They say there are three kinds of sailors: the ones who want to do nothing more than plane across the water at top speed in the midst of twenty others intent on doing the same thing; the ones who sail for its own sake, just to be moving along, quickly or slowly depending on the wind; and the people who like to putter, sanding here, cleaning there, tuning the rigging, sponging down the deck and taking a nap when they’re done.

I fall somewhere within the second two. I like to move along in winds that are steady but not too strong, but if I end up in the cabin because of a rain storm, I don’t feel like I’ve wasted the day.

I do wish I was a better sailor, a bit less nervous in the wind and with a better feel for my boat. And there are times I wish we kept it on Barnegat Bay so we could slip off and anchor and spend the night. It’s another of my life’s funny turns that I’ve ended up living so far inland.

But no complaints. It was pouring down rain this morning so I know I’ll be pumping out Finally again next weekend, but the forecast says it’ll be sunny so I’ll just get another day to sit around and imagine the summer.

This morning, though, I picked up the iPad from the night table and settled in with the Times’s app, which I’d downloaded the other day. Now I’ve read the whole paper, as it were; watched the videos, checked out the slide shows and finished my coffee. (If I was a real prig, I’d add that I don’t have to go wash my hands of the ink, but I’m not, so won’t.)

The Times app isn’t the most ambitious in the world, and it’s a little clunky to use but, really, it’s no more clunky than the physical newspaper itself. It doesn’t have a lot of fancy features that let you build profiles or stock portfolios. The fanciest thing it does is send news alerts if you want them.

But this is what I like about it. I don’t want to spend more than a minute figuring out how to read the news, and I didn’t have to. You page through it in a manner that’s not unlike paging through the Kindle app. Its news package goes back for several days, so you can catch up on things when you have to.

Everyone likes to batter the Times for its awkward approach to online news, but I like this one very much. I’m sure purists won’t, but even they’ll have to admit it’s better than Murdoch’s Daily.

You want to know what it’s about? It took me 60,000 words to summarize it. How much time you got?

Anyway, I kind of hate to give the L any more publicity than they deserve, but you can’t appreciate how bad this is without seeing it.

So then I start to read about MTV’s new series Skins, which is causing all sorts of angst among grown-ups and youth alike for its portrayals of teenage drinking and, well,  skin. I haven’t watched it, and I probably won’t. Not because I’m prudish and uptight, but because I never did drink well when I was in high school, and my exposure to skin was even worse. I just don’t want to go back there.

Anyway. Between the L’s dopey ad campaign and MTV’s apparent misreading of its advertisers, I’m wondering whether a lot of media people actually have lost touch with their audiences. I don’t know whether kids like Skin or not, but with advertisers pulling out, that’s not a show that’s going to last long. As for the L, one marketing manager I know watched the commercial with her ad agency and told them that if they ever submitted anything even close to it, she’d fire them.

All to the good. Because the next step was them throwing Survivor’s losers to the sharks. Literally.

The Ladders Is The Single Biggest Piece Of Crap (The Cynical Girl)

But, finally, here I am blogging. It was pure shame that got me going this afternoon – that and the daily reminder that Outlook pops up each day.

A lot of people say they’re going to blog regularly, and many do because they’re sure they have something to say. I only think I have something to say. It’s hard for me to imagine that my tales of cleaning the family room rug are going to strike a great chord with others about weekend chores, or that I’ll draw life lessons out of fixing my boat each spring. When it comes to working on the boat, I’m happy to come away with all ten fingers intact, let alone with a blog post.

I have great admiration for people like Verlyn Klinkenborg who – aside from having great names – have a knack for taking inspiration from a simple occurrence or landscape view in turn it into a smoothly written 300 words.  Kind of like this:

I light a fire in the wood stove and settle in to read in the kitchen. Light spills onto the deck, and I see a movement. It’s an opossum, come up to investigate the cat-food dish. It walks up to the glass door and peers in, surely blinded by so much brightness. Perhaps this is the one I met — to both our surprise — on the ladder to the hayloft a few months ago. Now it stands in the light looking hopelessly disorganized, as opossums do, and then it wanders off into the darkness, where the seeing is so much better.

As you can tell from this post I’m not that good, but writing is one of those things that you can hone with practice, like you do with playing piano or sailing. I’m better with fiction because I’ve been working on it for 37 years and, I think, because I’m more comfortable in my own head than I sometimes am in the real world. So if I can keep at this, even a few days a week to start, I should get better at it. And I hope it won’t be four months before I try again.

It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. Plenty of hate-filled partisans swore that Abraham Lincoln was a Catholic and Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence?

The piece is called Building a Nation of Know-Nothings, and it’s blood-chilling. Back in the day, studying to be journalists – before that became a bad word – we couldn’t conceive of a business so off its course as ours is.

My post on what hiring managers are looking for in resumes and cover letters kicked off quite a discussion, so I’m weighing in here.

Obviously, I disagree with the idea of cover letters being a waste of time. It seems like the hiring managers who’ve chimed in to the discussion agree with me – certainly, most of those I talk to do. So if you think you shouldn’t bother with a cover, let me ask this: How do you know the manager you’re addressing feels the same way you do?

Whether you’re hiring someone or taking a new job, this whole process leads to a huge leap of faith. Any one of the candidates I’m looking at could become a very important part of my life – and vice versa. Learning about someone you don’t know is an imperfect process, no matter how you do it. The first steps of communication – the job posting and the replies – are simply the beginning.

But those replies are all I have to base my first judgment on. If I see things that don’t match the job description I’ve written, that’s a big red flag. In this case, I don’t just need someone who’s breathing in San Jose, I need someone who knows their way around the tech community out there. (For the record, no one who applied from the East Coast said they were willing to relocate themselves. Also, we did say in the job description that the position was based in Silicon Valley. We have some tips on how to handle some aspects of relocation here.) So right away, someone without the IT background and the right location doesn’t fit the bill. I’m left with the impression they didn’t read or understand the job description.

Unintended Consequences

To those who say you’re better off spending your time applying to dozens of jobs rather than writing a cover letter – well, you’re wasting that time. While looking for work is something of a numbers game, you still need to demonstrate you – out of all the people applying to one specific job – are the person who should get it. Doing nothing to differentiate yourself isn’t helping you. Even if you’re getting interviews, you should realize that when I’m trying to make a close call I’m going to go back and look at everything. If two candidates have solid resumes and interview well, when the time comes for me to break the tie, as it were, a well-written, articulate cover letter may be the thing that does it.

Besides, if you don’t write a cover letter, you’re telling me I’m not worth the investment of time. What kind of message does that send?

Also, you have to remember: The job search isn’t about you. It’s about the company you’re trying to work for. I’m sure I’ll get beaten up for saying that, but there’s no way around it. When you’re applying for a job, you’re basically making a sales pitch. Good sales pitches are about articulating how a product, a service, or a professional can solve a problem. I need to be convinced you’re the one to solve my problem – not some generic problem. The cover letter makes the argument, the resume backs it up.

Finally, and frankly, saying cover letters equal brown-nosing is like saying you’re sucking up when you ask someone “how are you doing today?” Yes, there are people out there who get off on being treated “like the manager.” You’ll have to take my word when I say I’m just looking for someone who can do this job and do it well. Sure, there’s some selfishness in that: Good managers know their staff is the basis for their success. I need to see candidates are serious and interested the very first time I hear from them. So, you don’t want to bother writing a cover letter – just send me some links so I can see how smart you are. That’s not really showing me you want the job. In a way, it’s like telling me I’m dumb if I don’t recognize your talent on my own. What kind of relationship is THAT going to build?

@Jack B. says the time will come when there’ll be many more jobs than candidates, and hiring managers may have to lower their standards. And he’s right. But today, right now, that’s not the dynamic. The point of all this is to help YOU get a job in a tough market. As a hiring manager, I’m just saying that those who take the time to differentiate themselves have a better chance than those who don’t.

Thanks to everyone who commented. Fire away some more.

Everyone hates the notion of customizing their resumes and a lot of people seem to think writing a cover letter is a waste of time. So I’m here as a hiring manager to tell you: If you’re not doing these things, you’re blowing opportunities.

Sorry to be so harsh, but I’ve been sifting through a lot of resumes lately. Dice is looking for a staff writer/blogger, you see, and I’m the guy who gets to do the hiring. Now I know that writers/bloggers aren’t the same thing as application developers or QA folks, but some aspects of hiring are pretty broad. So I thought I’d share some observations as I go through the process. Here’s what comes to mind after doing my first week of screening:

Believe the job description: Even if you think some corporate dweeb has loaded up the posting with an impossible combination of skills and requirements, assume they mean it. In some cases, you’ll have to work pretty hard to sell yourself on what you think are the most important aspects. But in other cases, not meeting a requirement is probably an obvious clue you’re not going to be considered. For example, when I say our job is in the Silicon Valley area, I mean it. New York and New Jersey are on the east coast, last I checked. And Southern California isn’t particularly close to Palo Alto, thank you very much. To the people who live outside the Valley or the Bay Area: I stopped reading when I saw your address.

Proofread: Okay, I’m frankly amazed at this one. And a little annoyed. Accuracy counts. It counts in writing/blogging, it counts in QA, it counts in project management. If you can’t spell correctly in a job application, well, when DO you sweat the details? My personal favorite this week: The person who said they’ve written for the “new York times.”

Cover letters matter: I use cover letters and resumes together. I scan the cover letter quickly, then go on to the resume and give that a quick read. Then I go back to the cover letter and read it more carefully. Then I go back to the resume to see how it backs up the arguments made in the cover letter. I do look at resumes that come without cover letters, but I never feel I’ve got a sense of the person in those cases, which makes it less likely I’m going to want to talk to them. My point: If you don’t send a cover letter, your resume better show me a spot-on perfect match.

Believe the job description II: The minimum qualifications we listed are:

Degree in Journalism or related field
Strong reporter with 2-4 years experience
Background in business journalism and/or technology journalism preferred
Familiarity with blogs, video blogs and other areas of online publishing
Ability to create and manage HTML pages and websites using tools such as blogging services, Dreamweaver and Photoshop
Understanding of technology industry
Self motivation and ability to work under deadline pressure

I don’t want to be an old-fashioned hack, but what part of that exactly screams “advertising” to you? Or “consumer product marketing?” Yeah, yeah, the lines can be blurred sometime, especially in trade journalism, which is essentially what we do here. But still…

Pay attention to me, I’ll pay attention to you: And here’s where customization comes in.  If you send me the same resume you send to everyone else, I’ll know. I’ll know because the fit between you and me won’t be obvious. The same’s true with the cover letter. If all of your work’s been in consumer products – and I don’t mean the iPhone – I’m not going to see how you’ll be able to write about IT. I might love your clips about art gallery openings, and your video samples of neighborhood meetings might show how well you interview with a Flip. But I’m still not going to call you, because all I care about is blogging about tech. Wouldn’t it be a shame if you had samples like that you didn’t include?

I’m just one person, and each manager approaches hiring in a different way. But it’s true we’re looking for a certain someone who can solve a particular problem. How you approach applying for a job tells us a lot about how you’ll approach your work.

More on this later, as we move along. Meantime, if you know someone who’d be interested in the job, send them my way, will you?

Publishing’s about sharing information, pure and simple. It’s the first step in a conversation that involves many people because, despite what a lot of folks think nowadays, it’s not simply a one-to-many proposition.  Anyone who’s really good at waits for a response, whether it’s by mail, e-mail, comments, YouTube, Twitter, whatever. If you want to talk with more than one person at a time, you have to publish. Which is why businesses have to publish.

Of course, you can publish in dozens of ways, using any number of media. If you want to be smart about it, you use the media your audience uses. And THAT means you have to reinvent yourself every time you branch out. Sound changed how movies were designed, television quickly evolved beyond merely restaging radio-style programs and the Web is in the process of hammering traditional publishers who are sticking to their old models.

The Web is about silos. It’s about depth to a series of narrow audiences. News Corp. will have The Wall Street Journal handed back to it on a plate until it figures out a way of cost-effectively delivering increasingly focused sets of news to more specialized readers. Back in the day, the Journal could charge premium subscription and advertising rates – and later premium online usage rates – because a business-focused newspaper was, by definition, specialized. Now real specialization is about sub-sectors within each industry. It’s about risk in finance, say, or state and local taxes in accounting. It’s about electronic medical records in IT and healthcare. It’s about wooden boats as opposed to fiberglass boats.

And here we get back to the publishing potential of any business. No one knows more about transportation and logistics than companies who work on that every day. The company that wants to stand out as smart is the one that shows off its industry expertise on a regular basis, with customers, colleagues and even competitors. It’s not all that different from being the smartest guy at the bar at a trade show. It just reaches more people.