Two months ago, I wrote up my experience of sending out a resume, only to see it appear in my spam folder half an hour later. Last week, I got a call from a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Kris Maher, who was doing a story on job hunting and spam filters, and who had found my post via Google. He interviewed me over the phone, and unlike some of my other interactions with journalists, what he wrote bears a reasonable resemblance to what I told him, although he didn't go with my suggestion for the story hook -- the increasing unreliability of email. Here is what he wrote, quoted from a freely available copy of the story as syndicated to The Arizona Republic, of all places:
Tim Bishop started to worry about spam filters after he e-mailed a resume in February. He was shocked to discover 30 minutes after hitting the send button that a copy he sent to himself turned up in his own spam folder. Today, Mr. Bishop, a 42-year-old president of a software-development company in Berkeley, Calif., runs every resume and cover letter through three spam filters on his computer before e-mailing them. "I figure if it passes those three filters, it's probably OK," Mr. Bishop says.
I think I wrote the story more engagingly, but less completely, but I'll let our readers be the judge of that.
An amusing side note to the story is that my grandfather is an old line businessman who worked for the same company for 50 years, and even after retiring he reads the Wall Street Journal cover-to-cover almost every day. For years he has asked about my career, and seemed slightly puzzled at the (to him) rapid succession of different jobs at different companies, most of which never appeared on the pages of the WSJ. I have certainly personally done nothing newsworthy enough to get my name in the WSJ. Imagine his surprise tomorrow morning when he sees my name in the WSJ, not for any accomplishment, but because I self-published a story of my experiences with email, resumes, and spam.
P.S. For the curious, and especially for those who are hiring, my resume can be found online, avoiding all that difficulty with spam and email. My partners and I shut down our software development company at the end of last year, and I'm currently looking for a product, project, or development management position, preferably at a software or content startup.
My apologies, but my web hoster has turned off commenting, due to a flood of obscene spam bringing the server to its knees. I hope to have this weblog transitioned over to Wordpress in the near future, so that I can have commenting up and working again. Until then, please feel free to send me your comments via my email contact form.. Please ignore everything below this comment.
Hey, we're both famous, Tim!
E-mail providers such as Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s Hotmail often divert suspected spam into a special folder, which presents another opportunity for job seekers to miss a communication from a company. About two months ago, Adam Lasnik says he almost deleted a note that turned up in his spam folder from a recruiter at a major high-technology company. "I almost fainted when I saw the company line and signature," says Mr. Lasnik, 32, who was about to delete the message unopened. "I almost missed interviewing with this company."
Setting aside, for a moment, the fact that Kris wrongly implied that I use Yahoo or Hotmail (I use mail with my own domains, via Outlook), he did get my quote right :). And, like you enthused... hey, we're in the Wall Street Journal :D
Now if someone would just give us a job, darnit...
Posted by: Adam on April 14, 2004 02:30 AMThanks Adam and Mel,
I don't know that I did anything to be proud of. I'd much rather make the WSJ for a human or business accomplishment, and it isn't as though I developed a vaccine for malaria or created a business employing thousands of people. I guess I am proud of my writing, so I'll take mini-kudos for that.
I do think Mr. Maher missed the larger point I made in my original post, which was:
Email has evolved in a very short period of time (~10 years) to become a critical means of business communication, similar to the rise of the telegraph in the second half of the 1800s. However, the measures being used to combat the rising flood of spam are now threatening email, because they make email unreliable. It used to be that when you sent email, it either got to its destination, or it bounced. Now there is a significant possibility that an email will simply disappear into the black hole of spam filters, with no notification to sender or intended recipient.
That's not good enough for business use.
Except for the ISP's, businesses that got involved in the spam issues have primarily been involved in trying to assure that they can market to people (i.e. bulk mail them at best, spam them at worst).
Businesses need to start getting involved in figuring out better and systematic ways of combatting the flood spam, otherwise they are going to lose an incredibly useful business communication tool.
In this case, job-hunters are the canaries in the coal mine.
I, too, read the WSJ but missed the article. Hope Grandpa sees it. Thanks, Tim.
Posted by: Reston on April 16, 2004 05:34 AM