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Subject:Re: Psychic Targeting of Potential Employers From:Robert Plamondon <robert -at- PLAMONDON -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 4 Mar 1997 23:36:33 PST
Miki Magyar writes:
> It's like Pascal's wager. The cost of being wrong is too high, assuming
> you only send resumes to companies you really want to work for
This is an interesting concept. You are asserting that one can determine
in advance which companies one really wants to work for.
How is this done? I spent eleven years working at a company I had never
heard of until my interview. I wasn't sure it was one of the companies
I really wanted to work for until I'd been there several months. But
I became very attached to the company in the end, and stuck with it
practically forever.
In my experience, unless you have some inside knowledge, the fact that
a company seems like a great place to work is a credit to its P.R.
department, but doesn't correlate very well with reality. Meanwhile,
of course, all the up-and-coming companies are too obscure for you
to have much of an opinion, one way or the other.
Thus, I have always taken a "cast your bread upon the waters" method.
I spray resumes left, right, and center. If I'm writing cover letters
and targeting resumes, I don't have all the time in the world to do
each one. Most of the people I know who ended up at fascinating little
companies did so because of a mass-mailing of at least 100 resumes.
While a generic resume is often just the ticket when doing the shotgun
approach, targeted resumes are often best when dealing with a large
number of companies about which you know something, but whom you
haven't fallen in love with.
So I guess I'm saying that you'd go about kissing frogs one way if
you're sure a particular frog is Prince Charming, and another way
if you can't tell one frog from another, but are pretty sure there's
at least one prince in there somewhere.
-- Robert
--
Robert Plamondon, High-Tech Technical Writing, Inc.
36475 Norton Creek Road * Blodgett * Oregon * 97326
robert -at- plamondon -dot- com * (541) 453-5841 * Fax: (541) 453-4139 http://www.pioneer.net/~robertp
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