I remember how much work I put into writing my first (and only – I became a
freelancer later) job application: I read a book on how to do it, wrote a nice
letter, had it spell-checked by people who knew the language and wrote the
letter on good paper. I then carefully typed my curriculum vitae on my
father’s typewriter (remember those?) and checked and re-checked that
everything looked neat before lovingly sliding the sheets of paper into a good
envelope and carefully licking and precisely placing a stamp on it. I see job
applications come in once in a while. Not spam, mind you, but real
applications written by people who really need a job. Let me show you one. (I
bounced this to Gmail to anonymize it.) The “job application” announces itself
so: I first notice that the person hasn’t even bothered to
use their full name, and I notice an advertisement – probably a free mailer.
(This e-mail needs deleting before doing anything else…) Upon opening the
message, we see this:
First, the ad, which says: “Your
desktop background is boring? …”. There is no letter of introduction. The
e-mail contains no personal message at all, just an attached JPEG which a
whopping 1.2MB. The image file contains a lousy scan of the woman’s head and
shoulders, and badly written, lousy information. Well, lady: this attempt
isn’t even worth an answer. And let me tell you one thing: nobody on this
earth is going to give you any kind of job if you don’t pull out your finger a
bit more! In case of doubt, read this! Update: Stephan Wissel seems
to have similar experiences.