digital pen, digital paper.

Articles of Confession

Has anyone ever had any luck on Monster.com?
via atomatic

No. And employers who post there get flooded with hundreds and sometimes thousands of resumes (especially in this economy), so you really have to do something amazing with your resume to get noticed. After lasting more than two seconds on their screen, you better fit their criteria very closely if not perfectly to not be discarded.

I had to hire my replacement at my old job and parsed through 80 to 90 resumes from a monster listing. Perhaps 40 more poured in after the selection of my replacement. A number of people would just direct you to their website, so for the first batch, I trashed anything that took too long to load on my screen. Then I gave up on web-based resumes all-together and trashed all of them.

Since the position was for graphic design, I looked for a resume with good layout and did not actually read any text unless it looked pleasing to the eye. That included the handful that utilized solid bright colors as a background, making any text impossible to read had I not immediately closed and deleted their files. For content, I looked for experience and then for a link to any portfolio work. At this point, I was willing to navigate their web page as a supplement to an already interesting if not impressive resume.

But again, if the page took to long to load, they were cut.

In the end, I just ended up handing the job over to my friend’s girlfriend, because really, it’s all about who you know.