Advice for job seekers

I'm doing some hiring right now and am having the dubious pleasure of plowing through a lot of resumes and doing a lot of phone screens. As always, Joel Spolsky has lots of useful things to say on the topic, but let me offer a few additional suggestions to the would-be job seeker.

• Put your complete contact info on the resume. Name, address, email address, phone number, lat/lon, and whatever else you can supply me. You might have written a truly masterful cover letter, but it got dropped when the HR department just sent me a PDF copy of your actual resume. Sorry, but them's the breaks. Burden's on you.
  

• When I find a resume I like, I email the candidate to set up a phone screen. We will agree on a date and time, and then I will call you at that time. This means you need to be waiting by the phone and ready to talk when I call. If you're not available for some reason, fine -- things do happen, I understand -- but the burden is on you to send me a note ASAP and explain and reschedule. I'm not going to spend my time hunting you down.

• When we talk on the phone, one of the first things I'm going to say is "have you had a chance to look at our website and see what we do here?" If you say "no", you're down one strike and we haven't even gotten to your experience or skills yet. If you say "yes" and then show no comprehension about what you've read, you're also down one strike. I'd much rather have you say "yes, but I'm not familiar with the Mugwump market and so I wonder if you can explain to me what your FrobNitz product actually can do for me" -- that's great, let's have a dialog, no problem. But don't try to bluff.

More on this later.