[CLUE-Talk] Marketing Your Linux Skills

[Jed S. Baer]

On Fri, 7 May 2004 12:37:41 -0600
"G. Richard Raab" <rraab at plusten.com> wrote:

> > The short versions: keyword-bomb your resume, so that it comes up more
> > often in recruiters' searches. Oh, and put it in MS-Word format.
> 
> Are you suggesting that they use MS-Word format because somebody else
> uses it, or are you asking?

Neither. Just the 2 cent summary of the article.

But, I actually did an eval of various HR packages once while I was on the
bench for a consulting firm. What has already been pointed out by others
is absolutely true. The nearly de-riguer format for HR mgmt. packages is
Word. Think about it. M$ provides an API for Office formats, so SW vendors
can use VBA, or MFC to diddle with it. I wouldn't be surprised if the
various APIs actually make it easier to deal with Word than plain text.

BTW, there are lots of people now who don't know what "plain text" means
-- they never work with it. In fact, they think that what they're looking
at in their word processor is plain text. Note that even if OpenOffice,
when you look at the prefs, they refer to word-processor documents as
"text documents". I've asked people to send stuff via e-mail as plain
text, and gotten Word documents in reply. As a further example of this
type of thinking, I once received an event schedule as an Excel
spreadsheet. It was at most a half-page of sparse text. Nobody at the
originating organization could understand why this was an issue.

But, to get to the core of your question, it's an indication of the
self-reinforcing ubiquity of M$. Regrettably, for the job-hunter, the
question is whether you can afford to have your resume tossed out merely
because of the format.

I'd love to turn my aging Win95 box into a Linux playground. But as Angelo
pointed out, OpenOffice still isn't good enough. So, I keep the old thing
around mainly to run Word97.

jed
-- 
http://s88369986.onlinehome.us/freedomsight/

... it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday
facilitate a police state. -- Bruce Schneier