Schewanick Computer Services

This article briefly summerizes how to succeed in getting job as webdeveloper.
You've read about how desperate people are to hire Web developers. Your friends are spending their days pointing and clicking in Dreamweaver and their nights rolling around in the huge piles of cash they take home from their developer jobs. The kid next door has abandoned his paper route in favor of running an e-commerce site from his treehouse. Yet despite your well-developed personal Web empire, you're still not working in a Web-development job.
It's time to look at your job-hunting strategy. Although the tips you've acquired from well-meaning parents, college advisors, or parole officers can provide a great base for a successful job hunt, there are plenty of Web-specific job-hunting tips missing from all the books and articles out there.
Because I've successfully used the Net to find jobs, I figure I'm as qualified as anyone to tell you how to become the ideal job candidate online. Even better, I've also been on the hiring end, so I can tell you what makes a candidate's email or URL stand out in the over-tired eyes of discriminating employers.
There are three areas you need to work on: Writing a great e-résumé, trolling for jobs without offending potential employers, and writing a great e-cover letter. I've compiled the results of my years of observation and first-hand experience (read: embarrassing mistakes) into handy, Miss-Manners-like, dos and don'ts for a successful Web-development job hunt.
Many of us have suffered through some sort of résumé workshop where a well-meaning instructor shared the secrets of laser printing and heavy-stock paper. Those tips work well if you're sending out paper résumés, but most Web-development companies expect their job candidates to send ASCII résumés or URLs via email, and advice about five-pound bonded cream paper just doesn't port well.
Fortunately, your basic online job-hunting strategy is fairly simple: All you need is a Web-based résumé and an ASCII résumé that you can send out via email. The following tips are the product of my hard-earned knowledge of what does and doesn't work in online résumé presentation.
DO invest in a personal Web site. If you're working as a webslinger for a large, faceless corporation, you're probably not going to be able to host your job-hunting efforts on the company server. Spending US$20 per month on a personal site allows you to build a product that showcases your skills and convinces future employers that you know what you're doing.
DO test your résumé extensively and make sure it makes sense on a 2.0 version browser and can also be read with the images turned off. If you're really slick, make your resume.html file a conditional HTML file, where you can serve different versions of the résumé to different browsers.
DO include specific URLs of Web sites you've worked on, and list exactly what you did on the site. Nobody is going to be impressed with your work at "http://www.netscape.com" unless you tell them exactly what you did. If you're a steady writer for their developer section, be sure and say so and list URLs that point to the pages featuring your work.
DON'T go crazy with the URLs. The person reading your résumé will want to see URLs for the sites you've done, but not for the schools you attended or the software tools you used. The only exception to this rule is if you built the sites for the schools you attended or the software tools you used; even then, the URLs need to be listed under work experience.
If your specialty is interface design or information architecture, DO include a click-through portfolio to flaunt how savvy you are with design samples, site maps, or other explanatory material that showcases your in-depth knowledge and experience.
DO offer a printable version of your online résumé. If someone is looking to recruit you, he'll want a hard copy for interviews, and your five-framed, dHTML-driven résumé is going to be difficult to print. The last thing you want is to have your name associated with the frustrating experience of being unable to print.
DO make sure you warn users whether any links in the résumé will launch a new window or take them off the site. This is a user interface courtesy that, sadly, is not often practiced. Win points for being polite.
DO practice good résumé writing. Nobody is going to be impressed just because you're online. Observe the same rules of writing for all versions of your résumé.
DO have an ASCII version of your résumé handy for quick emailing. Remember that most email programs wrap any lines that exceed 72 characters, so make sure each line on your résumé is 72 characters or less. To help you eyeball the amount, here's an example of a 60-character line:
Designed primary and secondary navigation for online commerce sites. DON'T send your résumé as an attachment. People looking to fill a position can receive hundreds of inquiries, and they're not going to bother to take the extra time to open and print out your résumé. Put your résumé in the body of the email, after your cover letter.
To save time and prevent having to cut-and-paste your 72-characters-or-less-per-line résumé below every cover letter, save your résumé as a .sig file in your email program, then select the .sig when you're mailing out the cover letters. Eudora is an excellent program for this if you're not comfortable with pine or elm.
DON'T point potential employers to your Web-site journal where you talk about your explicitly photographed bondage sessions, illegal drug use, or extramarital affairs. There are documented instances of current employers getting hot and bothered over employee Web sites with less controversial fare. If you force a potential employer to assess whether it wants to have its name associated with the author of such a Web site, you'll probably find yourself on the short end of the stick. Try to get a feel for the company culture before sending URLs out, so you can either practice discretion or opt to pass on a job opportunity if you feel like the company and you won't see eye to eye on personal Web sites.
About the Author
Ajay Patole is a qualified management professional working as sales manager and runs a site 'Venturemall',a cool hangout to play money games,buy and sell in auctions,date and photochat.It is available at URL http://venturemall.tripod.com and newsletter to rediscover true colors of life at http://www.topica.com/lists/venturemall.Also he runs a community 'Venturecon', for entrepreneurs which is available at URL http://groups.msn.com/venturecon.