I Know The Guy Who Owns This Place

With unemployment nearing 10% and many great folks being laid off from great companies, I decided to write up my “(Don’t be a) Dummy Guide to Applying for a Job” thoughts. Over the past several months, I’ve read hundreds of resumes and interviewing a flood of candidates for Redfin’s two, open product manager positions. I’m painfully aware of how hard it is to get even to an initial phone screen or in-person interview. Yet, I’m always reminded how sloppy people are regarding one of the most important things in their life: their job, career and, ultimately, livelihood.

This may seem pedestrian, but the point needs to be drilled home: Your resume is your first impression and it’s critical it catches the hiring manager’s eye. Most managers will skip the cover letter and scan the resume in less than 2 minutes. That’s all the time you have to make your impact. If you pass the resume screen, then they’ll look at what you said in the cover letter. For candidates who apply to Redfin, I always ask for a couple suggestions on how Redfin could improve it’s products. I always read these; they usually give a good indicator of how you think and from what angle you approach design.

1. Make doggone sure your resume is a work of art.

• Check your spelling and grammar. Have several people who don’t know what you did at your last job review your resume for errors as well. It’s shocking how sloppy people are with this detail.
• Be clear about what impact you had in a team. “Led”, “Drove”, “Organized” are usually weak descriptions and can make you appear to be a go-between instead of a go-getter. Try things like “Decreased annual support calls by 14% by designing a self-help wiki site for CSRs and customers to share solutions to common problems.” Look for “do” words.
• If there’s a gap in time on your resume, be ready to be asked what happened.
• Have something interesting or creative in there. You need to stand out and, better yet, make you memorable. (even if it’s “Watermelon Spitting Champion 2007″)
• Don’t use Microsoft Word stationary. It always looks cheesy and cheap.   
• if you’ve got the skills, put some visual design polish on the resume. One of my recent candidates had the logos for each company on each job he’d previously had. It’s a tiny detail, but it definitely gave the impression that detail and visuals mattered to him. (great for a PM.)
• Scrub out your TLAs. This was one I fell for coming out of Microsoft. I had used a lot of acronyms of projects that everyone in MSFT understood like it was 1st grade English. Unfortunately, the first startup guy I had read my resume had literally no idea what I did at Microsoft after reading my resume. He didn’t know all the internal Microsoft lingo (and shouldn’t be expected to!)

2. Include a cover letter (email body) that explains, briefly, why you’re interested in the job. Keep it short. Do not just send a resume with no note at all. That just makes you look like you’re spamming every job you can find and aren’t truly interested in this one as a career path.

3. Find an in. The best way to really get yourself noticed is to get passed to the hiring manager as a referral from someone else in or out of the company. That’s the best way to get you remembered. Hiring managers will always take just a bit longer screening a resume if it’s via someone they know. Twitter pretty much makes this a no-brainer to do.

4. Send a thank you note after an interview.   It’s a simple thing and sets the right vibe/tone with the hiring manager. it’s also, hopefully, an indicator of how you’d treat customers and partners.

5. Understand the company you’re applying to. I’ve had many applicants tell me how they’d make everything better by doing XYZ… all things that are in complete conflict with Redfin’s culture, philosophy or goals. If you can’t even take the time to read the About pages on their website, don’t bother applying.

6. Go through the website extensively before your first interview. Figure out for yourself what you liked and didn’t like. Read up on how the customer moves through the site and how the marketing and experience are focused. You’re certain to be given one or two questions where you’re shown a web page and asked to critique and improve it.

I’m sure there’s a hundred other things I could write about, but these are what I would consider the absolute, no-excuses, must-do rules when applying for a job at a technology company.

This was all prompted by a post I ran across called “10 Answers You Should Know Before Your Job Interview” (via Lifehacker) There’s only 10… read them and know your answers. Good luck and happy hunting.

~ by bryan on July 4, 2009.