Re: how not to do job postings (was: A reply regarding my earlier post for an EE with LUA skills)

[Drake Wilson <drake@...>]

Quoth Quae Quack <quae@daurnimator.com>, on 2010-10-14 14:05:54 +1100:
> The objection is the use of improper html emails, the disregard of
> list ettiquette, and the bad grammar (especially "LUA" (its Lua, quite
> a few of us are overly sensitive about this)).

Specific problems with the original message, IMHO:

  - The subject line should not be in all-caps.  This is possibly the
    largest (accidental?) signal that says "I AM SHOUTING AT YOU; MY
    GOAL IS TO GRAB YOUR ATTENTION WHETHER YOU WANT IT OR NOT" which
    is often considered hostile.  You don't use a megaphone at a job
    fair; don't do it here.  Posting the same message twice in a row
    is a similar problem; it oversteps bounds in people's attention
    space.

  - There was very little announcement of personal presence, and no
    targeted relevance; the message looked like a bulk message coming
    from nowhere.  In fact I didn't see the original message at all at
    first because it pegged my Bayesian spam filter into the red (0.98
    classification).  A paragraph indicating that you were new to the
    list but thought the job posting might be of relevance would have
    done wonders for the reception (at least from me).  A paragraph
    about the role of Lua specifically in your work environment on top
    of that would have been even better.

  - HTML mail is not recommended on this list, including inside a
    multipart/alternative.  There's a 27 kB "signature" attachment
    which is completely superfluous, too.  Don't do this.

  - "Lua" should not be spelled in all-caps.

    Note that many people make this mistake with "Perl" as well,
    though it's a little bit more excusable there because the name has
    nominal initialisms associated with it.  The fact that "Perl" was
    spelled correctly here but "Lua" was not does not look good when
    you're posting to the Lua list.

    You should have seen any number of instances of the spelling on
    the website on your way to the list.  Having apparently ignored
    this is indicative of non-investment in list quality, which is
    minus points to whether people will read your message.

Probably none of these are immediately fatal in isolation (maybe the
first), but in combination it makes a very poor first impression.

   ---> Drake Wilson