From all appearances,Vinnie Boombotz isn’t a guy who’s used to not being recognized. But that’s mostly what happened when the CPA (that stands for Chief Protection Associate) began applying for jobs online from his home on Greeneyeshade Place in Lotsamoola, N.J.
A creation of Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin, co-authors of “CareerXroads” (MMC Group, $26.95), Vinnie “applied for” accounting jobs on every Fortune 500 site that accepted online applications. Despite a patently ridiculous resume (Vinnie was a collections supervisor at Bad-a-Bing Corp. who “eliminated turnover and competition”), it contained enough career accomplishments to pass muster with a computer not programmed with a sense of humor.
Crispin and Mehler pulled the stunt to dramatize the shortcomings of automated resume screening systems. At most large companies, computers, not people, give a resume its first read, Mehler said. “There’s not a human involved, unless it’s a clerk in a backroom who scans it for a few seconds to see if the format is OK to go into the database.”
Vinnie received automated e-mail responses acknowledging his application from about 250 of the 400 or so companies that got applications. In the worst cases, the automated e-mail spit back a terse reply that included a candidate reference number but no information naming the company. In a few cases, Vinnie was linked to other accounting jobs within a company by an automatic agent.
Only a dozen firms followed up and told Vinnie he didn’t get the job.
What’s the lesson? “A job seeker needs to find a friend to hand-carry a resume into a recruiter,” Mehler said.
Great minds think alike?
Ever wonder at what age you’re at the top of your game? If you’re a genius or a criminal, you do your best work in your 30s–and it’s mainly to impress the opposite sex.
Or so says Satoshi Kanazawa, a researcher at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. He studied biographies of prominent scientists, mostly men, and found that they made their key discovery before their mid-30s, around the same age that criminal behavior peaks.
Kanazawa says in New Scientist magazine that the male competitive urge to attract females is a driving force behind criminal and scientific achievements. That drive decreases with age as men’s priority shifts to caring for their children.
Big bosses, big personalities
Odds are, your boss is extroverted–or at least pretends to be at the office.
A survey of executives conducted by Sim Wyeth & Co., a training and consulting firm, found that 75 percent of managers describe themselves as extroverts. And even 36 percent of managers who didn’t tag themselves as extroverts said they become more extroverted at work.
Possessing an outgoing personality is a plus when it comes to building relationships with colleagues and clients. But it might not be a positive if you’re intent on lightening your workload. Why? Although most of the 173 upper and middle managers surveyed agreed that saying no to requests from colleagues makes them uncomfortable, extroverts were twice as likely to be more uncomfortable than introverts.
These executives likely aren’t shy about asking for help, though–and probably from you, if they’re your boss.
Some tech talents still at a premium
IT workers with “hot” skills–skills in short supply and high demand–may not be commanding the salary increases they once were, but they’re getting raises above the norm, Hewitt Associates reports.
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The Lincolnshire-based outsourcing and consulting firm surveyed more than 100 companies and found that the median pay increase for IT workers during the past 12 months was 2.9 percent. This compares to pay increases of 4 percent in 2002.
But workers with hot skills are seeing bigger increases. Data warehousing workers saw their average base pay increase by 5.9 percent, while professionals specializing in Microsoft systems earned pay increases averaging 4.7 percent. The three hottest IT specialties? Customer relationship management, SAP and enterprise application interchange, Hewitt reports.