不知道讲这个会不会对这里在找工作的mm有帮助，我们公司非常袖珍，只有十几个人，作科研仪器的，只有我和同事写软件，有些源码管理，发行，和旧程序的维护没人干，想再找个junior developer，这个招人的活儿就落到我们两个人头上了。

第一轮广告在craigslist上发，大概要花$75，本来是打算发十天广告，然后再统一筛选，可是加州这里工作市场太好了，前两天还收到一些回复，过了几天就没人理了，只好重新放马过去，在careerbuilder上面发广告，我同事的朋友在那里工作，把它吹得天花乱坠，当然，在上面登广告也比较贵。

先小结一下，从我同事的招工过程来看，发简历后十几天没有回音很正常，一般只是说明这个公司打算收完简历再回复，那些贴了一两个星期的广告，也不妨去试一下，大部分公司会在招到合适人选之后把广告删掉。

我们的广告写得很详尽，把我们经常用到的编程语言都写上了，我同事想招一个有过一两年公司里工作经验的人，虽然写了很多语言上去，其实熟练使用一种就够了，其它可以慢慢学。我个人觉得他的广告写得太长，需要应征的人仔细read between the lines，不过也无妨。

回头来看craigslist上收到的简历，首先没有cover letter的简历统统删掉，我们是觉得cover letter是个基本的态度问题，其实筛选简历的时候，我根本没看着cover letter。:) 太不切题的简历也删掉了，这样只剩下十来份简历，我纯属好奇统计了一下，大概有四个华裔，三个印度人，三个美国人。。。

这些简历打印出来我们两个各一摞，每份打上123分，1分是一定要见见的人，2分是有点儿犹豫，3分是不打算搭理的，最后对照一下看看我们都想见的是谁。我跟我同事心有灵犀，打的分基本上完全一样。

首先地址out of state的简历（在craigslist上收到的简历还好，只有两个out of state）我们都不太想要，如果我们是大公司这应该不算什么，但是小公司实在没钱让人家飞过来。然后没有过公司经历的fresh graduate都没法收，谁叫我们人手不够呢。然后我们主要是作硬件的，比较希望新招的人有作hardware communication的经历，有两个只做过财政软件的也被筛除了。

这些收到的简历大部分都挺长的，甚至有份正反两面三张纸的。我只好一目十行地快速扫一眼关键词。另外有一个人，做的项目不少，可是都没写清楚。反正，我觉得简历的语法错误还是小事，排版也是小事，重要的是把一个项目的关键技术写清楚。有个明显overqualify的写了几十年程序的人，就把他项目中的关键词用黑体字打出来，看着很不错。

这里感慨一下，转行真不容易啊，有一份简历是个作生物都做到了postdoc的人，其实他一直在公司打工，相关经历非常多，但是我同事跟老板提了一下，老板（他也是作物理做到了postdoc改行的）马上否决了，说人家堂堂一个phd来这边给我们两个打下手，会干得很不高兴的。总算明白LG（也是个想改行的物理postdoc）前半年找IT工作的艰辛了。

当然以上筛选过程只是对我们这个职位而言的，相信这些简历的主人们可能收到据信之后，会在更合适的公司里找到更好的职位。其实作为在招人，想想都觉得有点儿悲观，有经历又能干的人怎么会看得上我们这个小破公司呢。。。

最后一摞简历放到一边儿了，只剩下一个大家都想见见的人，还得问问他是不是还有兴趣。下个星期还得收一轮儿简历，长叹一口气，等我们面试完了再来写写。。。。

Hmm, sorry I haven't been able to follow up on this, my LG broke the Chinese input on my laptop! I should write our experience down in English before I forgot. So the story goes...

We waited until our craigstlist ad expired, and reposted the ad on careerbuilder.com, my coworker's friend works for careerbuilder, and highly recommended its service, turned out there's even less matching resumes there, I suspect a lot of responses were generated by people who're mass-mailing their resumes, we got a lot of over qualified candidates, they might have worked out just fine for bigger companies, but between our two people "team", we have already decided that we'd rather get someone with less experience so that she / he doesn't come in with the wrong expectations.

Two weeks later, the signal to noise ratio is just still too low, we gathered our three chosen resumes, and started doing phone interviews. I only sat in for the first phone interview, and it was a total disaster. This is a candidate whose code sample looked fantastic, but we noticed there is a year's gap on his resume, so we started off by asking him about the gap, he gave up this incredulous story about not liking his boss and his boss doesn't like him back... Well, we went on and asked him about source control, his answer was quite surprisingly, "I just zip them up from time to time...".

We then asked him about his experience with Linux, by then I've noticed that, the way he framed his answer was always a "yeah", then after some diversions, "I'm not sure", after several rounds, we're starting to skip some of the questions, but my coworker just had to ask him the classic question, "What do you consider the biggest mistake you have made in your previous job?", and he insisted that he has not made a single mistake,  that was the last straw, my coworker had to coerce *some* answer from him by telling him, "good engineers should learn from their mistakes"...

The phone interview ended with us asking "what would your coworker say about you", and he went on to give another long story about how he had this coworker who liked to go out have a beer with him, they are good friends, very good friends indeed, we could hardly contain our snicker at that moment, and my coworker pressed on, "so what would he say about you?", the poor guy thought for a moment, and said, "I guess he'll say that basically, I'm a good guy." Ouch!

We hanged up the phone and decided that was just not the right attitude, a phone interview is still as professional as a face to face interview. By the way, this person is a native speaker, so he has no language barrier, yet he kept speaking as if we're chatting over a beer, that tone gave us a very bad impression.

My coworker went through two other phone interviews later that week, and decided to bring one person in for an interview, this is one of the candidate whose code sample I did not care for at all, they're full of magical numbers, and doesn't demostrate any good programming practise. But my coworker thought we don't need to require such a high level of competence if the candidate is willing to learn. We prepared some C and C# tests for the interview, the C question is to write a usable linked list, and my C# test was to fill in the blanks for a couple of our existing functions. Both are pretty rudimentary, I was hoping to see good programming style, not so much of a correct answer. Right before the interview I took another look at the candidate's resume, and realized that he doesn't have any .NET programming experience at all. Big mistake on my part, but we decided to give him the test just to see how he fares.

By the way, if you are looking for a job in programming, be sure to check out Joel Spolsky's writing on technical interviews, it was immense help to us in formulating the interview, I bet a lot of other companies are using his guide for interviewing people too.

All I could say about this interview was that, it was again a disaster, the candidate showed really good attitude, but his techical expertise is a lot lower than we thought, he failed both the C and C# tests, in fact he didn't even quite understand what a linked list was. After the interview, he emailed us three times(!) with new solutions for the tests, that made us felt very guilty, but then, his new solutions were not better than his attempts during the interview as well.

After all these, we were feeling a bit frustrated about spending so much time looking at resumes, and have now temporarily given up on getting a new person in our team. Good news in this lesson is that job market is still very hot right now. but I've also learned that getting the right job has so much subtleties. Okay... for now good luck to mms on this board, and good luck to ourselves too.

windysnow mm, I've read almost all of Joel Spolsky's article on user interface design etc, these two are the most helpful regarding interviewing, take his words with a grain of salt though, he's a typical elitist i.e. snob. :)

The Guerrilla's Guide to Interviewing
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html

Getting your resume read:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ResumeRead.html

HtooO mm, I bet every company is different in their attitude towards cover letters, I've never seen any recruiting ad explicitly  requesting cover letters, but for many furstrated recruiters, it is an effective way to weed out some of the applicants who were not really interested. For the specific content and tone of the cover letter, you can refer to the "getting your resume read" article I posted just now. :)