Posts Tagged ‘Work’

On resumes, or: 5 things you shouldn’t do if you want me to hire you.

Posted on July 25th, 2010 by emdash in Opinion, Work

The other day I found some notes on incoming resumes. In this particular instance, I was sifting resumes to hire a part-time in-house designer and office administrator (yes, it was two jobs in one.)

My notes were personal and determined whether or not the incoming resumes got a checkmark (meaning let’s call them back and set up an interview!) or got filed in the round file cabinet (meaning the bin.)

Here’s some highlights:

“Personal website is pretty awful”

“Leaving for France in April? WTF?”

“1000% OVERQUALIFIED”

“No office experience. Nice typography though.”

“Lists ‘Windows’ twice under ‘Software’, probably not good at computers”

“DOESN’T EVEN LIVE IN VANCOUVER”

“Website portfolio pisses me off” (in this instance I think they had some Flash template site)

 

As you can see, I’m a bit difficult to please.

This hiring process took place about a year ago, at the peak of the recession when unemployment was rampant and people were desperate for jobs. I’d sifted over a hundred resumes before selecting callbacks.

I definitely noticed a lot of repeat offenses; things people did when they applied that immediately annoyed me or put their resume in the round file cabinet. I’m going to share these things.
ATTN: PEOPLE OF CRAIGSLIST: STOP DOING THESE THINGS WHEN JOB HUNTING!:

Don’t bother reading the job description before applying: One of the resumes arrived with a nicely formatted cover letter… stating the applicant is great with accounting/bookkeeping and looks forward to saving our firm money. Did they even READ the job description before they applied?? A cover letter that isn’t relevant is far worse than none at all.

Poor grammar and spelling: I got so many resumes with typos and horrible grammar it made me want to cry. Nearly all the cover letters and emails had at least one glaringly obvious grammatical error or horrible spelling, but when it’s on the actual resume, it’s just inexcusable.

Send a 1 paragraph bulleted resume in 8 pt type. The print designers who applied were by far the worst for this. I got resumes with nothing more than a name, email address, website for portfolio samples, and the work history was nothing more than a bulleted list of company names and dates. How can we hire you if we barely know anything about you?

Apply for stuff there’s no way you’re qualified for. Kudos to you for being confident, but either you didn’t read the job description or you have an inflated sense of self-worth. Sadly, you’re wasting everyone’s time.

Send a presumptuous cover letter. I got a cover letter with salary expectations of $35K. This was for a 2 day a week part time position. Either we got a generic template cover letter (again, worse than none at all, please expend some effort writing about the job you’re applying for!) or you didn’t read the job posting at all!

The overall experience has led me to believe Craigslist is a bad place to look for a new hire. While it does get a lot of eyes, it also produces a lot of junk results, which someone then has to sift through.

At least in this case, the sifting process gave me some insight and fodder for a blog post!

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The trials and tribulations of royalty-free stock photos

Posted on June 14th, 2010 by emdash in Work

Recently, I was approached to create a website for a new staffing & events planning company. Because the staffing/events division is brand new, they didn’t have any existing photos to demonstrate their services – the site also didn’t have a lot of content – and they needed images to help flesh out the site.

They also had barely any budget for stock photos.

I’m getting frustrated with the photos on the old standby, istockphoto.com, and decided to try an alternative. I went with bigstockphoto.com for inexpensive, royalty-free photographs for the project. I find that site easier to look at than istock, and on the surface, the quality of photograph generally seemed higher.

Well, I found the perfect image for the front page of the site. Or at least, it was perfect in my head… in reality, it needed a bit of post-production work.

Bigstock Photo #2867129

I knew how I wanted the image to look, and this was the closest thing I could find to an image featuring helpful, happy, friendly and professional staffing. The price was right for my client, so I went ahead and bought the image.

I did notice a bunch of stuff once I got the high-resolution version. This photo is actually two stitched together: the pretty girl in the foreground is pasted over top the out-of-focus people background. This isn’t a problem as such, since the depth of field is faked well enough in this photographer’s work that you won’t notice it’s actually two images. However… the girl was cut out of her own photo in such a way that she’s got a white halo.

bigstock: photo issues 01

Naturally, I had to go in and fix this. Not just because I’m a perfectionist, but also because the image was going to be fairly large on the finished site, and the white outline would be visible!

Then there was the girl’s outfit. On closer inspection, she wasn’t wearing business at all… she was in a black corderoy fashion jacket with brass features, and a skirt more suitable for a nightclub.

bigstock: photo issues 02

Okay, so the skirt had to be lengthened, and that side lacing had to go. (I ran out of time, but if the project had more budget and a friendlier timeline, I’d also have fixed her salon-length fingernails and eliminate the sleeve zippers.)

Lastly, the corporate colour for this staffing agency is a businesslike royal blue, not red… so those folders had to be recoloured.

The finished website

All in all, the changes made to the image were perhaps subtle to the average viewer, but they made the difference between an obvious stock photo and something harmonious with the website and the company image.

The moral of the story? Stock photography is a matter of getting what you pay for. In this case, a lower budget meant I used a photograph that needed a bit of work to bring it to an appropriate level… however, a good designer/production artist can make this happen.

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web designers versus developers

Posted on March 15th, 2010 by emdash in Opinion

It’s always interesting to see the differences between web designers and web developers in the way they view project solutions. In my time spent in this industry, I’ve seen a lot of designers frustrated with developers, and vice verse. I’ve heard a lot of developer friends complain about the designs they’ve been handed by others, and designers annoyed they “can’t do something” they think would be spectacular… because the developer doesn’t want to code it.

Any larger-scale web presence is going to require at least one designer and at least one developer working on it. It isn’t in the interest of the client to have an ongoing war between these people. They generally just want their site up, as quickly as possible, and as cheaply as possible. It’s best for them if the designer/developer work well together and understand each other. Judging from what I’ve heard and seen from both my designer and developer acquaintances, this doesn’t often happen.

I have a theory about this. My theory: both designers and developers have egos. (Who doesn’t?) A web designer might become enamored of their layout and not want to change a thing. Being told something isn’t possible with the way the back end of a website works, or that it’s not possible to template the layout, is the last thing they want to hear. On the development side of things, you have programmers who view their work with more importance than the designers’, to them, the layout may simply be decoration. (It works both ways. Designers have a tendency to go on about branding importance. Branding is important. So is a functioning site people can navigate and use to find information.)

I’ve really seen both sides of it all. My formal educational background is in print design. But I’ve been making websites since high school in the mid-late 1990s. I started with a free/limited version of Photoshop 5.0 and Notepad. I found since graduation from design school, I kept getting asked, “hey, you build websites, right?” Now, online content is about 70% of what I do. (Last year I’ve been learning more .php to work with open source database-driven CMSs.)

I’ve worked with print designers to build their clients’ websites, and outsourced back end to developers. I’ve been fortunate with who I have worked with, personally. I think the fact I do both design and development has helped me communicate with both types of people. I’m able to see their side of things because I do their side of things.

If you want to become a better web designer: stop using Dreamweaver/WYSIWYG software. Learn how to actually code for the web, to write properly marked-up HTML, to use styles correctly for layout in all browsers. Take a beginner/intermediate level course in it. Don’t expect to suddenly be able to do the job of a web developer… just learn a bit about it for the sake of knowing what those terms are they like to throw around so much.

If you want to become a better web developer: take an art course, like painting. I know this sounds bizarre, but understanding the artistically visual mind is integral to learn how to talk to the designer who believes their site layout is amazing. I don’t want to say “get creative”, because to me, coding is creative. It’s creative problem solving and that is why I can write scripts but not do calculus.

Overall, the thing to keep in mind: you both have the same goal, that of the client’s: to produce a functioning, attractive website that fits their needs. Remember that, and you’ll do fine.

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