Details, details, details…

Buzz Online Media is currently looking for a Web Copy Writer.  This person has, what we think is the fun job of ghost writing Twitter accounts, helping formulate user review responses, manually track, monitor and respond to client content online (Citations, citations, citations!!!) and to generally interact with our clients content online in a way that gives our clients an edge over their competitors.

So we put an ad on Craigslist looking for a few copy writers.  It’s AMAZING the things that come across ones desk…

We are looking for someone who is grounded, together, consitent, hard working, critical with details, hard working, on top of it…works hard, etc.  And our ad says so.  And we get the following, which can be used, inversely, as a list of things NOT to do when responding to job posts online:

1.  Email addresses addressed as, for example:  “tillman, j”

What’s wrong with this?  One, it’s not a full name.  Two, it’s lower cased.  It’s like “Ah, I’m too lazy to capitalize my own name”.  Now, for a personal account, do what you may, but for a “professional” account or an email account you’re going to respond to job postings for, do the following:  “John Doe”

2.  This was hilarious and irritating at the same time.  Is there a word that combines those two emotions?  Email header:  “holfentein, jack”. “Jack” writes me a nice intro email with some “pop” and I get to the bottom and it’s signed “Simon Holfentein”

What’s wrong?  Again, not capitalized.  But more hilaritating is the fact that this person either has deeper issues that we shouldn’t go into here, or they are sending a professional response from another account, or in this particular case, have two names.  I actually responded “Who is this, Jack or Simon”.  “Oh, I have two names…yeah, sorry about that, people get confused.”  Um…yeah they do!  I mean, really?  So no, SimonJack, we will not be interviewing you.  You need to pick a name…pick ONE.  It’s one thing if the email was “James Raymond” and they signed their email “Jamie” (NO experience doing this:)  But…Simon and Jack isn’t even CLOSE!

3.  No response to the email other than an attached document / resume.  No, don’t do this.  It’s borderline hostile.  I know your busy and I figure your’re responding to a lot of job postings, but at least indicate you’ve read the job description and that you have an onus of interest in actually capturing the opportunity.

4.  This is a copy writer position.  You wouldn’t believe the misspellings and grammatical errors I’m getting.  People, it pretty much comes down to correcting the red lines in Word…it’s just too simple to get it right to not get it right these days.  (Accept when you’re ‘blogging’:)

That’s about it from this round of emails…I’m sure there will be more to report.