evaluating resumes

On a tech-writing mailing list people were talking about red flags in resumes (for tech-writing positions, I mean). Most people were talking about content issues, so I raised formatting.

Specifically: if you send me HTML (or a URL) I will inspect your source, and if you send me a Word document I may examine the structure of your document. (Word isn't a core tool at this job, so I don't care as much -- but I still care a little.) This is because I care not just about what you write but whether you have some basic tools-usage clues. For example, I've seen resumes that claimed HTML proficiency, but when I looked at the source I saw that it was Word's generic export (which is really really awful HTML). If you and I (and the hypothetical other members of my team) are going to be working on the same source files, that won't do. Similarly, I'd like to know if you're using headings or hand-modifying those paragraphs to be bold and a bigger font. Stuff like that.

Someone complained that I put too much emphasis on tools, but I don't think I do. I haven't set the bar especially high, and it's one of several factors I consider. But I consider poor use of tools on the resume or submitted writing samples to be in the same broad category as awkward writing and grammatical errors -- everyone makes those mistakes at times, but if you do it on something as important as your job application, how much will you do it once I hire you?

If I were interviewing a programmer who showed me a really snazzy demo, but the source code was a tangled unmaintainable mess, I wouldn't care too much that he'd written snazzy code, because he wrote code that no one else will be able to maintain (and that he probably won't be able to maintain in six months). Doc source is no different. Your content and your methods have to be good or there will be long-term pain. If there's going to be long-term pain, I'd like you to do it somewhere else. :-)

I'm not saying that I'm going to reject the otherwise-perfect applicant who uses a hard-coded "bold + font+2" or whatever, but it's not the otherwise-perfect applicants who have to worry anyway. It's the folks who aren't clearly better than the rest of the pack.

As an aside, I personally don't send Word source files any more unless that format is specifically requested. I send PDF instead. Different versions of Word render differently, and I've seen some pretty bad formatting that I'm pretty sure the sender didn't see on his end. I don't want that to happen to me.

Israeli music

It's fairly rare that Dani wants to do something that could be categorized as "Jewish", so when he does I almost always go along with it. That's how I ended up seeing a concert tonight by Chava Alberstein, who is apparently a big-name Israeli singer.

She's very talented, and the show was fun overall. All of the songs save one were in either Hebrew (mostly) or Yiddish (a little), and there were several where she didn't tell us what it was about, so my comprehension was limited. I was getting a word or two here and there, but not entire phrases.

I knew that some words migrated from English into Hebrew, mostly technical terms. It was still a little disconcerting to hear the word "video" several times in one Hebrew song. (The song was about an immigrant who was working in Israel to feed his family back home, and the recordings he made to send back with the money.) I wonder if speakers of languages from which English has borrowed have the same reaction when they hear English speakers.

She did a group of love songs near the beginning that she sketched out loosely in English. I asked Dani later if they were as sappy in Hebrew as they sounded in English, and he said yes. You can do a lot with sappy lyrics by performing them in a language not native to your audience, though, a trick that opera companies have known for centuries.

She had two backup musicians, a guitarist (she also played guitar) and a percussionist. The latter, Avi Agababa, was really good, and fun to watch. His bag of percussive tricks was quite sizable, though he spent a lot of time on doumbek (or something very like a doumbek -- metal, not ceraminc, and large) and tambourine. When using other items, like cymbals, bells, and something that looked like a bunch of large wooden beads clumped on a cord, he really understood the concept of "less is more".

Now here's the surprising part: we bought our tickets two days ago, asked for "best available", and got third row center. The theatre was about half full (maybe more). Did most of those people really just pay at the door? How did we get such good seats on Tuesday?