Right now, I’m sifting through 50+ applications for a new entry-level position. Here’s some advice from the person who will actually be looking at your CV/resume and cover letter:
‘You must include a cover letter’ does not mean ‘write a single line about why you want this position’. If you can’t be bothered to write at least one actual paragraphs about why you want this job, I can’t be bothered to read your CV.
Don’t bother including a list of your interests if all you can think of is ‘socialising with friends’ and ‘listening to music’. Everyone likes those things. Unless you can explain why the stuff you do enriches you as a person and a candidate (e.g. playing an instrument or a sport shows dedication and discipline) then I honestly don’t care how you spend your time. I won’t be looking at your CV thinking ‘huh, they haven’t included their interests, they must have none’, I’m just looking for what you have included.
Even if you apply online, I can see the filename you used for your CV. Filenames that don’t include YOUR name are annoying. Filenames like ‘CV – media’ tell me that you’ve got several CVs you send off depending on the kind of job advertised and that you probably didn’t tailor it for this position. ‘[Full name] CV’ is best.
USE. A. PDF. All the meta information, including how long you worked on it, when you created it, times, etc, is right there in a Word doc. PDFs are far more professional looking and clean and mean that I can’t make any (unconscious or not) decisions about you based on information about the file.
I don’t care what the duties in your previous unrelated jobs were unless you can tell me why they’re useful to this job. If you worked in a shop, and you’re applying for an office job which involves talking to lots of people, don’t give me a list of stuff you did, write a sentence about how much you enjoyed working in a team to help everyone you interacted with and did your best to make them leave the shop with a smile. I want to know what makes you happy in a job, because I want you to be happy within the job I’m advertising.
Does the application pack say who you’ll be reporting to? Can you find their name on the company website? Address your application to them. It’s super easy and shows that you give enough of a shit to google something. 95% of people don’t do this.
Tell me who you are. Tell me what makes you want to get up in the morning and go to work and feel fulfilled. Tell me what you’re looking for, not just what you think I’m looking for.
I will skim your CV. If you have a bunch of bullet points, make every one of them count. Make the first one the best one. If it’s not interesting to you, it’s probably not interesting to me. I’m overworked and tired. Make my job easy.
“I work well in a team or individually” okay cool, you and everyone else. If the job means you’ll be part of a big team, talk about how much you love teamwork and how collaborating with people is the best way to solve problems. If the job requires lots of independence, talk about how you are great at taking direction and running with it, and how you have the confidence to follow your own ideas and seek out the insight of others when necessary. I am profoundly uninterested in cookie-cutter statements. I want to know how you actually work, not how a teacher once told you you should work.
For an entry-level role, tell me how you’re looking forward to growing and developing and learning as much as you can. I will hire genuine enthusiasm and drive over cherry-picked skills any day. You can teach someone to use Excel, but you can’t teach someone to give a shit. It makes a real difference.
This is my advice for small, independent orgs like charities, etc. We usually don’t go through agencies, and the person reading through the applications is usually the person who will manage you, so it helps if you can give them a real sense of who you are and how you’ll grab hold of that entry level position and give it all you’ve got. This stuff might not apply to big companies with actual HR departments – it’s up to you to figure out the culture and what they’re looking for and mirror it. Do they use buzzwords? Use the same buzzwords! Do they write in a friendly, informal way? Do the same! And remember, 95% of job hunting (beyond who you know and flat-out nepotism, ugh) is luck. If you keep getting rejected, it’s not because you suck. You might just need a different approach, or it might just take the right pair of eyes landing on your CV.
And if you get rejected, it’s worthwhile asking why. You’ve already been rejected, the worst has already happened, there’s really nothing bad that can come out of you asking them for some constructive feedback (politely, informally, “if it isn’t too much trouble”). Pretty much all of us have been hopeless jobseekers at one point or another. We know it’s shitty and hard and soul-crushing. Friendliness goes a long way. Even if it’s just one line like “your cover letter wasn’t inspiring" at least you know where to start.
And seriously, if you have any friends that do any kind of hiring or have any involvement with that side of things, ask them to look at your CV with a big red pen and brutal honesty. I do this all the time, and the most important thing I do is making it so their CV doesn’t read exactly like that of every other person who took the same ‘how-to-get-a-job’ class in school. If your CV has a paragraph that starts with something like ‘I am a highly motivated and punctual individual who–’ then oh my god I AM ALREADY ASLEEP.
Very good post thanks for this.
Excellent advice for building and submitting job application documents.
I recently read the monster stat block for the Siren in Tomb of Horrors and was pretty disappointed. It’s good-aligned and has only one casting of charm person to controll people. So I came up with my own version, a bit closer to the myth and way stronger. I have no idea if the challenge rating is fitting so be careful.
WebGL Wateris a great water simulator, with a sphere that can interact with the water’s surface. It can be paused which means you can then use it as a reference for lighting, reflections, refractions, etc.
Process painting of the painting I did of @blueludebar ‘s pilot for #drawthisinyourstyle . I was experimenting with the gouache so this process is a bit messier than my usual.
i’ve stopped trash talking comic sans after learning the font is actually one of the only dyslexia-friendly fonts that come standard with most computers and i advocate for others doing the same
In the event that you would like to continue hating Comic Sans, other dyslexia-friendly alternatives include Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, Century Gothic and Trebuchet.
thank
Random fact: Verdana is one of the few fonts which was specifically designed to be as easy to read as possible, even at smaller type sizes. It was designed this way for use on screen, but the same principles apply in print too. This is part of why some Universities use Verdana as their default font for documents.
“In the event that you would like to continue hating Comic Sans” is one of the best things I’ve ever read on this website
Century Gothic and Trebuchet are both quite handsome typefaces.
I’m partial to Century Gothic as well. It’s serif, but not boring.
There’s also a dyslexic font designed especially for dyslexic people to read.
You can install on your tablets, laptops and browers etc, so not only can you change things like documents into it, you can change websites into that font as well!
I’m sure you’re bright enough to do a google search, but since I’m dumb enough to forget to post a link, here it is. Better late than never
I default to arial for this reason, but I will now be defaulting to verdana or dyslexie. nice.
I don’t think I have dyslexia but that dyslexie font was the easiest fucking thing to read ever. Books should be written in that shit.
ALSO!!!
For computer reading, when you mix up lines of text, there’s a web browser app called Beeline Reader. It looks like this
The colors are also customizable, to an extent and while I don’t have dyslexia, I have adhd which makes reading large amounts of text harder and this helps A LOT.
This is dope. I freaking love how much more accessible this information is nowadays.
for our dyslexic ravens.
I always thought I was a decent reader, but holy crap that BeeLine made reading enjoyable lol
literally every skin and hair care professional in the world: hot showers are really damaging!!!
me, stepping out of the shower into a bathroom filled floor to ceiling with steam, my skin glowing neon pink after i’ve scrubbed every inch of my body raw under boiling water: Interesting!
This is a call out.
Both are good!
Fucking finally! Some good news for us hot shower lovers!
HEY THIS IS IMPORTANT whats your favorite place to find drawing references?
so far we’ve got
senshi stock
croquis cafe
line-of-action.com
quickposes.com
posemaniacs
clip studio paint models
pexels.com
sketchdaily
eggazyoutatsu atarichan drawer
designdoll
if you have any more please reply!
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no one tagged me, but i wanted to post six selfies…
that hair… HOW YOU DO THAT HAIR PLZ TEACH
😀
Buckle in, because this is going to be a LONG post. And I’m going to talk about BOG MUMMIES.
For reference, the hair in question:
This updo was actually what convinced me to grow my hair long in the first place (back in ye old 2008), and it has been strongly influential in my personal aesthetic ever since.
The story starts in 1938. Actually, it starts even earlier than that. In ~280 B.C., a woman died, and her body was placed in a bog, where it stayed until it was discovered in 1938, so well-preserved that the hair was still there.
This bog mummy is referred to as the Elling Woman. Here’s a bit about her.
The article talks a bit about her hair, but it’s kind of an unsatisfactory description. I found out about it when the article reached the Long Hair Community Forum in 2008, resulting in a 40-page (and counting!) thread wherein a bunch of long-haired women figured out how to recreate the hairstyle.
The ladies of LHC looked at the images of the hair, and were like: “Yep, that’s a rope braid.” “Here’s how you could do a 7-strand braid with 2-3-2 sections.” Etc. And basically, they tested out different versions, and came up with something that was cool-looking, comfortable, and practical.
Here’s the ~official~ reconstruction on the Tollund Man website:
And here’s a (very confusing) diagram of how the style is supposedly constructed:
There are several different recreations of the style floating around the LHC and youtube and the wider internet. The style also looks and works differently with different types of hair. I had to grow mine out until I could make a waist-length braid before I could really successfully do it with my hair, but my hair is medium-thick and fairly fine, so YMMV. Some people on the LHC did it with much shorter and thicker hair.
The LHC thread about it is a fun read, but it’s a bit long and meandering, and there are several conflicting sets of instructions there, so I’ll just talk about the method that I use. If you want a video aid, what I do is basically this, except I do rope braids for the bottom 2/3s instead of English braids, and I finish it by wrapping the thick braid around the middle braid, like this (I’ve never actually tried that particular method for forming the big braid, but finishing up the bun is the same).
Here’s a written description:
Take the top 1/3 of your hair and braid it in a basic 3-strand braid (a.k.a. an English braid) down to a little past your neck. Tie it off so that it stays braided while you braid the rest of your hair.
Separate your remaining hair into two sections (each about 1/3 of your total hair), one on the left side, and one on the right.
Braid each section into a rope braid (a two-strand braid that’s made by twisting both sections in the same direction, then twisting them together in the opposite direction). Tie them off so that they stay braided. Also, I’ve found that it’s better to make the rope braids so that they’re coiled in opposite directions.
Take the two rope braids, and braid them with the top/middle section of your hair that you’d braided into an English braid. You’re basically making one big English braid. After I’ve started braiding it, I slip off the elastic tie that I’d used to hold the middle braid together temporarily.
Braid it as a 3-strand (that’s made up of two 2-strand rope braids, and one one-strand section that started as a 3-strand braid, so it’s sort of a 7-strand braid!) English braid all the way to the end of your hair. Take out the elastic ties around the two rope braids when you get to them.
Tie the whole thing off with a single elastic tie at the end.
To make the bun, you lift up the simple English braid (the one you made in step one), and you wrap the thick, complicated braid around it in a spiral.
Tuck the end in as best as you can, and then secure it with whatever you want. I’ve used everything from a hair stick, a hair comb, a few bobby pins, and even a single barrette before.
You’re done!
There wasn’t any evidence of any hair pins or anything like that to secure the hair found with the Elling Woman’s body. If your hair is very oiled and/or very unwashed, it might be able to hold itself in place without needing to be tied or secured. As it is, this style does work better if your hair has been oiled, or hasn’t been washed for several days.
This hairstyle is really cool for a lot of reasons, but it’s also extremely comfortable! The middle braid essentially holds the whole thing up, so you don’t experience any of the pulling you feel with some buns.
Basically, if I had to wear the same hairstyle for thousands of years, I’d definitely pick this one. It’s beautiful, versatile, comfortable, and has a really cool backstory.
backup blog in case tumblr explodes 