I get sent CVs from potential employees all the time. Most of these are traditional, paper-based CVs. Perhaps one in ten of these are any good. The rest are devoid of useful information. I’m not interested in the positions that people held, or what projects they worked on. I’m interested in how they applied their skills to their role, what they achieved, what they learnt and how they contributed to the success (or failure) of the projects they were working on. Sometimes I get sent CVs by e-mail. These are usually of the same dismal quality.

People who are looking for graphic design or web designer positions sometimes have their own on-line portfolio. I tend to visit these rather than look at the CVs. To date, I’ve not seen one that indicates they could bring anything new, interesting or innovative to my company. Why is this? Well, the main reason is the work is either too focused in one specific area, e.g. Flash animation, or their portfolio does not look good, that is, either their own website, or those they’ve produced for other people.

As a case in point, today I received an e-mail from someone who has a “lot of creative energy and a history of delivering projects to the highest standard”. So I visited their website and this is what I found:

• A initially visually appealing website. Good.
• No on-line samples of work. Just a placeholder for samples. No matter of clicking on the various sections gave me any links to websites, graphic design, print work or anything.
• At this stage I thought maybe it was a browser issue. So I switched browser and found that the site is full of JavaScript errors. Now, I’m quite open to graphic designers not knowing much about web design. But this person promotes web design on their website and refers to the website as the primary source of information. Very bad news.
• I then found their CV, under the ‘Contact’ section. Of course. But no telephone number either on the website, or the CV. Whilst I could read the Microsoft Word version of the CV, it was poorly laid out, written in yellow and black Courier font. A graphic designer no less! Always be suspicious of someone who sticks ‘conceptualisation’ in a CV. Be very suspicious if they stick the word in five times.
• Finally, I looked at the PDF version of the CV. One page of a few yellow and grey rectangles. There was no other content.

I’m now off for a lie down.

Since I make up 50% of the workforce at my company, I spend a lot of time answering cold calls. Or rather I did, until I signed up for British Telecom’s Anonymous Caller Reject. This rejects all calls from people or organisations that withold their telephone number. I don’t yet know if it works, but today I got a cold call from a woman who did release her number.

This call started off by asking for someone in Marketing. I said, like I do with all cold calls, that we don’t do Marketing. (Replace Marketing with Advertising, Sales, Window Cleaning, whatever, to get my standard response to all such queries.) However, this woman was not detered, and she wittered on for a minute about something or other, which resulted in her stating something like “and you have to put people on hold whilst you work out a quote.”

She seemed to know what our company did, but she was still under the impression that we could provide quotes to people in, say 15-30 seconds (the kind of time one would expect to be put on hold). But, we’re a web design / graphic design company. So, I said that we don’t put people on hold. She was rather surprised, and rang off.

But here’s why we don’t put people on hold:

1. Much of our meat and potatoes work is for small websites. We have stock prices for these, with simple rates. Give me the number of pages for a website and I can tell you how much it will cost.
2. For more involved work, we need to work out the costs, primarily because of the engineering work required. This usually requires some investigation, of a day or two of elapsed time. I wouldn’t dare put someone on hold for two days, whilst we work out the pricing!
3. Other customers require written quotations, so why bother telling them the price over the phone? Just say you’ll pop a quotation in the post, or via e-mail. It’s much more professional and they get a record of what they’re going to be getting, plus it prevents slip ups. We can then follow up with another phone call at our expense.
4. We don’t like to inconvenience our potential clients. It’s better to discuss their requirements on the phone, and work out the pricing later. They don’t get kept hanging, whilst we make up some numbers. If they’re serious enquiries, they won’t expect a price off the top of our heads.