Wednesday, January 11, 2006

False Alarm

You want to know how bad this industry is for jobseekers? It's so rare for an employer to acknowledge a job application that my heart literally raced when I spotted a reply from a chief pilot sitting in my e-mail.

Thank you for submitting your Resume to Hamster. I have reviewed your Resume and placed it on file. If you are not contacted for further information, I encourage you to update your file every 6 months.

A form letter acknowledging that someone actually read my resume is a good thing. The fact that my e-mail filter recognized it as a form letter and put it in the Junk Mail foldre along with the solicitations offering me "Fine Armband Timekeepers" and "v!aagra and c!aalis" is not so great. What if one of my contacts passed my resume on to a manufacturer of prestigious wristwatches, hiring for their corporate jet, and I discarded the contact e-mail as spam?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

One trick: if possible in your situation, set up a special e-mail address just for resumes. Filter out those into a resume folder.

Some ISPs' mail delivery servers allow this format: aviatrix+resume@isp.com

Then you filter for the "+resume" in that instance. This doesn't mean zero spam will get through to that folder.

To get really nasty, for each company, use a different ending, like aviatrix+resume-hamster@isp.com. Then still filter for "aviatrix+resume" into one resume folder. If you get spam, check the company ending. Then don't ever apply for them, those bastards who sell your e-mail address to spammers. Plus, you can also filter out that particular target address (e.g. aviatrix+resume-bastardcompany@isp.com) and no more spam in your resume folder.

As usual, less spam == more inconvenience.

Anonymous said...

P.S. Yes, I use this method.

sweavo said...

oo that gets me mad! The 'state of the art' in spam prevention at the turn of the millenium supposedly had way fewer than 1% false positives. Yet here we are 5 years on, and if I send a URL to my own mother it goes straight in her spam folder!

Anonymous said...

Wanna buy a rolex? Maybe some C I A L I S. Makes me spit.

Anonymous said...

For anyone who might be tempted to blacklist places who you presume sold your information. As a netwrok security responder. I can tell you that there are a million and one ways (mostly involving viruses and spyware) that email addresses can leak out, and once it makes it onto one list, well, it's all downhill from there.

The old story of never assigning to maliciousness that which can be explained by incompetence or stupidity applies. Now maybe you don't want to work for a company that can't keep their computers clean of viruses, as that may say something about their ability to keep their planes in the air, that is a different story.