What made me smile today? A Cover letter!

Recruiting in a small / medium business can involve trawling through a lot of unprepared or unsuitable applications.

Many can be close to the mark, but require a bit of digging to see exactly where the gold nuggets are hidden.

As I wrote in “recruiting with a little help from your friends“, I try to look for the people part when sometimes the documents have little life of their own.

Currently we are interviewing for a PHP programmer, and no offense to any programmer, but there are a few who happily would live without social contact, or lights for that matter, and just love to be in small groups coding furiously for hours on end.

Thus finding who has the great skill sets and can also fit into a group like ours is not always readily apparent from the applications.

Our current advert is summarised here on our recruiting site [view advert]. I won’t go into the why of that particular site (it works for us), but today I got back an application that made me smile.

I had a good chuckle for nearly 5 minutes and appreciated the effort that went into it. You need to have read the position description to see the humour, but I felt I would share this as I enjoyed it!

Oh and the rest of the resume stacked up so of course I will be interviewing this potential dog food eater.

I wonder how many applications you have received had an introduction like this:

…<snip>

On the initial inspection of your job ad on seek.com.au, I thought that somebody finally had the nous to develop some sort of PHP based proctology system, but on closer inspection of afore mentioned ad, I am slightly relieved that’s not the case.

The job description sounds like it’s right up my alley.  I currently have 5 years experience with all things LAMP (BASH scripting, OO PHP5, MySQL, Javascript libraries etc.), love innovation and problem solving and know Ajax is a superior web technology and an inferior cleaning product.

….<end snip>

Hat’s off to the applicant who will remain anonymous (well for now).

It got my attention which is part of the process. It helps to stand out in the crowd.

MediaHunter wrote a great piece about ways to approach finding a job in the creative and design industries in this day and age, which is a great piece especially for those looking for more creative roles. Yes I have had someone applying much of those similar techniques recently, probably read Craig’s post. [How to get a job in the advertising, design or media industry in 2009 ]

So to the creative programmer, let’s hope your interview and rest of you is so interesting and the potential is good. If nothing else you brightened up my day – that’s what ireckon!

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