Still hiring...
Well, I posted yet another ad today for a “generalist”, and therein I had, once again, a few litmus tests to help me weed out the total clowns.
I wrote, inter alia:
You must be able to think on your feet, and you must be able to read and follow directions.
and below that I wrote:
Please provide a cover letter explaining how you feel you fulfill the requirements and a résumé in plain text or HTML format only. We will not open PDFs or MS Word/OpenOffice documents.
As I've mentioned before, I use this as a zeroth-order filter to weed out the totally clueless; there's plenty of cluelessness floating around the IT industry since the dot-com-boom that I try to avoid it.
The posting went out around 2006 06 14 T 1345Z. By 1431Z I had already received the first clown: someone who sent me an email without cover letter, but with an MS word document attached.
I also wrote, within the top two lines of the ad:
in-office, during the regular work week (please no offshore or outsourcing companies)
Guess what came next? At 1435Z, I had someone named “Lenny” hawking overseas (CL > 0.95 from FSU) programmers; clearly he can't read. I do, however, love his “it's not spam” spam:
Confidentiality Notice:
We respect your Online Privacy. This is not an unsolicited mail and
cannot be considered Spam as long as we include Contact information
and a method to be removed from our mailing list. If you are not
interested in receiving our e-mails then please reply with a "remove"
in the subject line. We sincerely regret any inconvenience.
Yeah, right. Sure thing, Lenny.
1441Z showed another clown with no cover letter and a .doc attachment. I had to wait until 1546Z until I got someone who could follow directions.
I have to give props to the guy at 1754Z sent me his résumé in .doc format, then 3 minutes later sent back an “oops! sorry” and sent it in plain text. (I give him props since I've done the same klutzy thing too.)
So far the score is 3 contenders, 5 clowns, and 1 contender-clown.