Robert Scoble

Robert has come home once again to early adopter-ville... - Allen Stern

Great advice, Robert - not only for someone submitting a resume, but also for hiring managers and what to look for to find the "cream of the crop." - Vince DeGeorge

Allen: early for what? Recession advice? :-) - Robert Scoble

Insightful article + great comments. But seriously, the pay needs to be $15-$20 or else you won't interest the career type - only the mass-mailing, money desperate grad student :¬P - CannonGod

Resume is dead. Got my new job without it :) - sean percival

Resumes do indeed suck for telling your story, but until HR people change how they go about getting people to submit for jobs, that's what we are stuck with. - Alex Scoble CISSP

i never go for a job where i need a resume, or an application form. if it is not person to person, i don't want to work there. - Gregory Lent

I'm curious. Why is applying for a job that you are overqualified for an automatic ding against you? What if you are someone who wants to get out of your current career and start a new one that you happen to be overqualified for at the moment? Also, in Scoble's post, he said he wants someone who won't settle for a $10-$12/hr job and looks ahead in his/her career. So how does someone who's overqualified in experience not fit that description? - Cheryl Jones

Cheryl, because it'll show when you work there. Overqualified people make it clear that they are overqualified for the position they're in, and it comes out in salary negotiations, task delegation, and dealing with superiors. - Mark Trapp

FYI overqualified will not usually hold up in court if someone decides to sue. At least, that's what they taught us in HR class. - Glen Campbell

Glen: sue for what? If "overqualified" was code for racism/sexism during job selection? - Mark Trapp

for not selecting the most qualified applicant. - Glen Campbell

Let me get off the iPhone and expand. If you post a job listing certain qualifications, and you bypass someone who meets all the qualifications but is "overqualified" for someone who doesn't quite meet everything, then that person may have a case for employment discrimination. We are encouraged to write our job descriptions very carefully to be sure that we find the right people. An "overqualified" person may very well be looking for a simpler, easier job to handle until he or she retires, and it may even.. - Glen Campbell

...be on the advice of a doctor. You put yourself and your company at risk by rejecting them as "overqualified" without considering them. You're safer if you can find some legitimate way to disqualify them. - Glen Campbell

I commented on the post. Impossible is Nothing - Christopher Harley

...except an adidas slogan. - Shawn Farner

Love this post Robert. This plus Seth Godin's post Why Bother Having a Resume? http://sethgodin.typepad.com/s... are keepers. - Hutch Carpenter

What's a resume? Oh yeah, I vaguely remember getting my first job out of undergrad with one of those things. - Logical Extremes

@Cheryl... right on! I always thought it would be fun to pick a company you liked, and try to go in totally entry-level with no documentation, and just see what could happen. - Logical Extremes

Robert: here were some of my observations on resumes a few months ago... http://www.stagetwoconsulting.... - Jeremy Toeman

Robert, good post. My experience is people should not apply for posted jobs for the very reason they will likely be lost in the crush of applicants. The more savvy strategy is to discover the outfits you would LOVE to join and then apply for the job that is not yet available. Do your homework and reach out to everyone from the CEO down. The key here is how you are treated as an outsider. Pushed off to HR. Not provided any response. These are indications they are not the company you want to work for. - Dave Martin

few things: as someone who desperately wants a career change, I appreciate the tips provided. Second have you considered a viritual admin assistant? One area of disagreement, the video. While the person might get high marks for creativity, they run the risk of being blond and the hiring manager having preconceived idea about blonds, what if the room they use is in their home and it is not neat, etc etc - bottomline I would be concerned that something could be used from the video that eliminates me People do judge a book by it's cover, sometimes without even realizing it. - Ruth Ferguson

Ruth: if someone is going to judge you based on your appearance, they're going to do it in the interview, as well. Showing judgement about where you film the video is fair game: you chose to shoot the video, why would you shoot it in a messy house? - Mark Trapp

Jeremy - that's a good post. - Hutch Carpenter

Mark, you are right about appearance. But perhaps if your resume is strong enough they once they finally meet you, it is possible you have a strong advantage that a glance at a video would preclude. Messy room was not a good example but I will give you that point. - Ruth Ferguson

Regarding overqualification: I'm not opposed to that, but you MUST point it out on a letter to me and explain why you are applying for a job that is so obviously "beneath" you. Remember, my producer used to be a software developer. He changed careers and has worked out very well. But you've gotta take on that objection head on in your cover letter or you'll get tossed. - Robert Scoble

Ruth: one thing that I'm looking for is a little risk taking behavior. Doing videos is risky, yes. But if you want to stand out of the crowd you've got to do something different. That requires taking a risk. On the other hand, I'd be very careful about taking a risk and I'd get lots of people's opinions about it. - Robert Scoble

Thanks for the comments regarding overqualification, everyone. I had always heard about this "faux pas" and wondered why an employer wouldn't like someone overqualified for a job. For example, I heard about someone on a discussion forum that the hubby reads who recently came into a lot of bad luck, lost his job, and couldn't get another because there were none in his field, and he was overqualified for other jobs, like retail work. I thought it was insane that he couldn't even apply for a job at McD's... - Cheryl Jones

...or a bookstore or something to make ends meet while he couldn't find anything in his "native" profession. That didn't make sense to me at all, and is kind of scary, considering how I'm in a volatile field (software engineering) and would like to know that I could at least have something else to fall back on in case the very worst case scenario happens and I'd have to take a job lower than what I'm supposedly qualified for. - Cheryl Jones

when I applied for a number of jobs last year I found a large number of people demanded word files instead of PDF's :S I also don't get the problem of a person being over qualified for something... surely it means they would do better than someone that needs plenty of training. After all, they applied for it so they are showing an interest in doing a job you see as "below" them! - alphaxion

I am in the process of tweaking my partners CV, I gave her some feedback, didn't go down well! This post is submitted from the naughty step! - Joe Dawson (beta)

Robert, I wrote a similar post back in March titled "Hiring in a 2.0 World" http://tinyurl.com/39dy8d - Aaron Strout

? so if you google a potential applicant, and land on their social network(which isn't biz based) do you downgrade them if they may be wild in the personal life? - clarke thomas

clarke: not necessarily! :-) - Robert Scoble

wow, what an interesting and yet disappointing experience. I was expecting you to receive a gamut of well appointed resumes. So, this is really odd. Bummer! - Susan Beebe

@Susan - our last job posting (craigslist + linkedin) generated >200 incoming resumes, I phone-screened ~30, in-person interviews for 7, follow-ups for 2. Hired none. Most recent hire came due to our blog post for the job... - Jeremy Toeman