPR has said of the independent plans world leaders have submitted before the conference, “Independent experts have calculated that if the world is currently on track for warming of about 4.5 degrees Celsius, these pledges would reduce that to about 2.7 to 3.7 degrees — which is real progress, before the Paris summit even starts.”

But there’s plenty of healthy skepticism to go around, too. Many are arguing that unless something changes, these talks may fall far short of producing the kind of consensus needed to begin the reversal of exponentially increasing global warming trends. Fivethrityeight.com has already noted that “Of the 183 countries [who have submitted plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions], only two — Ethiopia and Morocco — have plans that Climate Action Tracker (a consortium of research organizations) rated as “sufficient” to meet climate goals.” The U.N. itself has even stated out of desperation that these talks are one of the last chances the world has to deal with climate change.

Still, the consensus at this point, that these talks will be different, meaningful even, is growing. This conference is seeing more international media focus then any similar climate meeting before. The fact that virtually every government on the planet has submitted plans for the reduction of greenhouse emissions before the conference has even started is alone a huge step forward. Even the Vatican has commented on how important the Paris conference is to the future of the planet. There are still scores of things that could go wrong; Murphy’s Law is not affected in any way by climate change. But the level of goodwill among governments and people going in to this conference is unprecedented. DSW will be covering the talks as they go ward from now through December 11th.

 

-G

BUSH CAMPAIGN CONTINUES TO FLAIL WITH CHEST BUMP

The Hill posted yesterday yet another piece of evidence that the presidential aspirations of Jeb Bush are unraveling fast enough to possibly slow rotation of the earth by raw force alone. In a statement that is somehow more awkward then his previous one about eating nails when he wakes up, Bush made this almost comically desperate campaign recruitment push:

““I do that [chest bumping] for every convert…Anytime you guys want to try a chest bump, I’m all in.”

Bush’s increasingly desperate appeals to an electorate he seems unable to understand are at least the proximate result of his being thrashed in the polls almost since he started his presidential run a few months ago. The idea that his entry into the race for the GOP nomination would unite the party and discourage challengers could not at this moment seem any more wrong-headed. Even though the race is getting more personal for Bush–in the last debate he was beaten by his former political protege Marco Rubio–he seems incapable of responding. His strategists are equally incapable of stopping Bush’s nosedive: this fist-bump incident, the latest in what I can only describe as a dedicated attempt to infuse Mr. Bush with the blended personalities of a frat boy and middle-aged accountant, has only underscored that much more how fast the campaign is losing altitude.

To be honest, it’s insulting how disingenuous it all is, how much the fist bump reference isn’t like Jeb Bush. It’s so unlike him I literally could not find an image of him chest-bumping someone for this article. And even the idea of a man with Bush’s robotic personality chest-bumping people for votes is so outlandish that late night comedians should be paying him for their material. Now opening bets on when he drops out.

-G