Looking for a job?

by Len Barker, Managing Partner - Lotus Practice

President Obama's American Job Act has a basketful of incentives that are meant to encourage small business owners like myself to start hiring. While I won't turn down incentives like payroll tax relief, it is not what motivates me to hire.  I hire when Davalen's services are in so much demand that I need more consultants to service that demand. In other words, you can reduce the payroll tax all you want but I am not going to add a salary to my payroll unless I have work for that employee to do. Fortunately that demand exists and we are hiring. Since I have been reviewing a lot of resumes and doing a lot of interviews, I thought I would share what I think makes a candidate stand out; at least in the eyes of this employer.

Relevant Experience

The number one thing that stands out on a resume is if you have experience doing the exact thing that I am asking for. If I want a Senior WebSphere Portal Administrator and you have been the lead Portal admin at a Fortune 100 company for the last 10 years than that stands out. But close counts too.  Maybe you have been a WebLogic Admin for the last three years and before that you were a WebSphere Portal Administrator for two years. If you were a Lotus Notes Administrator for the last ten years then that is not too relevant.

Relevant Skills

Sometimes candidates will not have relevant experience but they have the necessary skills. For example, if I am looking for a Junior WebSphere Developer and I get a resume with no WebSphere experience but great J2EE skills then I'll want to talk to this person. Raw talent is worth a lot. I would rather hire a really sharp person with a great skill set and no experience than a candidate with good experience but poor previous performance.

Confidence

Candidates must believe they are right for the job or there is no way that I am going to believe it. I pick up confidence from the resume and from the interview. A well written resume starts to make me feel good about the candidate. A poorly written resume doesn't rule them out but it doesn't add bonus points for sure.  During the first interview I look for someone that engages me in a discussion about the job, tells me how they think their experience matches well with the position or even states that they are not sure how well it matches but tells me what they have done that they are proud of. There is usually no way a candidate knows enough about what the hiring manager really wants to invent stories about their past that will hit the target. Therefore, as with most things in life, honesty is the best policy.  Be proud of what you have done and tell me about it.

Education

Amazingly enough, education usual doesn't matter at all to me.  If a candidate can prove to me, through technical interviews, work history and references, that they can do the job then I don't care at all about where they went to college or if they went to college. The same is true for certifications. Davalen's consultants need to be certified in the IBM software they support, so if a candidate has the certifications that is a plus. That will save us the effort of having them take the test. But having the skill to be certified is all I care about.

A final note about over qualified candidates. More often than not I get resumes from candidates that have way more experience than I have asked for. For example, if I am advertising for a junior developer with 3  years experience I get a master developer with 20 years experience.  I don't discourage those types of applications at all. I am not going to hire them as a junior developer but it certainly can't hurt to send in the resume. I always send those resumes over to our National Staffing Manager for inclusion in her database of talent. Sometimes I even call to interview them for other opportunities that I have not posted yet. So go ahead and market yourself, no one else will.

Think you may have what it takes to join the Davalen team. Send it  my way!

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Building a Successful Mobile Search Interface: Part II

The New Mobile Search Metaphor: Simpler Interfaces/Smarter Apps

The direction I was heading towards in the earlier article in the series, Understanding the Coming Problem, is this: mobile interfaces will be driven by search engines but the fact that search is driving them will not be immediately obvious to end-users. We already see this in portal websites, sites with web content management applications, as well as commerce/retail websites. So, while current mobile sites may or may not be search driven, at some point Mobile interfaces for content-rich sites will, in some form, be search-driven. The key will be designing the search interface to be "smart." The jury is still out as to what that will look like. I am going to look into my crystal ball and share what I see.

Simplification of Search UI

Search apps will become much simpler. The number of options available to a user for filtering and sorting results will be reduced significantly compared to a traditional website-based search interface. The lack of screen real estate and difficulty typing will drive this.

Smarter Search Apps

To drive simpler Search UI's the search apps themselves will have to be much smarter than they are now. Search Apps will have advanced features employed behind the scenes than was ever employed by 90% of current websites users. I believe users will be able to select one or more "search user profiles" each of which representing preset filters and keywords for enriching each query submitted. Domain experts, who know what filters to apply to get the best results in different scenarios, will manage these profiles.

Specialization of Search Apps

Currenlty search engines on retail web site's will let you search entire inventories.   Mobile search apps will be different. Instead of letting a user search the entire inventory of a store,  we will start seeing apps that focus on a department. Already we see mobile apps give users access to only a subset of data limited according to an app's purpose.

In the retail space we will see separate apps for selecting and purchasing jewelry, women's clothes, men's clothes, lawn equipment, recreation equipment, etc. Why? Because developers are trying to limit the number of choices that a user needs to make because of the small screen real estate and the perceived focus of mobile  users that they are focused on completing a task at hand rather than "surfing" for information in general (We'll postpone thinking about how users will find the right app until later in the series).

Individual Result Views will use "Informatics Graphs"

Information listed about individual documents listed in search results will have to go beyond the snippet of text highlighting search terms used. Snippets alone do not present enough information in many cases, especially in the context of a mobile device. What I see happening, driven by limited screen real estate and compounded by users brief attention spans, is that there will be better representations of the information contained in the documents returned.

Happily I don't have to give you theoretical applications of this approach. I can point you to restaurant menus. When I look at menus at my favorite restaurants, I see dish after dish listed. I am interested in knowing aspects about each dish that go beyond what they contain. I am also interested in knowing which ones are "heart-healthy." Many restaurant menus have a small heart-shaped symbol, an icon, to give me a quick and easy way to identify which of the dishes meet my criteria. I've seen some restaurants use other icons to help people find vegetarian dishes or to signify some other characteristic in which people might be interested.

With mobile search each document returned will also have an "informatics graph" of what that document is about. It might be that the graph would be displayed on the search results page itself. However, it might be that when a user clicks on a document in a search result list they will be taken to a document's informatics graph - and this is the "cool" part - they will be able to "swipe" from one document's graph to the next like you do between panels on mobile apps.

There are many ways to make mobile search even cooler - and this case "cooler" means keeping the interface simple while making the search app smarter.   I look forward to thinking about that together as we continue the series.