I know things are becoming more and more open these days, and there is a lot of information about you that is simply searchable online, but there are still certain things a resume is good for, and other things that are just not crucial, especially when you’re just being introduced to a company.

Still, I occasionally receive resumes with some of these items on them or included in the cover letter.  They are not necessary, and can hurt your chances of getting hired.  Still, not having them included on your resume shouldn’t affect you one bit.

1. Your Picture
   Your resume is not facebook (though some may say facebook is becoming your resume). Leave out your photograph for at least two reasons:

• First, it is illegal for companies (in the US) to hire you based on your race or sex, age, etc. Having your photograph on your resume puts the company you’re applying to in an awkward spot. If they hire you, was it because of your race? If they did not hire you, was it because of your sex? Are you too old? Some companies will refuse to consider resumes with images because of the liability, which means you just got deleted from the possibility of landing the job.
• Second: Humans make very quick judgements about things they may not be consciously thinking of. Do you want to have your appearance considered for the job (for better or worse) before you’re even interviewed? Isn’t dressing right for your interview stressful enough? Let your qualifications and intelligence speak for you, not your “buddy pic”. NOTE: If you are in a field where your physical image is part of the job, then, obviously, this is moot, but you knew that going in, I hope.

2. Your birthdate or age.
   I am surprised how much I am seeing this lately, and usually from younger applicants (I know they are “young” because they tell me how old they are). I am guessing this is from a lack of experience, but this is both a very private piece of information (in this age of identity theft) and companies can not hire you (or not hire you) based on your age, and you throwing it out there just makes recruiters (and their attorneys) squeamish. Leave it off there.

   If we see you graduated this year and your last job was an internship, we’ll get the picture–you’re entry-level. We don’t send out birthday cards until after you’re on the payroll.

3. Your social security number or other ID number (such as a resident alien ID).
   I see this frequently from individuals wishing to prove their citizenship or ability to work in the US. Maybe this is appropriate in other countries, but in the United States, simply stating “Authorized to work in the US for any employer” is sufficient.

   Please don’t give thieves a chance to steal your identity, either. If you included your birthdate as well, you should call your credit card companies RIGHT NOW.

4. Your references.
   This one is a matter of respect as well as privacy of those people you list. It is fully appropriate to disclose that you have professional references (the other kind of references don’t really do anything anyway) and you will provide them when it makes sense. However, revealing your references should be done somewhere in the interview process, usually when the company is about to make a hiring decision. Read: After the 2nd round.

   I should note here that it is appropriate for you to call your references and let them know you have released their phone number to a certain company who may be calling. It’s only polite and, remember, your relationship with your reference is much more important in the long-run than your relationship with the ACME Bean Counter company who may be calling them.

In a word, this example from Not Hired is a pretty good description of what not to do:

Welcome news to the ears of the great team at EnticeLabs, First Advantage and Omniture’s founders Josh James and John Pestana have chipped in $2 Million in funding to add to the $1.3 Million the Provo, Utah startup has already received in the past. Techcrunch broke the news earlier today.

Over the past few years, the company has been developing the TalentSeekr recruiting engine, which proactively helps companies place targeted recruitment advertising in front of specific candidates that fit a reasonable set of criteria, determined within milliseconds by the EnticeLabs servers.

In May, Ryan Probasco and Grant Gordon appeared on the Couchcast show I host to talk about the technology.

Way to go, team!

Transparency: I am loosely affiliated with EnticeLabs.

The sample size can’t be representative of all orgs, but Smartblog on Workforce polled their readers and found 72% of them do not recruit using social media tools.

Also, 43% of respondents couldn’t care less, thank you.

72% of companies polled do not use social media to recruit

What innovative ways is your company recruiting? (or… not?)

IMG from CollegeRecruiter.com

Data released today by job aggregation service SimplyHired shows that Salt Lake City ranks fifth of the top five markets for job seekers when comparing the number of job-seekers for each unique job.

The rankings were “determined by the ratio of job seekers to unique open positions (duplicates removed) in metro areas around the country.”  Utah’s capital, Salt Lake City (Jobsearch), and presumably surrounding metro areas such as Ogden and Provo/Orem fared well in the overall list, opposed to nearby Las Vegas, which has 26 candidates for every unique job opening.

SimplyHired revealed their findings only on the top and bottom 15 markets. Regional areas such as Denver, Colorado Springs, Albequerque, Phoenix, Boise, Reno and others were not included in either of these lists.

Salt Lake City, Utah Ranks 5th overall in best cities to find a job, according to data released today by SimplyHired.com

These are interesting statistics, for sure. There are a few caveats I see that you should consider as well:

• These data do not seem to specify if the candidats for each job are qualified for it or not.  This can either mean the actual number of candidates for a given position is actually less, or it may mean that companies are hiring for positions that our population does not support (which requires relocation).
• These data are statistically approximated, but we do not know if or how these data include information such as:
  • Passive candidates who are not looking for work (and therefore do not search for jobs) but still change jobs thanks to personal referrals or other reasons.
  • “Tip-toers”… people who are well-employed, but “google” around for jobs, but don’t jump at anything because the opportunity they currently have is sufficient than the opportunities they see.
  • Hidden jobs that are never posted openly because candidates are hired from within and/or hired through personal networks.

In other news, sky is blue and water is wet.

I will never forget the day I came around this corner in Boston near the Bell Atlantic building (Now Verizon) on my way to work and found hundreds of 411-information workers picketing. This was late summer 1998. The economy was booming beyond its bounds. The financial giants of Boston (including Bell Atlantic) sat literally feet from this place in their glittering towers of monolithic, economic supremacy, but these workers felt an injustice had been served, and through their union, they walked out on their employer so they would hear and know their frustration.

The uproar and the noise echoed deafeningly off the walls of the other buildings. I could see business people in the large windows above looking down at the craziness below with distant interest. Police with riot gear stood nearby. Since it was nearly 8am, as people tried to go into the building for work, they would receive shouts, jeers and swearing in return from the emotional, angry scene. I was frozen in my tracks. I literally felt breathless as I watched the scene–the anger, the emotion, the intensity.

Checking my watch, I knew I would be late if I stayed there, but I

just.

couldn’t.

leave.

Hundreds of people walked through that square in the few minutes I was there watching. Hurrying to work with their newspapers and lattes, cellphones and blackberrys. Some of them stopped and looked. Most of them hurried on. I felt like I was caught in that moment.

That experience really effected me (obviously, since it’s 11 years later and I am blogging about it). I remember wondering what it meant. What was the point? It began to make me think long and hard about the hours I was putting in for my employer, making someone else’s retirement a sure thing. I began to lose the taste for the technologies I worked with every day. There had to be something MORE than just writing code!

Fast-forward a few years, a layoff, two more kids and a mortgage, and I jumped from technology programming into recruiting, mainly because of the opportunity to use what I know about technology with what I know about people and help people get connected with new and amazing opportunities. Hopefully ones they could be proud of when they went home at night.

But that isn’t enough. There is more to be done because the ground has shifted and moved, and the companies who don’t learn this will soon enough be spit out by the very economic forces that made them great when it was OK to treat your employees like tools.

Markets are Conversations”. – Cluetrain Manifesto

Cluetrain, Rise of the Creative Class, and Groundswell (how to be human) give you primers and clues into the language.

Blogs, Twitter, and Facebook show you a peek into the conversation.

Meetups, Codeaways, ignites and camps give you access to the people.

But without your CORPORATE PARTICIPATION, you will be forced, eventually (by either your talent leaving you, or the market selling you) to watch all of this revolution from the sidelines… unable to join in until it is far, far too late.

“Markets are conversations… Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about “listening to customers.” They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.”
- The Cluetrain Manifesto

EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY

NEW OFFICE POLICY

Dress Code:
1) You are advised to come to work dressed according to your salary.

2) If we see you wearing Prada shoes and carrying a Gucci bag, we will assume you are doing well financially and therefore do not need a raise.

3) If you dress poorly, you need to learn to manage your money better, so that you may buy nicer clothes, and
therefore you do not need a raise.

4) If you dress just right, you are right where you need to be and therefore you do not need a raise.

Sick Days:
We will no longer accept a doctor’s statement as proof of sickness. If you are able to go to the doctor, you are able to come to work.

Personal Days:
Each employee will receive 104 personal days a year. They are called Saturdays & Sundays.

Bereavement Leave:
This is no excuse for missing work. There is nothing you can do for dead friends, relatives or co-workers. Every
effort should be made to have non-employees attend the funeral arrangements in your place. In rare cases where
employee involvement is necessary, the funeral should be scheduled in the late afternoon. We will be glad to
allow you to work through your lunch hour and subsequently leave one hour early.

Bathroom Breaks:
Entirely too much time is being spent in the toilet. There is now a strict three-minute time limit in the
stalls. At the end of three minutes, an alarm will sound, the toilet paper roll will retract, the stall door will open, and a picture will be taken. After your second offense, your picture will be posted on the company bulletin board under the ‘Chronic Offenders’ category. Anyone caught smiling in the picture will be sectioned under the company’s mental health policy.

Lunch Break:
* Skinny people get 30 minutes for lunch, as they need to eat more, so that they can look healthy.

* Normal size people get 15 minutes for lunch to get a balanced meal to maintain their average figure.

* Chubby people get 5 minutes for lunch, because that’s all the time needed to drink a Slim-Fast.

Thank you for your loyalty to our company. We are here to provide a positive employment experience. Therefore,
all questions, comments, concerns, complaints, frustrations, irritations, aggravations, insinuations, allegations, accusations, contemplations, consternation and input should be directed elsewhere.

The Management

Its not fair, but recruiters pwn you when it comes to getting an interview. Until you’ve moved beyond the screening stage and your recruiter is actively working with you, TREAD CAREFULLY or some of these behaviors might lead to an eternal busy signal when calling your recruiter.

If you want to hurry up and wait, here’s some great ways to skip the line and jump headfirst into the “resume blackhole”:

1. Blah, blah, blah and don’t respect their time.
   Once you get a meeting with a recruiter, its good to find out if they have time for you, and how much. Then keep to it. That shows respect, and smarts on your part… to juggle a conversation, and exit gracefully when the time is right. If the conversation is going well, but it’s time to leave, simply state something like, “I’d like to continue this, but I know we’re out of time. Should we reschedule?”
2. Ask for an interview without knowing if there’s even a job open.
   Candidates know the recruiter is their gateway into the company. Coaches and job-hunters tell you to get an interview at all costs, but asking for one before you know there’s even a job can end up killing your chances to get one at all.Remember: The recruiter’s job is not to interview. The recruiter’s job is to find the right person to fill open positions. The interview is a tool in that process to be used with the right people at the right time. Not anytime.
3. Call back. A lot. A few times everyday works best.
   It’s appropriate to call an office line and then maybe a mobile phone if they didn’t pick up. Leave a courteous message briefly reminding them of who you are and what specific position you’re interested in. Chances are high they know you called, but just can’t get back to you at the moment.  Recruiters have caller ID , too, and a hyper-sensitive awareness of phone-numbers and people (which are some basic DNA characteristics of a recruiter). If you consistently call multiple times a day (especially if you’re as reliable as Old Faithful), your recruiter may begin to find things to be busy with when you call. Or worse, out of nowhere, you’ll get a voicemail they left late at night (on purpose so you wouldn’t be there to answer) saying “Thanks, but no thanks.”Call. Leave a brief, specific message (referring to the exact role you’re interested in ). Possibly email the next day or two days later mentioning that you called a few days before, and asking for an update on the status of your application and/or the specific job you are interested in.  Let them know that, if there is no progress, or if you are no-longer a candidate, it’s OK for them to tell you.
4. Promise to follow-up if they don’t get back to you.
   Don’t say, “I’ll check back in a few days if I don’t hear from you.”  A busy recruiter will simply say to themself, “OK, great. I don’t have to call you back, let’s see if you follow-through on your promise.” Its not polite to give someone a deadline for no reason at all. Putting them on the hook may just guarantee the phone stays on the hook whenever you call.
5. Don’t take “no” for an answer.
   When you’re being told a position isn’t right for you, It’s completely fair to ask what was missing from your background or experience to keep you out of the running.  Ask for candid feedback, and request if there’s a seperate set of positions they feel you’d be more qualified for, or  if the things which limited your candidacy this time around can be improved upon for the next time.  Phrasing your questions like, “Is there something in the job requirements I do not meet?” will encourage your recruiter to be open and honest with you, and you’ll likely avoid platitudes like, “well, you’re just not a match” (the recruiter version of “we’re just not that into you”).

   Finally, when the call is complete, you may ask permission to email or call the recruiter if future opportunities arise, if you can connect with them on LinkedIn or another network you both use (LinkedIn recommendations are an excellent “parting gift” to your recruiter, btw), and then graciously thank them for their time and let them off the phone.

You should note that all of these suggestions change when you’ve moved beyond the passive/tense/delicate “screening” process and into the active “interviewing” process . In the latter, all of the above change, except the respect thing. That one seems to stick around for, well, ever.

The summary is to remember that your recruiter is just as interested in finding the right person to fill their jobs as you are in making the right move. Help them help you. Openness and respect mutually in the beginning will pay dividends. Respect them, be low-maintenance, don’t make them work hard for you and, when the timing is right, they will work very hard for you.

Good luck!

P.S. Enjoy a good laugh at other jobseeker’s sakes at NotHired.com. Some links may be NSFW. Others may make you roll with laughter.

Google announced on their blog recently that they’ve not only reduced the number of contractors they’re employing but they’re now reducing the number of recruiters on staff by about 100:

Our first step to address this was to wind down almost all our contracts with external contractors and vendors providing recruiting services for Google. However, after much consideration, we have with great regret decided that we need to go further and reduce the overall size of our recruiting organization by approximately 100 positions. #

Also, they are displacing up to 70 engineering employees by closing offices in Austin, Texas; Trondheim, Norway; and Lulea, Sweden, Alan Eustace, SVP engineering & research said.

In a Wall Street Journal story commenting on the changes at Google, Jessica Vascellaro reports:

Google spokesman Matthew Furman said the closing of engineering offices in Texas, Norway and Sweden wasn’t motivated by cost cutting and that Google will offer jobs to the 70 employees affected by the changes. Alan Eustace, Google’s senior vice president for engineering and research, wrote in a blog post that the moves would help Google better coordinate its efforts across different geographic areas.Mr. Furman added that the 100 recruiters let go represents less than a quarter of Google’s total recruiter population. “Overall, we will be working with [those recruiters] to try to locate them other jobs at Google,” he said.

He said that the company didn’t have plans to announce any further cuts at this time. In recent months, Google has taken measures such as reducing the hours of its food service and giving employees cellphones instead of year-end cash bonuses.

Utah’s economy continues to outpace the United States, though we’re losing ground on key economic indicators, we’re losing that ground more slowly than the nation as a whole and many states around the country.

September 2008 Unemployment Rate Utah VS. USA Click for latest employment situation report
Utah: 3.5%	U.S.: 6.1%
Year-Over Nonfarm Growth
Utah: 0.1%	U.S.: -0.4%

With economists and pundits expecting the worst Christmas shopping season in a generation.  Like Alisa Roth with Marketplace says it, “It’s hard to believe. But it looks like Americans may have quit shopping. Retail sales fell nearly 3 percent in October. And that’s the biggest drop since the Commerce Department started keeping track back in 1992.”

Things aren’t getting nicer, either:

Jerry Yang at Yahoo! calls it quits, meanwhile Republicans appear to be pushing Detroit off the cliff they’re facing.

How is the economy and recession (which Jeff Thredgold estimates began nearly a year ago) affecting YOU, personally?

What have you changed about your lifestyle? No-longer online window shopping? Stricter budgeting? Only perusing certain aisles at the grocery store? Job change? Changes in retirement goals?

PLEASE LEAVE YOUR COMMENTS. What’s happening out there?

Annually, Fortune Magazine highlights the 100 best companies to work for in the US. Thanks to the economic downturn, many people are looking to recession-proof their jobs, and part of that includes changing jobs.

Here’s the latest list (below), from the February 4, 2008 edition.  Find the full Fortune 100 list online.

It’s worth noting that eBay is the only company listed on the Fortune 100 that is in Utah.

Notes:
N.A.: Not available. U.S. employees includes part-timers as of time of survey. Job growth, new jobs, and voluntary turnover are full-time only. Revenues are for 2006 or latest fiscal year. All data based on U.S. employees.
* Average annual pay: yearly pay rate plus additional cash compensation for the largest classification of full-time salaried and hourly employees.