Ask the Redhead | Tanya Martin-McClellan

Well, it depends what you mean by “standard”.

If you mean a resume that lists every job responsibility you’ve ever had – do not use it!

If you mean a cover letter that says “to whom it may concern, please consider me for that job you posted.” – do not use it!

The only thing that should be “standard” about your resume is the size of paper it prints on.

I’m not saying you should have a wacky, attention-grabbing resume – well, not usually.

What I am saying is that a job worth applying for is a job worth investigating, a job worth tailoring your message to. When you throw the same generic resume to 50 potential jobs with no particular care to who they are or what they want, your indifference shows.

Analogy time!
Consider online dating for a moment. Perhaps you’re looking for someone special. You put a lot of time and care into writing your profile. You carefully explained who you are and what you’re looking for. Then, in the first hour after you post the profile, you get 15 copy-and-pasted generic messages by people who obviously didn’t read your profile at all. Will you take these messages seriously? Probably not. It certainly doesn’t give you a great first impression of them.

Employers are often faced with a similar dilemma, but on a larger scale. Many of the people who apply to their job openings are so busy applying to dozens of jobs that they don’t even look at what was asked. Employers have to spend time and money sorting through all of the applications to find the few qualified ones in the batch.

Rather than be a part of this problem, become the solution. Here are some things you can do to set you apart in your future employer’s eyes.

1. Do your homework. Before deciding to apply for a job, find out everything you can about it. Research the employer, the job itself, the location, the people you would work with. You might find out that you don’t really want the job, which saves everyone time. You might also find the exact reasons you like the job.
    
2. Identify the problem. Ask yourself, “what problem is this employer trying to solve?” The job listing, industry news, and news about the company are good places to look for this information. Next, ask “how can I help solve this problem?” Think about your qualifications. Is it your skills? Your training? Your experience? What is the key to how you can help?
    
3. Craft your message. Put together the problem and how you would help to solve it. Find different ways to say this in person or in writing. Make sure the medium is in line with the message. Don’t write an email to tell your potential employer that your great phone voice will make you the best call center escalations lead ever. Instead, write yourself a short script that you could read into their voicemail one evening and let them hear it for themselves.
    
4. Know your audience. If you know resumes get submitted to Skippy Patel, find out what you can about Skippy. What department is he in? Who does he work with? What does he write about in his public personal blog? Skippy or his assistant will be the first judges of your message, so if Skippy wrote a 15-page screed on the evils of the word “utilize”, you shouldn’t use that word in your cover letter.
    
5. Put it all together. When you put together your resume and cover letter to apply for this job, you should have a consistent message, tailored to your expected audience. It’s the difference between being generic and being a world-renowned expert in llama relations.
    

Emotional responses:
Here comes the hard part.

The hardest thing about the methods I described above isn’t doing the work, it’s taking the emotional risk. When you’re applying for jobs, you’re going through an extreme emotional experience. The risk of rejection causes fear.

Detachment is a coping mechanism you may be using to deal with the emotional extremes of fear (of rejection) and excitement (about starting something new).

When you apply to jobs with a generic cover letter and resume, you are saying, “this is who I am. If you want that, let’s talk. If not, whatever. I’m sending this out to everyone, so it’s not like you’re special, employer.” That’s a good way to protect yourself from some of the emotional pain of rejection, but unfortunately, it also increases your chance of being rejected.

When you put more time into applying for a job and it doesn’t work out, you may feel more deeply hurt and rejected than you would have felt if you hadn’t put effort into it. That is a valid concern.

My experience was that I was better able to handle rejection because of all the work I did.

Knowing what excited me about the job made it easier to find other jobs that would make me happy for the same reasons. Researching the industry and the potential employer meant I could turn around and apply to their competitors if my first choice turned me down. Best of all, even when I didn’t get the jobs I applied for, I improved these skills and met some very interesting people.

I hope this advice is helpful to you.

Well, I got it this weekend, as a matter of fact.

It provided me with a lot of insight into how businesses work, how nonprofits work, how governments interact with both, and how people create organizations. I learned why it matters to my what Singapore’s government does with its banking laws, what to do when activity based costing suggests a product line is losing money, how to look at pricing a new product, and how to hire and fire people as positively as is possible. It was amazing.

It took me three years to complete the program while working full time.

I’m glad I did it, relieved that it’s over, and a little sad to say goodbye to my cohort. I’ve spent evenings with them for three years now; it’s like they’re family to me.

On the other hand, with all the grades turned in, I know now that there is NO HOMEWORK IN STORE FOR ME ANY MORE!! It’s time for some more celebration…

Tanya

This is a follow up post to my earlier one, “My robot bunny won’t talk to me”

So, in answer to some questions I’ve heard…
Binky still spends days on end in his undocumented state, not talking or responding. He’s in a pretty green glowing coma that still looks like this:

Binky just sits like this and stares at me

We unplug him and plug him back in, and most of the time, he just settles right back into this state.

But then, sometimes he’ll connect up and start doing his thing. Frustratingly enough, in addition to the whole coma issue, many of the applications I’ve added are very spotty in THEIR performance, too. I can’t say whether the coma issue is related or not, but even when he’s connected, there’s no guarantee that many of the apps will work.

Here’s the breakdown of Binky’s apps:

Tai-Chi: to be honest, I just don’t notice whether he does this or not. I mostly listen to Binky rather than watch him.

Talking Clock: as advertised, this app has Binky read the time out loud in his own special way in the languages I selected. Because this app usually works, the absence of Binky reading the time is often my first clue that he’s gone into a coma again.

NPR Story of the Day: I think Binky has successfully read me the story of the day three times now. I’m always surprised when it actually happens.

Weather forecast: short and sweet and delivered when I ask for it AND at scheduled times (when Binky’s not in a coma). FINALLY!

Your Report Card by Nabaztag: as far as I can tell, this has never worked.

Storynory: this is set to run when I’m out of the house, but my daughter is at home. I’ve never heard her mention it, so I’m guessing it has never run.

New York Times: this tends to work more often than not. The voice is a little weird, and the NYT headline writers aren’t doing it any favors. I often end up wondering whether I got any meaningful information from it at all.

Wake-up call: this is my other indicator that Binky has gone into a coma. Having one of your alarm clocks fail regularly is not good for one’s work or social life, so I can’t and don’t rely on Binky to perform this duty. I’m frankly quite surprised when it DOES happen. I have a different mp3 file set for each day of the week, so if he were to play them regularly enough, I might start to associate the songs and days.

BBC News: Front page: just like the New York Times headlines, but the headline writers are more likely to impart news IN the headlines.

Dear Old Love: the same voice that just read me world news headlines will now read me short letters people wrote to their former loves – notes like “Even if I wanted to erase the pictures of us on my iPod, I wouldn’t know how.” More here. For some reason, these letters in this voice are very amusing to me.

The Onion Radio News: Doyle Redland’s voice is even MORE amusing, and he always has something disturbing/funny to say. I just wish this would actually PLAY more often.

107.6 Juice FM: radio from Liverpool to my house… it’s supposed to play for 15 minutes every night. Instead, it occasionally turns itself on and can’t turn itself back off again, even to go to sleep. We have to unplug Binky to get it to stop.

The Economist: when I imagine Binky being the best he can be, I think of him playing me this podcast EVERY MORNING. On the mornings when he does, I’m quite pleased by it.

Rotten Tomatoes: this is another electronically-read titles-only RSS feed. If the movie’s name and the review itself can be determined from the title, this delivers useful information. Otherwise, it reads a random string of nonsense at me in a silly voice, which is about half as good.

Soap Detectives: this podcast has never played. I’m sure it would be lovely, but I’ve yet to hear it.

Peter Day’s World of Business: see comments on The Economist, above.

Nabaztag’s Moods: Binky uses a feminine voice to express his moods, and a grating one, at that. He is constantly trying passive-aggressive maneuvers to convince me to buy him new ears. I frequently respond to him to tell him he can ask me to invest more when he starts working more than a couple days a week. When I hear that feminine “moods” voice, I just want to drop Binky from a great height. For now, I’ve reduced the frequency of the moods. I may just turn them off soon.

Our diagnostics showed that Binky could connect to our network and to the Internet, but the coma state comes from not being able to connect to “the warren” (violet.net). A recent upgrade was alleged to have addressed some of the difficulties people had connecting to “the warren”, so I hoped that things would improve, and I suppose they have.

I still can’t recommend Binky until his MTBC (mean time between comas) is MUCH larger.

I’ll do another follow up this summer – maybe they’ll get these kinks worked out by then.

Tanya

Believe me, it isn’t because of a lack of fascinating people, great information, or very funny jokes. Twitter has all that and then some! However, it’s not working for ME, and so that means that I shouldn’t use it.

There were two main reasons it didn’t work for me:

1. It was broken so often, I started tensing up every time I attempted to use it.
2. More importantly, even if it had worked perfectly, it would have not been the right tool for me because it relies on its ability to constantly interrupt what I’m doing.

Here’s why that second one is a problem. I try to do all my work in quadrant 2. It’s where I’m productive; it’s where I feel good about what I’m accomplishing.

When I examined how twitter was (not) working for me, I saw that its problem is that it’s in a quadrant I like to stay out of.

Tanya's four quadrants

These quadrants have many activities; I included just a few. Quadrant 3 is my least favorite quadrant. Answering phone calls is often in this category. A phone rings, and it seems urgent. It demands attention NOW! – but chances are, it’s some vendor’s sales rep trying to get you to buy a new data storage solution. Or maybe it’s that acquaintance who likes to call you up and tell you about her latest shopping trip – in excruciating detail. In either case, how do you make progress on your goals by accepting those phone calls? What would your life be like if you let these phone calls hijack your day whenever they arrived? For me, that’s what twitter was like – except with a broken voice mail system that wouldn’t let me catch up on what I missed.

Obviously, many people use twitter for many purposes, so it will have different value in each case. But for those of you wondering why I ditched… for me, it’s just not in line with what I need.

Tanya

I’m occasionally asked if I would link to someone’s website or specific pages… I’d be happy to do so if I can see that it has valuable information and is easy to read/view/listen to. I’m thrilled to do so if the person asking me is the author and is a nice person to be around.

If you’d like for me to provide a link to something of yours, please let me know.

Tanya

I’ve been talking to James Christie recently, and he brings up some good points about application security. Ideally, security is a concern the entire organization shares, from the board of directors to the records clerk. Ideally, security is considered in the requirements of each new application and best practices are followed. Ideally, testers (defect finders!*) are looking at security. Ideally, auditors can check to make sure these practices are in place.

[*thanks, Keith!]

But what can we do when we don’t live in the ideal world? What can we do when we’re the lone voice in the wilderness, crying “SECURITY!” to the winds?

I’m going to try to apply what Professor John A. Daly taught our class about advocacy: first, they have to feel the pain.

No one wants to hear about solutions if they don’t believe they have a problem.

So, for each security failing, I have to tell a story about how this failure could cause a real loss. For example, let’s assume for a moment that the application is a payroll application and the authentication method is flawed.

This is where I tell a tale of the spiteful temp who gets access to the payroll reports and emails them out to the whole company and the press. Chaos, panic, the dead rising from the grave, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria! Okay, maybe not that bad, but the idea of the CFO’s salary being emailed out to all of her direct reports probably will get her attention, and most of us have seen enough irrational human behavior to see this scenario as at least mildly plausible and definitely threatening. Realistically, this is just one of many scenarios in which the vulnerability could be exploited, but the key is to pick one that is relevant to the audience.

Once you have the attention of your stakeholders, you have to follow through. If they think that security holes are something too big or too small to worry about, you won’t get their support. If you can explain that they are truly a problem, but a mostly solvable one, you may be able to implement better application design.

So, in answer to the question, it’s everyone’s responsibility – they just might not realize it yet.

Tanya

I got a really neat birthday gift this year, my Nabaztag:tag robot bunny named Binky. Yay, Binky!

Now, some of you probably know that the reason I got into testing in the first place is because I have an outstanding ability to make software break – which even happens when I’m not trying. I can’t help it. It’s just what I do. (Or, in a different perspective, there are just that many defects out there.)

This “gift” of mine may have somehow put little Binky into an undocumented state:

Binky just sits like this and stares at me

I was hoping to have a morning companion who would enlighten and entertain me, but Binky apparently likes mornings even less than I do. He’s completely mute in the morning, as well as most of the other times I have observed him. And yes, I did check the volume dial in the back.

He’s confusing me with his complicated symptoms. Occasionally, when I ask him to do something else, he’ll play me some rap music for a few minutes. And sometimes, when he feels like it, he’ll read out your tweets or emails… but usually not. Twice, we successfully got Binky to tell us the weather on command, but never on schedule.

The iPhone MyBunny app will operate his ears and voice successfully, but still can’t make him respond to commands or scheduled events. Obviously, he’s connected to the Internet. He just doesn’t want to do anything. Lazy bunny.

Violet.net help has been… very French. Perhaps they will get around to replying to me someday. Or perhaps they won’t. Or perhaps they are on holiday. Their automated email isn’t very clear about that.

In the meantime, I have a very pretty lit-up little brick.

I’d love to give Binky glowing reviews, but at this point, all I can say is that it glows.

[UPDATE: Violet support reached me to say they don't work weekends (I sent the original message to them 6 days ago), and asked me to send them an undefined configuration page. I responded, and now I'm waiting again. While some communication is better than none, I would really love something a bit less glacial in speed. I did submit another ticket with this post's URL in it, so the people at Violet are welcome to chime in here if they would like.

In related news, my husband asked Binky to play me some music this morning and he read me the economic news. Progress!]

[UPDATE #2: I noticed a mysterious French test feed on Binky's settings... and suddenly, Binky started (mostly) reading the RSS feeds and podcasts I had directed him to read! Yay!]

Tanya

One question I get asked a lot, directly or indirectly, is whether I can help someone land a job.

The answer, unsurprisingly, is “maybe… it depends.”

If you want to know whether I can help you land a lumberjack job in Washington state, well, no, I probably can’t help you much. Good luck, though!

Now, if your needs intersect with what I have to offer, then maybe I can help you.

Some things that may or may not help you:

• I can help you dress & groom appropriately for interviews. Contact me with a description of the situation you’re in and a description/picture of what you plan to wear and I’ll give you prompt feedback.
• I can check your resume for gross errors and sometimes nitpicky details. For major rewrites, I recommend TunaRez.
• I can give you general advice about job searching – HINT: much like senators, hiring managers are busy people without a lot of time to read email blasts. Try a more personal touch!
• I can point you to my favorite job search aggregator, Indeed.com. If you use this tool, you can see jobs on all the job boards and from company websites without having to create accounts on all of them. It also tells you when a job is posted in multiple places, which can be valuable information when evaluating opportunities.

and there’s more!

• If you’re in Texas and eligible for it, I can point you to where to get unemployment payments.
• I can talk you through interviews and salary negotiations, or the annoyances of waiting for employers to respond.
• I can talk to you about what hiring managers are looking for. Let me know what kind of job you’re looking at, and in many cases, I have some insight into what is needed there. If I don’t know, I’ll tell you. For example, I have no idea what the people who hire actors or lumberjacks are looking for.
• I can remind you that you are not alone.
• I can remind you how awesome you are if you happen to forget.
• I can talk through some of the early explorations of starting your own business.

What I can’t do is hire you on the spot. Sorry; I don’t have any jobs open right now.

The services above are free to my friends and to people who are pleasant to deal with. If you don’t fall into those categories, I’m not interested in working with you at this time, but I wish you the best of luck finding someone else to help you.

my, my, aren't I looking goofy?

I pronounce the first syllable of my name like it rhymes with lawn, pawn, on, fawn, or dawn – not like it rhymes with man, plan, LAN, SAN, fan, or ban. Other Tanyas can and do differ on that.

I do my best to help people when and how I can. Sometimes that means solving a problem with them, sometimes that means NOT solving problems. Sometimes it means checking in on their cats. I’m flexible like that.

I live in Austin, Texas with my fabulous husband, my super-fun child, and two completely insane kitties.

So, this past week, I have been at The Washington Campus in Washington D.C., learning how our federal government really works. It is an amazing program. I heartily recommend it.

I’ve learned a lot about how to advocate successfully to the federal government this week, but the biggest thing I learned is this:

No one will pay attention unless you
1) talk to the right person, and
2) craft your message so that they care.

Randomly shouting demands in Washington D.C.’s general direction has no appreciable effect. Sad, but true.

There is also a big difference between how “real America” (Americans who don’t live/work in Washington D.C.) may think things work and how they actually work. That might not be a surprise to you, but it was to me.

Illusion: We “real Americans” think that our Congressmen and Congresswomen are swamped with constituent calls and letters and visits and emails. Thinking that others must have already told them how we feel, or that they won’t care about one more call, we usually don’t contact them.

Reality: they’re very busy people (CRAZY busy!), but real contact with a real constituent is a rarity they will gladly make time for.

Remember, they get re-elected by people like you! If they want to keep their job, they will try to make their constituents happy. Go meet them when they visit your district – and remember to talk to the staffers because the staffers (kids straight out of college) run everything.

If your message is more complex than “vote yes/no on bill XYZ” then talk to the staffer about your concerns and they will distill it for their boss. You aren’t being shoved off to a nobody; you’re being given access to the one person who can convince the Congressman/woman of your position. Treat them with respect!

Illusion: We “real Americans” think that the best way to let those Washington people know what we think is through massive, collective, uniform action.

Signing petitions, sending form letters, mailing teabags – we think the larger numbers will impress Washington more than a lone voice.

Reality: They don’t. They’re seen for what they are: slacktivism. If you want to make a difference, what you need to do is the same thing you would do to make a sale. You find the deciding person/people, and you figure out what will influence them, then you contact them personally to discuss it with them.

Yes, this takes a lot more time than forwarding an email petition or mailing in a form letter.

PLEASE NOTE: I’m not saying that every time you get a petition you agree with, you should always stop what you’re doing, go look up the key issues and deciding government officials, then do tons of research and craft compelling messages to the key people in charge. That’s not it at all. I know you might feel guilty about not forwarding an email. I’m not trying to add to that.

I’m saying that, if you care deeply about making that change happen, you will be more likely to have an effect if you follow that plan and spend more time working at it.

However, if the issue is not worth that time to you, save yourself a few more seconds or minutes and choose to do nothing. It’s just as effective as form letters and costs 100% less in time and postage.

Believe me, it is okay to do nothing. We have a representative form of democracy so that you can enjoy your liberty, spending your time as you please, while your representatives immerse themselves in the business of governing. If you can’t trust them to represent you, replace them!

Now, if you decide you actually want to petition your government effectively, I also learned a lot about how to do that. I may post that information after I recover from this week, but if you have a specific question, let me know and I’ll help as soon as I can.

In any case, now you know why I didn’t forward your email petition to 10 friends like you asked. Hope that helps.

Tanya, at the Lincoln Memorial