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comment by insomniasexx
insomniasexx  ·  3896 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: To get a job, write your story instead of a resume

I've been interviewing young college kids after my company has gone through 3 integrated producer / creative directors / manager types in 3 months. I told them to stop hiring managers if they are going to attempt to micromanage them and not let them do their job. Get young bucks who are ambitious, don't know what they want and will listen to you like you are king. Plus we can get 2 college kids and still have money left for an expensive dinner (with drinks!).

I did the interviews the standard way first. 15-20 minutes of hard hitting questions, a straight face. I listened to them go on and on about their strengths and weaknesses and challenging projects. Then I took them up to where they would be working and let them associate with my coworkers and see how they fit in. Reality is, their resumes can be shit or amazing, their "I'm detail oriented and love to work hard" answers mean jack shit, but the way they sit and interact and hold a conversation reveals just about everything I need to know.

This one girl seemed glorious on paper. Perfect everything. Purpose statement that I might steal a couple lines from for my own resume. Another guy had the most beautiful resume I've ever seen - which is saying a lot because I consistently scour the internet for design resume inspiration. Typography, color, and was even printed on cool paper!

The problem with the girl was she couldn't interact. She knew the right words during the traditional interview and probably spent 3 months solid perfecting her resume. But when I sat her down with a bunch of people her age (her potential future co-workers) and asked her what she likes to do - she can't answer. There's no meaning behind the perfectly crafted words on her resume. "I like to be detailed oriented in my free time." Bullshit.

I want to work with people who are genuinely interested in the things they do and the things around them. Last week, we played with fire. This week we played with holograms. No offense, but if you want to sit and craft powerpoints silently, I don't want you here. I want someone who loves to learn and is innately curious and intrigued by things around them. When you are curious, you think, you analyze, you look at problems, you look for solutions. Plus, people go insane after 10 hours of powerpoints. Fire is necessary for sanity's sake.





humanodon  ·  3896 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    I want to work with people who are genuinely interested in the things they do and the things around them.

I feel like this is the heart of what many hiring managers are after, but the structure of how companies hire gets in the way of that. I get that technology makes it easier to sort things (like resumes) but the fact is, we don't have technology that can really crystallize people in some kind of format that is easy for hiring managers to access.

I get what this guy in the article is saying, but this is the whole point of the interview process and in fact, all the technology in use now does, is limit the number of applicants who qualify for interviews and it's one of the inherent weaknesses of the written form: if the reader is not receptive to the content, then there's nothing that will make them read it. The perfect applicant for a job can be weeded out by something as simple as someone else's bad day.

As an aside: that's pretty damn cool that you get to play with holograms. As far as you know, will we be seeing holograms used in media more often any time soon?

insomniasexx  ·  3896 days ago  ·  link  ·  

We'll, we've had three fortune 500 companies request using holograms in ads in the last month so I believe we will start seeing them more and more. They might become popular or really cool or just be gimmicky. I'm going to say the latter until someone actually figures out how to do it well. Holograms right now are very ghetto.

Here's a few video of what people are doing right now:

If you want to make one of your own (this is what I did):

You need transparencies from any office place, this file - warning! autodownload!, an exacto, and a photo on your phone. There is a little dark gray square on this car image. This square should be the same size as the square made when your transparency is folded. Cut and fold the transparency based on the template linked about. Black is cuts and red is where you score / fold it. Open file on phone. Place your transparency on phone. Done.

Files can be downloaded here: http://steves2make.yolasite.com/

user-inactivated  ·  3896 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Awesome how-to video. I'll have to scare up some transparency paper.

humanodon  ·  3896 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Well that's a cool trick. I can see how it has a long way to go before it's widely adopted, but it's clearly got some potential. And, as per the first video, I can see that it's already being used to project images of nubile females, so I guess holoporn could be in the cards. I'd hate to see holograms go the way of Beta. Thanks for the links!

user-inactivated  ·  3896 days ago  ·  link  ·  
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