On summer blogging hiatus

We're on blogging hiatus for the summer, but Writing Wolf is still open for business during the vacation season. Have a wonderful summer!

Should you risk making yourself a pest?

Whether it's a company that won't respond to your resume or a hiring manager not returning your phone call after an interview, finding yourself dealing with an unresponsive employer is a common scenario.

In this article, the Career Doctor explores whether it's a good idea to keep up with regular follow-up. He notes that many companies have extended the hiring process beyond the comfort of job seekers. But if a company drags its feet, he concludes:

By all means, contact the VP (or the VP’s assistant) — by whatever means you are most comfortable. There are so many possible scenarios, ranging from the staff person never getting the message to his email going into your junk folder by mistake. So, pick up the phone or send an email and politely inquire whether the staff person has tried to contact you. As with any follow-up, be certain to again express your interest in the company and how you can make a contribution.

It's normal to worry about coming across as a pest, but remember that if you keep such contacts brief and to-the-point you are likely to come across as persistent and enthusiastic.

Are there some phrases to avoid in your job search?

Lewis Levin advises job seekers to avoid hackneyed phrases when speaking to potential employers. Consider these:

• 'next generation'
• 'flexible'
• 'robust'
• 'world class'
• 'scalable'
• 'easy to use'
• 'cutting edge'
• 'well positioned'
• 'mission critical'
• 'market leading'

Lewis says that researchers have found that these were the six most commonly used phrases in press releases.

Whenever possible, replace cliched marketing phrases with specific examples. Instead of saying that you worked on a "mission critical" project, explain what it was specifically that made your work so valuable. For example, you can say, "By working as effectively and hard as I did, I allowed the company to complete a release of its product by the quarter-end deadline, allowing it to realize revenues from a client sale at a time when the company was under severe pressure to demonstrate that it was translating ideas into cash."

If you can't come up with a more specific phrasing, it's possible you can do without the phrase altogether. I wouldn't sweat it though, if you're using these phrases. There are good reasons that marketing departments use the phrases so commonly: when they are backed by credible claims they help you to convey the significance of the value you add.

Federal hiring process reforms will be dramatic

Until recently, applying for federal jobs required navigating through a time-consuming and often confusing process designed to ensure merit-based hires. Most notoriously, applicants for every job were required to submit detailed essays on top of resumes.

John M. O'Connor gives a handy summary of the key reforms soon to be coming down the pike. He says the reforms will:

• Dramatically reduce the time between when a job is announced and is filled.
  
• Eliminate essays as an initial application requirement. Essays may still be used later in the process. Under the previous system, if an individual applied for five separate federal jobs, he or she often needed to complete five separate sets of lengthy essays.
  
• Use shorter, plain-language job announcements.
  
• Accept resumes from applicants, instead of requiring them to submit complex applications through outdated systems.
  
• Allow hiring managers to choose from among a group of best qualified candidates, rather than limiting their choice to just three names, through expanded use of “category ratings.”
  
• Notify applicants in a timely manner (and at four points in the process) through USAJobs.gov – eliminating the “black hole” that applicants often feel they enter when they get no response to their application.

Good news all around. For more information, you can check out the Office of Personnel Management's Hiring Reform website.

Blogging can attract the eye of recruiters for Microsoft, Amazon, and others

A recent article by Randy Woods highlights the importance of blogging and other aspects of online identity in conducting today's job search. He shares one success story, Liz Stinson, who landed a job at Microsoft only months after starting a technology blog:

“I had maybe five regular blog readers,” says Stinson, who mostly read white papers and other Web articles about Azure and “boiled down the language” to explain how it works. Luckily for Stinson, one of those readers was a recruiter for Microsoft who had been searching the Web for terms that relate to Azure. The recruiter was intrigued enough by the blog to arrange for Stinson, who lived in the Bay Area, to interview in Redmond.

About six months later, Stinson was hired as the new security program manager for Windows Azure. “I had only just started looking for a job,” she says. “So this was weirdly serendipitous.”

Blogs help in a number of ways: by communicating your passion for the subject, by showing off your knowledge of current industry trends, and by helping to establish your unique individual voice.

In some ways, blogs are the resumes of the future. They demonstrate your competence in an area of importance to potential importance far more convincingly and in-depth than a one- or two-page document. Moreover, they aare recruiter and hiring manager magnets, giving you an opportunity to continually interact with thought leaders in your field and position yourself as one of them.