Modern Job hunting hacks

Here are my hard-earned job hunting tips I've accumulated from 20 years of searching for jobs:

(1) CUSTOMIZE EACH RESUME TO THE POSITION! Unfortunately MS Word is usually required so after years of resistance I finally converted my resume to that system. I use a table on the front page (email me for an example) with "Your Requirements" / "My Experience" giving phrases from the ad along with what I can do to address the stated requirements. This format does two things for you:

• gets past resume scanners looking for words that appeared in the ad, which you will have put all of iin your resume's page
• is psychologically compelling for the hiring people ("well, everything we said we wanted is right here ...")

(2) Be flexible especially in "bonus points" ... If you know nothing about Perl, you obviously don't want to spin yourself as a super Perl hacker for a job that requires that. But if Perl i is listed under bonus points, study Perl for a bit, write a few simple Perl scripts and put "brief experience with Perl" in your "my experience" box opposite the Perl requirement!

(3) Put a resume up with all relevant experience on both dice.com and monster.com. Set both of these to 'private', meaning email will come from dice/monster and not from recruiters directly, making it much easier to keep overzealous spam filters from screening out your job offers.

(4) MAKE SOME CHANGE TO EACH RESUME ONCE PER WEEK! This blasts the resume out to a bunch of recruiters whenever the change is made. I discovered this by accident when making substantive changes, but the change does not have to be anything significant.

(5) remove all references to the date you graduated from college and any other clue to your age from your resume. If you're not 50, you will be at some point and you can nip age discrimination by not leaking your age more than absolutely required. Also don't put more than the last 15 years (maximum 20 if you have something especially relevant 19 years ago) of experience on your resume.

(6) Network like crazy! Go especially to local users groups for the technology you're interested in; if you want to get a job programming Python, hit the local Python users group every month and get to know the people there.

(7) Get business cards from Vistaprint or some other online business card purveyor. Get one for every subspecialty you have; if you're both a systems admin and a programmer, get a different card for each that makes you look like that specialty.

(8) Surf http://www.indeed.com, which searches all of Dice, Monster, local jobs boards, and several others. Also scan your local Craigslist tech

jobs section regularly, which indeed.com does not cover.

That's about the size of it ... questions? Don't hesitate. And good luck!