autistichrlady - Tumblr blog

[autistichrlady]

I've been finding a lot of job postings that ask me for a photo lately, which is uncool of them.

So I made an image which lets me bypass their demand. I don't care if I get that particular job, I just want to shame the HR goons who thought the photo requirement was a good idea.

Note: this only applies in the USA.

[autistichrlady]

It might reassure people to know how often as a recruiter I totally ignore things that would normally be considered "mistakes" or "red flags" from people applying for jobs.

If their resume is badly formatted and has spelling mistakes. If they send me a cover letter addressed to a different company about a different job. If they misunderstand my questions and I have to repeat myself and explain what I'm asking. If they didn't look into our company or even read the whole job description. If they're not available for an interview and we have to go back and forth repeatedly to find a time when we're both available.

I've had applicants do all of the above and still offered them interviews, and still hired some of them. Everybody makes mistakes and has miscommunications sometimes- it doesn't mean they wouldn't do the job well. In the overall balance of information about an applicant, their experience and knowledge about the job is much more important.

[autistichrlady]

A Common Interview Question that I Ask, and Why I Ask It

This is one of my favorite questions; I've used variations on it with high school students interviewing for their very first job, and with experienced professionals with advanced degrees.

"Tell me about a time when you made a mistake at work, and how did you resolve it?"

What I'm hoping to hear in the applicant's answer:

A specific mistake or problem

How they fixed the problem, or made sure it didn't happen again, or in some way learned from it

Positive things I (hopefully) learn from the applicant's answer:

They pay attention to their work and notice when problems happen.

They are aware of common problems that happen in this type of work and they know what to do about them.

How they solve problems (Do they ask for help? Do they do research? Do they use specific background knowledge or skills they already had?)

They are able to tell a story clearly and help me understand what happened in their example situation.

Ways people misunderstand this question:

Denying that they have ever made any mistakes, ever in their life.

I don't like this answer because everyone makes some kind of mistake at some point. A person who won't admit to me, in an interview, that they've made mistakes might also refuse to admit to mistakes at work, to their boss. And I don't want to hire someone who will lie about or cover up their mistakes instead of fixing them.

This answer also means I don't get any of the information I was hoping to get about how they recognize, fix and learn from problems. I would rather hear about a very minor mistake than not get an answer to the question at all.

[autistichrlady]

disclaimer this is not to shame anyone, actually it's the opposite. i want to see how many autistic people are struggling on holding down a normal job

[autistichrlady]

The Cover Letter Toolbox

Or, how to write cover letters while autistic.

One of the autistic traits I have is difficulties with what's called "expressive language" - I don't think in words, and putting my thoughts into words takes a lot of time and effort. For me, going straight from a blank page to a full sentence that makes sense is difficult, and making that sentence sound professional is even harder. So I came up with a way to avoid starting from a blank page. This is what I do instead.

When I've read a job posting and decided I want to apply, I start by making a list of qualifications and things from the job posting that I have or can do, just a list of words or short phrases like

Customer service experience Scheduling Microsoft Office

Then I go under each of those list items and make it into a full sentence.

Customer service experience: I have five years of experience in customer service.

Once I have the most basic version of that sentence, I think about details that I can add to it. The point of a cover letter is two things-

to summarize the things from your resume that are relevant to this job, so the person doing the hiring doesn't have to read the whole thing and connect the dots themselves.

to add details and explain things that might not be in your resume.

So some details that I want to add here are that I didn't just talk to customers myself for five years, for part of that time I was a manager responsible for training other people to give good customer service. And I was good at that- we always got good results on our customer surveys, and we also always hit our goals for stuff like signing people up for the loyalty program. So now I've got a second sentence:

As the [job title] with [company], I trained our entire team on how to best serve our customers and helped ensure that my location had the best results in the region for customer loyalty.

Another thing from the job posting that I want to address with this bit is that the job I'm applying for involves helping people over the phone a lot. So I want them to know that even though my experience is in a different environment (retail instead of an office front desk) I did still have to answer phone calls and help people over the phone. This is the type of detail that's not in my resume and that someone wouldn't necessarily guess, but I really did answer a lot of phone calls working in retail.

I also added a little bit of Flavor, so it's not just assisting customers, it's "welcoming, respectful assistance". Yes, I did try like five different words there before picking these ones. Usually I look back to the job posting and pick something that relates to what they've said they want. But I find it a lot easier to figure out details like this after I have the basic structure.

This is what I ended up with for my Bit About Customer Service:

I have five years of experience in customer service, providing welcoming, respectful assistance to customers over the phone and in person. As the [job title] with [company], I trained our entire team on how to best serve our customers and helped ensure that my location had the best results in the region for customer loyalty.

If I really wanted to add a lot of detail, I'd put numbers in here- how big "our entire team" was, what the "best results" were and how we were measuring it. But the position I'm applying for is with a small organization, and probably doesn't involve measuring sales in the same way, so I decided not to add that. If I was applying for another retail job, I'd include those things.

I repeat this same process with each of the qualifications from my list, copy-paste each of those bits in order of how important they are, and then I need an opening and a closing. For the opening, I start by stating the obvious.

Dear hiring manager, I am applying for/interested in/etc. [this position]

and then I apply my school-essay-writing techniques and do a one-sentence preview of the qualifications I just got done writing about.

I am confident I have the customer service skills, computer expertise and organized mindset to excel in this position.

For the closing, this job posting specifically mentioned putting your contact information in your cover letter, so I did that, and then I like to thank them for looking at my application because that's a nice polite note to end on.

I can be reached at [contact info]. Thank you for taking the time to consider my application, and I look forward to hearing from you. [signature]

Extra Bonus Brownie Points:

Go to their company website and add something that shows you have looked at their company website. Like yes, the main reason you're applying for this job is it's available and you need money, but besides that, there's gotta be something at least a little interesting about this company that might be cool if you get to work for them. In this case they had a whole big section about charities they donate to and how they get involved in their local community, so I added this right before my closing:

[this company's] contributions to charities such as [things from their website] are truly admirable. I've grown to love [this city] since moving here, and I would be honored to be part of an organization that does so much to contribute to the community.

Now wait before you go here's the important part:

I don't delete any of this stuff.

I copy/paste out the finished bits into a new document to send to the recruiter, but I keep that list of qualifications with sentences under each one.

Now I have a document with a list of qualifications I have and nice professional-sounding descriptions of those qualifications, and for the next cover letter I write, I can reuse them if they're relevant, so I don't have to redo all this work of making words make sense. If I decide to change them a little bit for the next job, I'll keep the new version next to the old one under the same heading. I also keep my openings and closings.

I used to have a big file like this but I apparently didn't back it up before my old computer died, so I'm having to re-create it, but you guys this saves me so much time I would otherwise spend staring at a blinking cursor. And it's easier than saving the full finished cover letter and trying to pull sentences out of it, because all the Bits are already organized by topic. (And it lowers the risk of accidentally copy-pasting the wrong company's name.)

I <3 my cover letter workbox.

[autistichrlady]

Dear people of Tumblr

(but especially my fellow neurodivergent and disabled people)

Are you searching for a job? Does the whole process of applying for jobs really seriously suck? Is it incredibly stressful, and time-consuming, and you don't know where to start? I felt like this for a long time, and then I got a job in human resources!Let me teach you what I've learned from being on the other side.

I use this blog to post my advice and things I've learned. My askbox is open for questions!

I also offer one-on-one help on a pay-what-you-can basis. I can help you with:  - Planning answers to common interview questions and understanding why recruiters ask them - Writing or editing your resume - Walking you through my cover-letter-writing method - Creating a strategy for how to spend your job-searching time and effort most effectively - Cheerleading / body-doubling while you fill out applications - Or even a practice interview to take some of the stress out of the real thing.

We can talk by email, text, voice call or video call, whatever is most comfortable for you. Send me a Tumblr ask, a DM, or email me at autistichr@proton.me.

[autistichrlady]

Job search tip of the day

If I could make one request to job applicants as a recruiter, it would be this.

Make sure that all the information you give in different parts of your job application is consistent. 

Every day, I get job applications that force me to ask myself, "Did this person make a mistake filling out the form, or are they lying?" I don't want to wrongly reject someone who just made a typo, but I also can't justify reaching out to every person with a confusing application to ask them to explain. 

When you're applying to jobs for the first time in a while, keep an eye out for inconsistencies like these:

- Adding a new job to your resume without entering an end date for the previous job, so that the dates overlap or the old job is still listed as "current".

- Answering an application question that says "I have three years of experience in this skill/job" but that skill/job isn't on your resume.

- Spelling the name of a company you worked for incorrectly, leaving out part of the name (like LLC or Inc.) or using only the initials.

- Not updating contact information when it changes.

- Keeping your old location on your resume or profile after moving to a new area.

I know that applying for jobs is always going to be more stressful than hiring, and I always try to give my applicants the benefit of the doubt. But I see errors like this much more often than you might think, and they're small things you can fix to make your application easier to understand and raise your chances of getting an interview.

[autistichrlady]

Job search tip of the day:

This is the very first tip I'm posting on this new blog because it's the one thing I most wish I had known earlier!

When you send a cover letter with a job application on Indeed, it is buried at the very bottom of your application. The recruiter may never see it.

When I first started using Indeed from the recruiter's side, I almost missed the first cover letter I received! Indeed didn't send me any kind of notification, and it placed the cover letter at the bottom of the application page. I only saw it because I happened to scroll down before the page finished loading.

I can't just show you a screenshot without showing someone's personal information, but when a recruiter looks at your job application on Indeed, this is basically what they see:

1. Your name 2. Your most recent job title 3. The list of skills from the job posting with little icons that say whether you have that skill ✅ or not ✖️ 4. Your work experience and education info, pulled out of your resume and reformatted. 5. Any extra questions or skill tests that were part of the application.  6. Your actual resume that you either uploaded or used Indeed to make (and if you used Indeed to make it, you've probably seen how they add a big long list of all the skills you've ever clicked "yes" on to the bottom of your resume, so it's quite long) 7. And finally, at the very bottom of the page, your cover letter.

Now that I know, I always scroll down to the bottom of the application to check, but a recruiter who doesn't take the time to scroll all the way down and read your entire resume won't even know that you wrote a cover letter at all. 

My advice: When applying through Indeed, don't send a cover letter unless the job posting specifically asks for one.

[autistichrlady]

Posting my profile pic because I'm pretty proud of it. The actual font that LinkedIn uses for their logo isn't freely available so I had to DIY a bit.