Sadly, however, we do not expect to have any positions available until approximately the end of time. We will, however, keep the remains of your resume on file, in a tasteful urn, and you may rest assured that nobody will disturb it except for routine dusting.
Sincerely,
The Personnel Department
So the question becomes: what do you do with your resume? My advice is, set fire to it yourself. Nobody ever reads resumes anyway. I only told you to write one because it’s an old job-seeker tradition, and we have so few traditions left.
Good! We’ve taken care of that! Now let’s move on to the next step, which is ...
Writing An Effective Letter That Will Get You A Job Interview
In an ideal world, of course, your letter would say, “Dear Sir or Madam: Give me a job interview or I will kill your spouse.”
But we do not live in an ideal world. We live in a world that has strict postal regulations regarding what you can say in letters. So you’re going to have to take the “soft sell” approach to getting an interview. Chances are, you’ve already written such a letter, and chances are it sounds something like this:
Dear Sirs or Madams:
As a dynamic, eager, hardworking young person who brings an enormous quantity of enthusiasm to every task, on account of being so eager, I am writing, to express my sincere desire to be considered for the position of Employee within your company. I am confident that once we have had a chance at some mutual and convenient time to meet and shake hands firmly while making eye contact and reviewing all my major accomplishments dating back to the birth canal, you will realize how mutually beneficial it would be for your firm and myself to seek some means of achieving our future goals in a way that would benefit both parties. Mutually.
I shall contact your office by telephone every seven or eight minutes, starting this morning, to determine a time that would be mutual and dynamic for you.
Very sincerely,
Byron B. Buffington II
The advantage of this kind of letter is that it has a confident, positive, assertive, enthusiastic tone. The disadvantage is that it makes you sound like the biggest jerk ever to roam the planet. I mean, look at it from the perspective of the people at the company: they have to actually work with the people they hire, and nobody is going to want to work with a little rah-rah snot-face.
What you want is a job application letter that makes you sound like a regular person, somebody who would be fun to work with:
Hey—So the priest says to the rabbi, he says, “But how do you get the snake to wear lipstick?” Ha ha! Get it? Say, did you get a load of the new clerk in Accounts Receivable? Whoooo! She is so ugly, it takes two men and a strong dog just to look at her! Ha ha! How about those Giants? I don’t know about you, but I say we knock off early today.
Take it easy,
Byron “The Buffer” Buffington
Whom You Should Send Your Letter To
A vice-president. It makes no difference which one. All vice-presidents do exactly the same thing with their mail, namely write the first name of a middle-management subordinate in the upper right-hand corner, followed by a question mark, like this: “Dan?” They do this by reflex action to everything placed in front of them, usually without reading it, then they toss it into the “OLD” basket. If an employee is hospitalized and a get-well card is passed around the company, it usually winds up with an unintelligible blot in the upper right-hand corner where all the vice-presidents wrote the names of subordinates followed by question marks.
Nobody will ever dare throw your letter away, once a vice-president has written on it. Eventually somebody is going to ask you to come in for an interview, if only to find out how the snake joke starts.
How To Prepare For Your Job Interview
One obvious way to remain calm and perspiration free during an interview, of course, is narcotics, but there you run into the problem of scratching yourself and trying to steal things off the interviewer’s desk. So as a precaution, what most veteran employment counselors recommend is that you wear “dress shields,” which, as some of you women already know, are these highly absorbent devices that you stuff into your armpits. They are available in bulk at any good employment agency. For a job interview, you should stuff three or four shields into each pit. This will cause your arms to stick out from your body at an odd angle, so to prevent your interviewer from attaching any significance to this, you want to begin the interview with a casual remark, as is illustrated by the following “model” interview dialog:
INTERVIEWER: Hello, Bob. Nice to meet you.
YOU: There’s nothing odd about my arms!
The Interview Process
Basically, what the interviewer wants to know is how well you can “think on your feet.” So what he’ll try to do, with his questions, is throw you some “curve balls,” which means you should come to the interview well supplied with snappy retorts. Let’s go back to our “model” interview:
INTERVIEWER: Tell me, Bob, why are you interested in coming to work for us?
YOU: Who wants to know?
INTERVIEWER: Ha ha! Got me there! Bob, what specific strengths do you feel you would bring to this job?
YOU: So’s your old man!
INTERVIEWER (tears of laughter streaming down his face): Bob, you sound like the kind of quick-thinking employee we are looking for! How about a large starting salary?
YOU: You and what army?
CONGRATULATIONS You’ve got the job!
In the next chapter, you’ll learn how to figure out what exactly the nature of this job is—specifically, whether it involves any duties, and if so, how you can get out of them.
Chapter Three. How To Do Your Job, Whatever It Is
To really succeed in a business or organization, it is sometimes helpful to know what your job is, and whether it involves any duties. Try to find this out in your first couple of weeks by asking around among your co-workers. “Hi,” you should say. “I’m Byron Buffington, a new employee! What’s the name of my job?” If they answer Long-Range Planner or Lieutenant Governor, you are pretty much free to lounge around and do crossword puzzles until retirement. Most other jobs, however, will involve some work.
There are two major kinds of work in the modern corporation or organization:
1. Taking phone messages for people who are in meetings; and
2. Going to meetings.
Your ultimate career strategy will be to get to a job involving primarily number two, going to meetings, as soon as possible, because that’s where the real prestige is. But most corporations and organizations like to start everybody out with a couple of years of taking messages, so we’ll discuss this important basic business skill first.
Taking A Phone Message
When the phone rings, lift the receiver, punch whichever button is lit, and say: “Thank you for calling the Marketing Department (or whatever). Kindly hold the line.” Then quickly punch the hold button.
Now you should check around briefly to make sure that everybody the caller could possibly want to talk to is in a meeting. This is also a good time to go to the bathroom. When you return, punch the hold button again, and say: “I am sorry, but whomever the person is to whom you wish to speak is in a meeting at this present time and is expected to remain there until at least the next major economic recession. Did you wish to leave a message?”