Emily's posterous

How to apply for a job at an 'aspirational' company

This is something I wrote a couple years ago, back when I was reading a lot of resumes, right when our company was becoming a hot place to work. 

What I want you to know:

Don't tell me what the company could do for you

It's unbelievable how many people tell me that working for my company would change them. That is the last thing I want to hear. I want to know you're a good reliable person, not that you're somebody who wants to change their lives.

Don't make me feel weird for working here

Don't tell me that you assume this is a magical place and everyone here is a very special person. We're regular people and our office is a regular office. I don't want to be the one to break your heart about that.

Don't be snotty about things we're not doing well

... and then offer yourself as the solution to the problem.

Your cover letter is not the place to ask practical questions that could disqualify you

... like saying, I'm only able to work 30 hours a week, though you require 40, will this be a problem? We get a lot of applicants, and I need to find ways to not spend my whole day reading resumes and letting them break my heart. I need to focus on the A+ resumes that offer exactly what I am looking for.

If you're applying to a nonsexy part of the company, don't sound like you're fixated on the sexy part

Try to sound like you want to work hard at the job advertised, not just be allied with our sexy brand in any way possible.

Don't tell white lies about how much you love us

It's OK to apply to our company without being a lifelong fan; just do your homework on what we do and why other people love us, and have an informed opinion about it. 

Look like a hard worker

The secret of sexy companies is everyone just works and works and works all night and all day. Show that you know how to work, not schoolwork but work-work, for money, over time. 

 

Yeah, it's powerpoint

This morning my editors and I agreed that "powerpoint" has become a generic term.

Why? Because it has a unique definition that no longer applies just to the software product named PowerPoint, or to the generic product called "slides." 

The denotation of "powerpoint" is: 

a set of slides, usually created by a non-designer, projected during a spoken presentation. 

The term is commonly used to describe slides created in other presentation software packages. (You can make a bad powerpoint using Keynote.) It's a generic term. 

And there's a pejorative connotation, which is:

a set of badly designed slides, projected during and meant to distract from or serve as a crutch during a spoken presentation. Often filled with too much bullet-pointed text, or with randomly chosen clip art, or collages of small images, and commonly unable to communicate the speaker's point. 

A Philadelphia joke in "The Good Soldier" that I just got

I've read The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford so many times, at least four, because it's on my phone and whenever I idly start reading it I can't stop, and yet I just saw this. The main character is a Philadelphian, and he writes this about his wife:

Florence was singularly expert as a guide to archaeological expeditions and there was nothing she liked so much as taking people round ruins and showing you the window from which some one looked down upon the murder of some one else. She only did it once; but she did it quite magnificently. She could find her way, with the sole help of Baedeker, as easily about any old monument as she could about any American city where the blocks are all square and the streets all numbered, so that you can go perfectly easily from Twenty-fourth to Thirtieth.

This is clearly about Philly because the blocks are all square and the streets are all numbered -- and the narrator refers at another point to

the title deeds of my farm, which once covered several blocks between Chestnut and Walnut Streets.

So the Philly he knows is Center City Philly. 

And you can't go perfectly easily from Twenty-fourth to Thirtieth there, because the Schuylkill River is in the way.

KA POW.

Mystery Tape ... & Swans

I spent four days last month going through old storage, but I never found what I was secretly looking for the whole time: the mixtapes my sister and her then-boyfriend made me in 1990 and 1991, when I had just moved to San Francisco and they were in Toledo collecting records. Today I finally found these tapes, along with two tapes from the late '80s that were designed, painted and lettered by my friend Eric Biret, who died in 1995. (He was hilarious.) Here's the tape case he made for a David Sylvian compilation:

It's gorgeous! And then you can feel the reaction to that New Romantic prettiness in this next tape, one of the 1990-era compilation tapes in my sister's handwriting. Side 1 is a traditional mixtape; Side 2 is a record and then filler. It was bad form to leave empty space at the end of the side, so if you taped a whole album you had to fill out the blank space as close to the end as you could. 

(All the band names on these tapes are written in the flickr captions; click on any photo to go over there.)

Here's a really well organized tape that the boyfriend made. He and my sister were obsessed with this local Korean store called Arirang Market. Suddenly everything was Arirang, including our family cat. Her alternate name to them during this period was Barbara or Pretty Barbara. Her real name was Tabouli. 

This next one might be my favorite tape designwise, and it has a date on it: 12/8/90. They were also obsessed with the word "smelt": 

Here's the liner notes of that tape; wouldn't you listen to this right now?

What's listed as Mudhoney "Diamond Ring," on side 2, is actually "Dive" by Nirvana. The song appears on a couple of tapes listed as Mudhoney. In their baroque culture of inside music jokes, I was afraid to ask why this was.

The tape in the title of this post is in my handwriting. I have no idea what's on it, other than some Swans.

George W.S. Trow on Country Time lemonade

Cleaning my house today, I found three gorgeous old issues of the New Yorker from the summer of 1979. I bought them in San Francisco because Veronica Geng was reviewing film in these issues while Pauline Kael was on vacation. Honestly. Just flipping through them makes me feel adult. They're slightly larger than the modern NYer and the type is smaller and blotchier, and I found myself flipping through these elegant magazines the way people flip magazines in movies but never in real life, impatiently back to front. Flipping through, I found this astonishing casual item. Just imagine seeing this in 1979, in a summer issue of a magazine, unsigned as everything was.  

Of course the New Yorker website has this bizarre capsule version of it (if you want to hurt yourself, btw, read the NYer capsule of "Love Trouble Is My Business") and I thought I ought to type it onto the internet in its entirety. Then I found that someone already had. (And that this person seems to be good friends with someone I sort of know, which means I get to ask them next time I meet them about their reading of George W.S. Trow). 

I re-paste the text here, rather than linking, only because there was one small typo in that other person's version. 

 

Think about Country Time, a powdered lemonadelike product. The coming forward of Country Time has centered on a certain old man and hordes of eager children. Children starved for news of the past. For years, they ignored Grandpa. Tied him up in the barn. Laughed at his silly ways. But now, after reading Foxfire One through Five in their public elementary school, they crowd around, hoping he'll teach them how to make butter with a stick. There is a song, "Country Time, Country Time," etc. With this idea: Sometimes you're real thirsty, blah, blah, blah, and nothing seems to do what you need to have done with your thirst, blah, blah, blah, and what you want is something real that will satisfy your thirst like good old-fashioned lemonade. That's right -- the idea behind the Country Time powder-product commercial is that lemonade is a thing of the past. No one can get lemonade anymore. Only some rich people. Most people don't even remember lemonade anymore. Only Grandpa, who has been bound and gagged and dishonored all these years out in the desert, like the decrepit warrior in Star Wars, only Grandpa even remembers what it tastes like.

The rundown is like this: Lemonade died out when the Old Ones lost out to the Invaders. But some people with the knowledge of the Old Ones escaped to Mars, where they made a kind of synthetic lemonade, using materials available on Mars. It was a powder and became popular. In the meantime, life on Earth contracted. Now, in these recent days, adventurers from Mars, sensing our need, have travelled to earth with the powder. When the powder is given to certain of our remaining Old Ones, they are made happy and remember lemonade. The idea is persuasive. It cause you to forget that you can make lemonade any time you want by squeezing some lemons in some water and adding sugar. People don't know. They really don't know that you can make lemonade any time you want. That's right. Lemonade is still available. Right now. Any time you want. Lemons are everywhere. You can make lemonade right now if you want to. It's great. Lemonade is still totally within our capacities.

Brief lives; or, 5 steps to a better online bio

In the past 5 years I've written or edited at least 900 short biographies of interesting people. Famous people and those about to be famous. 

What I've learned is:

How important an online bio is
How little attention you interesting people pay to your online bios sometimes

I'd like to ask everyone who's remotely interesting to take 30 minutes and review your online biographical materials.

A good general-interest online bio can serve two important purposes in sharing your work with a wider audience: it makes you look interesting, which is a big step in making your work look interesting, and it helps out the writers and TV producers and conference organizers who want to help share your ideas by telling your story.

Everyone has an "About Me" on their website, but it rarely is. What's there is a listing of data aimed at people in a specialist field, people who understand the significance of a particular award or a certain professorship or publication. What's missing is an accessible statement of what you do.

If you're doing interesting work and you want to share your work outside your world, can I ask you to read these tips? 

5 steps to a better online bio

Your website bio should answer two questions first: 

What do you do?

and 

Why should people listen to you? 

These two answers should come before anything else. The best way to accomplish this: verbs.

The first verb in your bio should not be "is." Look for an action verb about what you do: makes, runs, teaches, thinks about, writes about, wants to answer ... 

The second answer should be another action verb describing how you earned the right to hold my interest. What did you build, write, invent, discover in the past? What have you done?

Note this second question is not "Where did you study?" Your academic credentials are important, but they're not exclusive to you. They don't make you interesting. The same year you got your PhD, so did tens of thousands of other people. But no one has done what you've done since, what makes you you.

In other words, if your origin story isn't as good as "Bitten by a radioactive spider," don't put it way up top in your official bio. 

Talk about real, concrete accomplishments and goals. A way to frame it: Tell the story of what you do in the way you'd explain it to a smart teenager you end up sitting next to at a wedding reception.

The third question -- not to be mentioned until you answer the first two questions -- is where you are: your current official job title and the place you work. Here's the place to namedrop your team, lab, department, current project.

Fourth question: What does the world think of you? If you've been written about in any popular arena (including blogs and tweets), select a quote and add it to your bio along with the source. Not too fancy, just something like: "Forbes.com says, 'June Spoon will put a flying car in your garage in this decade.'" or "@Ohio43620 tweeted, 'Dr. Spoon's seminar makes me want a future filled with flying cars.'") It helps people put you in context.

Fifth thing: Your collected works. Your bio should contain a full list of your published or created works in the order that you want the world to know about them. (If you publish a lot, your bio should contain a selected list of works and a link to your CV with full publication list.) List every separate project you work on that has a website of its own. If there's video of you giving a lecture or being interviewed on the topic of your expertise, add links or embed it if you can.

TIPS:

Write in the third person ("June Spoon makes flying cars.") so your text is easier to re-use in other contexts without fiddly editing.

Make the text of your bio cut-and-pasteable, so a writer can cut-and-paste your book titles and quotes rather than retyping; and so a conference organizer can use the text exactly as is in a program guide. Never build your bio as an image file or an animation or anything un-copy-able.

Don't lose control over your bio text to the point that another person is needed to make changes. This is important: You should be able to personally get in and edit your own biography. It's better if there's a typo or two than that it be missing your latest book because the bio needs to go through three people's hands before it can be changed. Not kidding about this. 

If you're embarrassed by the online biography your institution or company puts up for you, the one that does require 6 months to change and is built in a heinous Flash site, start a blog, a Tumblr, a Twitter account and put up a bio that you like, make it findable by putting in lots of words that you think people will use when they search for you, and link to it as much as you can.

If you're in Wikipedia, keep an eye on that page. Don't turn the page into an exact copy of your personal bio, because it will get flagged by editors and cleaned up to conform to style. But do add new and pertinent information as it comes up, and make sure your list of works, links and video is up to date. Especially if your professional bio is hard to find or lawyered into blandness, Wikipedia is where people will look for you -- and they'll use what's there to describe you.

Oh dear

The following backgrounder was sent to me as an .rtf file by a professional public relations firm. (Name of client has been obscured.) Note that there's a return at the end of every line, and an extra return between each line. The point of a backgrounder is that it's cut-and-pasteable, so the journalist or researcher can use it as a starting point for what they write, and can pick up every proper name accurately. It's easy enough to strip the extra returns out, but why does this PR firm think this is a good thing to make me do?

Secretbio

Things I learned: Yesterday at BCNI

Walking into BCNI late, I missed the morning sessions and what sounded like a great lunch talk from Zach Seward of WSJ, who talked about what works and doesn't when tweeting news. A couple takeaways I heard repeated later on: Use a colon before URLs. Count engagement in clickthroughs, not followers or even RTs -- often, RTs and clicks don't track. (Complete-in-140-chars stories get RT'ed but not clicked through.) And duh, don't tweet about stuff behind a paywall, to which WSJ has some good answers. His slides are here.

Jumped in halfway into the 1pm session on tech in the newsroom. It was fascinating to me for a lot of reasons. Two guys, Greg Linch from the Washington Post and William P. Davis from the Bangor Daily News, talked about their CMSes and the cultural gap that exists between these two bright guys and the larger newsroom staff. Davis' system uses Google Docs (!) to push to WordPress, and setting it up involved a management change around the copy desk (which was renamed "display desk") and a cultural shift in which reporters needed to start turning in stories with headlines, a workstyle change that is a big big ask. An interesting question came up here: How do you train an entire newsroom on a web publishing system when the code changes pretty much every night, getting better and better, yes, but getting different? (Remembering how hard it was at my old place even to add another round of fact-checking.) What I found wonderful was the genuine concern in this room full of bright, technical people for making sure old-line reporters are comfortable with new platforms. Behind the occasional grumping about resistance, there was no doubting that traditional newspaper-style reporting and writing still had value. Marc Lavallee talked about how he was training a network of bloggers to write 5-6 posts a day versus the longform they were used to doing, and he actually sent his editor out to one blogger's house for 3 days to explain things to him. One takeaway from this: newspapers are lucky if they have guys like Linch and Davis who push them to do the right thing on the web. Another reporter in the room asked how he could start making his own newspaper employer smarter about web publishing, because they were still fixated on their print editions and only pushed web content live once a day, at midnight. It kind of broke my heart.

The 2pm session on using your metrics to drive actionable decisions was brave, and not what I expected. It was Brian James Kirk from PlanPhilly, and he basically showed a spreadsheet of last year's Google Analytics data to the room and, not in so many words but, asked what he should do about it. PlanPhilly has some amazing content -- especially their longform reporting on Philly neighborhoods. Whenever I end up there, I am impressed by the careful research and solid writing. But their core audience is 3,500 people who actively work in local planning in some way, and who want super-geeky news about meetings and decisions of the planning commission and L&I and all that. This year, the site has been asked to start generating some revenue. And last year, they lost their biggest single referrer when Brownstoner shut down. Plus, they're hiring. So they're at an inflection point. The session turned into a brainstorm on what they needed to do. If it was my site, I'd think about both audiences -- those who want the geeky planning coverage and those who like the features. Take @PurpleCar's suggestion and build some educational products they can sell to the planners. Do seminars, a conference, a newsletter. And then grab the casual readers, Brownstoner's readers, and become the entry point for homebuyers, baby neighborhood activists and neighborhood checker-outers. Sell Home Depot against that audience. Kirk, if I'm being honest, seemed a little worn out, like he'd been going too long without the resources to do the work he wants to do. Someone pointed out a design flaw on the site (... it wasn't clear that you could actually comment on the stories), and it brought a weary acknowledgment sound that is familiar to anyone at any website ever, but that was weird to hear in a room full of so many nimble thinkers. I'm not sure what I learned from this session, but I don't think learning was the point, except to learn how time-consuming it is to pull data from Google Analytics. But it was engaging from start to finish.

The 3pm session started out just being me, the instructor, Dan Diamond from Daily Briefing, and a local illustrator. So we started talking. At about 3:15 a bunch more people showed up and turned it into a real class, but we kept the chatty, open vibe. Diamond runs on a series of newsletters aimed at health system administrators, using Lyris and sending to a qualified list, with the goal of raising awareness of his company's research products. They test and test and test. Diamond is the master, and I learned a ton of good stuff here, some that reinforced work I'm already doing, whew. Test, test, test. An engaging subject line primes the recipient to open the matching story inside the letter, but a really engaging line can prompt more clicks overall, which surprised me; not just more opens but more engagement once opened overall. Subject lines need to exactly match something high up in the newsletter. Use a big, dark font, which duh, but designers like tiny, light fonts as a rule, so it was good to hear that testing shows it's a bad call. Newsletters that look like letters are more engaging than designed pieces. If you use Lyris or Mailchimp or another platform, your mailer has a ton of best-practices resources. A bigger takeaway is that email can be an effective front-end to hard-to-reach web content, and that's got me thinking about some of the things I can highlight in my own newsletter. I got to talk about some of our own best practices as well, which mirror what Diamond said. My one amazing tip: use some ALL CAPS, mixed with regular case, in your From: line so the email stands out in the mailbox. Don't everybody do this, or it won't work anymore.

So our 3pm session, which had started out just three people in a large empty room, turned into this great conversation and no one ended up going downstairs to see what the 4pm sessions were. Most of us just stayed in this same room, which turned out to be "Data Journalism." A huge crowd of coders walked in who all knew each other, and we newsletter people were wondering if we ought to stay. But it turned out the class was for non-coders, as the WSJ's Albert Sun showed us how to get started using Python to analyze big datasets. You can download his demo, in which he showed us how to pull data from UPenn schedule files using regular expressions. It was more a proof of concept for most of us, to show that such a magical thing could be done and maybe unlock some ideas for projects. The table of geeks was really helpful and sweet to those in the crowd who needed help getting TextWrangler going (though I wondered what they got out of the session themselves). Overall, for a presenter who started by spending 10 minutes getting people going in Terminal, many for the first time in their lives, things went smoothly, and it was fun to hear the little cheers in the audience when one of us did something right in Terminal and it delivered a result. OH: I'm programming.

The biggest takeaway from this session was something Albert said: "If you want to learn a programming language, it kind of doesn't matter which one you start with. Just pick one that someone you know knows, so you can bug them with questions." 

After this we all trooped downstairs to the atrium to hear some university administrator talk about some new initiative or something as if it was really boring to him. Clearly it had been agreed that he would speak as a condition of using the building. He didn't use his time well.

And then the all-day hackathon guys came out and were not boring! What they did all day while we were in session was awesome. They are working to unlock Philly civic data and make it into usable apps, and what they built on Saturday isn't quite ready to share but it's great and wonderful. Find out more at http://opendataphilly.org/.