I’ve recently found myself in the position of a hiring manager, which means I screen, interview, and recommend candidates for hire who will work with my directly. It’s a great position to be in, as I get to meet and speak with the people I will be working with on a daily basis, but it is also a very taxing one: Some of the things people will do just to get an interview are depressing.

I’ve compiled this short list of what to do and not to do based on my experience over the past few weeks:

1. DO NOT Lie on Your Resume
   You will be found out…eventually. Maybe you’re just looking for a job – any job – for any period of time and you don’t care about getting let go down the road. That’s fine. Maybe you don’t feel your time is all that valuable. But when you start wasting my time, my HR Department’s time, and the time of my co-workers, that’s when we have a problem. Normally, I can tell within the first 5 minutes of an interview if you’re full of it, and I’m relatively new to this. If you apply to a job that isn’t a good fit for you, it’s just as much a detriment to your employer as it is to you. Just don’t do it.
2. DO Include Portfolio Samples with Your Resume
   You can have the most impressive resume in the world, but at the end of the day it is completely worthless if I can’t see your work. HR gets 10-20 resumes per day where I work (some places get hundreds). They want to see your resume. By the time it lands on my desk, it’s filtered down to 3 or 4. The first thing I do is look for a portfolio link. If you don’t have one, your resume is in the trash bin. It’s not because I don’t think you have quality work, it’s that I DON’T KNOW if you have quality work. My interviews typically last one hour. I simply can’t spend that kind of time (besides interviewing, I do have a daily job to do) on an unknown. If you give me your portfolio off the bat, I might turn it down right away, but at least you have a chance.
3. DO NOT Be Nervous
   This is more of a soft rule: of course you’re going to be nervous. Hell, I’m nervous interviewing most people. Will they be the right person for the job? Will they want the job once they know the requirements? Will they be an easy person to work with? These are just some of the things running through my head before walking into the interview room. Interviews are just a much a chance for you to get to know your potential employer as it is for us to get to know you. Have a conversation, not a presentation. As soon as you walk through the door, forget that you’re looking for a job, or that you’re looking to impress. You’re simply going in to talk. You will find yourself more confident, natural, and able to answer questions without those awkward moments where you forget what you were going to say.
4. DO Bring a Creative Resume
   Another soft rule. You’re applying for a creative position, let it show. Your resume is a perfect opportunity to show your knowledge in information design, page layout, typography, white space, and just about anything design-related. While a normal resume won’t get you thrown out, a creative resume will get you shot to the top of the list.

While following these tips will not guarantee you a job, they will make the interview process easier, and might increase your chances of landing the jobs you apply for. Most importantly, they will make sure that you are applying for the RIGHT job for you.

If the goal was to have everything above the fold, then newspapers wouldn’t be folded. To ask to put everything above the fold on your website is like the newspapers switching to a half-height format.

The next thing I say is, “Yes, we can put everything above the fold, by cutting back on content.” Most clients get that I’m being sarcastic: what’s the point of having a website if you just remove all the content from it?

Should you worry about content being above the fold? Absolutely. Put the most important content there. Put the hook there. That’s what the space is reserved for- both in print and web. But the space above the fold is NOT the only space on your site. Web browsers have scrollbars for a reason, and really: people don’t mind using them. If the client demands to put the content above the fold (or any other equally bad request), challenge them. Ask them how many sites they actually visit on a regular basis with all of the content fitting within 400-600 pixels of height. You can be pretty sure that number is close to zero: with that little content WHY would they need to go back? You can memorize that much information. If it’s a quality client, you won’t offend them by challenging them: They hired you because they know they don’t know what they’re doing.

It seems so many people (web people included) get so caught up in the details of launching a website that they lose sight of the end goal. Whether that goal is to sell online, publish articles, direct visitors to another medium or anything else, one thing is constant: a site needs content. Without content, your visitors have no reason to come back, no motivation to delve deeper. A new visitor to your site is a blank slate. Before they pick up the phone to call, fire up their email client to write, or convert in any way whatsoever, they are going to read your content. And if it ain’t there, they ain’t biting.

/rant.

Update (6-27-2009): A first-time reader has contacted me via email to point out a great example of a site that balances above/below the fold design very well: bounceenergy.com The call to action is placed directly above the fold, while rich content is placed below the fold. Thanks, Dan!

Update (12-17-2009): Emily Balog over at Brooks Bell just wrote an article with lots of facts and fancy graphs on the same topic. I recommend you check it out for the actual facts behind the “fold”: http://blog.brooks-bell.com/2009/12/forget-what-you-think-you-know-about-the-fold#more-351

Twitter is built with the cards stacked against mass-marketing, at least the spammy kind. You have to confirm who you get updates from- that doesn’t help the marketers at all. Secondly, it sets the tone of the conversation: “What are you doing?” Not “What would you like to buy?” But third, and most important, is the level of intrusion.

There are various levels of intrusion when it comes to marketing, and these determine how receptive people may be to your voice. Send me a mailpiece, and I can ignore it (which is actually part of direct mail’s success- it depends on you placing the ad on your coffee table, where it will haunt you until one day you look at it and realize, “hey- I do need an oil change!”). Call my house phone, and I may get a bit angry- but in truth I’m used to it, and may respond. Call my cell phone, and forget it- that’s just too personal.

Twitter falls in cell phone territory. I use Twitter to chat with friends, colleagues, and my readers. I use it to share useful information with others, and find information from those who are doing the same. The few cases where I did sign up to Twitter marketing alerts, I did so not because they blind followed me, but because it was part of an existing web campaign. I get NewEgg daily deals because they clued me into it, and I shop there a lot.

But not everyone uses Twitter effectively. You need to bring your A-game to have an effect in the Twitterverse. You need to make sure you’re bringing something to the table that people WANT. And remember, it’s an opt-in system so let your audience CHOOSE to follow you by integrating Twitter with your existing campaigns, not by randomly following them and hoping they follow back.

And one last note: please, please, PLEASE don’t tweet about how to get more followers. That totally misses the point. Twitter- like anything else social- isn’t about number of followers, it’s about quality.

While I will agree that flash-based websites suffer from an SEO standpoint (workarounds aside), I don’t always think that matters. And this is where the deluge of “WTF” started- largely from people that weren’t even following me.

I know, I should have expected it. Saying SEO doesn’t matter on the web today (let alone on Twitter, where the SEO folks tend to congregate) is social media suicide. But it’s true. Sometimes.

SEO can be a very time-consuming, exhausting practice, and that time may be better spent elsewhere depending on the intended use for your site. The thing to remember is that the search engines are but one channel through which people will find your content or website. If organic search isn’t an important channel for your uses, don’t pour the energy into increasing your search engine visibility.

“But increased visibility is always a good thing!” I hear you shouting. And it’s true. But is it necessarily worth the effort?

Example: My portfolio site, georgegumpert.com gets some search engine traffic (mostly people searching for me by name), but not much at all. Maybe 1-2 hits per day come from search engines. But I don’t care. My conversion rate from search engine traffic is a whopping 0%. I have yet to get a lead from search engine traffic, and know that even if I do, it will be at a rate of 0.5-1.0%- not really worth the trouble of optimizing to me. However, my conversion rate from other channels – face-to-face primarily, but the same can be applied to word-of-mouth, direct mail and video/print advertising – is much higher, around 70%. So why would I dump the effort into optimizing my site for search engines, when it’s already optimized for my uses?

So what is the take away? Yes, you should do what you can to make your site search engine friendly. But like everything else, do it in moderation. If it comes down to a choice between launching your campaign’s site effectively or making it as appetizing as possible to the spiders, ask yourself if search engine traffic is really a channel that you’re targeting. Don’t just listen to what the SEO guys tell you – search engines aren’t the only way to use the web, no matter how much they try to convince you otherwise. And always remember: focus on quality content first, and the social nature of the web will take care of your publicity for you.

Sure, I had my iGoogle start page with a few sites I followed: Lifehacker, Slashdot, and a friend’s blog or two, and that worked fine. That is, until I saw Bradley Robb speak at WordCamp in Richmond. In his presentation, he advised bloggers of the importance of RSS, and setting up Google alerts to get the latest news from the topics they’re most interested in. And my whole outlook on RSS changed.

So like a good little blogger, I rushed home, setup my Google Reader account, and made a few generic alerts: “photoshop tutorials,” “illustrator tutorials,” “graphic design” and “web development.” Within an hour I had over 100 new items to sort through. Yeah, there was a lot of noise, and Bradley warned us of the signal-to-noise ratio…and assured me that the process of refining keywords would help. And it did.

But still, I had subscribed to a number of RSS feeds since the event; I was begining to suffer from Information overload. Something needed to be done. And Google Reader’s ugly interface wasn’t helping.

I downloaded the Flock browser, which helped to manage all of my social media accounts, but didn’t really deliver feeds in any sort of useful way. And then I found Feedly.

Feedly is like a magazine for your RSS feeds. You are given multiple views for your data: Cover, latest articles, and Digest (my personal favorite). It delivers news to you in a way that doesn’t make you feel overwhelmed by it. It brings the joy back to reading the news.

After installing the add-on (Firefox, Flock), you will be asked to provide your google reader information. This may (reasonably) turn some of you off to the service, but there IS a reason they ask for it: Feedly will tie in with your Google Reader account, and stay synchronized with it. In addition, it makes use of some of Google Reader’s features.

Once you tie your accounts together, you will begin to see your pages fill up. To the left is an example of what my digest page looks like (click for full view). As you can see, it pulls in my feeds, and lays them out in a mash-up format that’s a little more visually appealing than your typical RSS Reader (you can also view each feed source individually if that’s more your style). Tie it to your Twitter account, and you will find your Twitter stream and the top trends in addition to your featured (favorited) news sources. Further down the page, you will also find a break down of your feeds by topic and source, who is following you (in Google Reader), and an interesting little “Explore” section, where you are given site feeds that seem to do a good job of relating to your topics of interest. For media streams (photo/video feeds), it does a good job at laying them out in album format.

What else does Feedly do? Besides basic Google Reader functionality (sharing, favoriting), how about integrating with your FriendFeed account to share with that network? Facebook? It does the same there. Twitter: same. Delicious also plays nicely (as you would expect). It even does a good job of hooking into Digg so you can tune into whatever inane chatter is going on over there about what you’re reading. And all sharing services also allow for you to add your own annotations, which is nice.

So give Feedly a test drive at http://www.feedly.com. I’ve been using it for a few days now, and already find myself getting more out of my RSS feeds.

And then I found CandyBar (Shareware, $29). Candybar lets you customize not just any icon on your computer, but also your dock’s appearance.

And for those of you without the time or patience to make your own, there are many icon sets available for free at Iconfactory (You’ll want to download the iContainers)

Also check out some of these creative themes.