crafting the perfect cover letter

Cover letters, it turns out, might be that foot in the door, the magic bullet, the all-in-one reveal everyone is looking for.  Cover letters, though, take time to craft.  If they don't, your submission is spam, you're spam, you're looking at the jobs like spam, and the return rate is gonna suck.

All that work for the polished up resume, meh.  Had to cut the summary section out.  I'm not gonna stress over trying to force that step-sister's foot into a combination resume format.  That effort will have to wait for the next phase of rejection and mostly because I've worked so many projects that trying to narrow it down... well, I've taken the bits which garnered me awards or commentary and added those to the cover letter.

I've also started adding some of my stripped out / schema deleted oracle sql code to a github repo.  This was wildly successful in yesterday's interview.  The 30 minute interview turned from testing me in my query skills to "are you sure you'd like to do this?" because I basically would be moving from a "Principal" engineer's position to one lower.  Apparently, "Principal" holds the same level in both Amazon and Microsoft as it does at AT&T.  Good to know.

Anyways, since I'd already checked out the payscale range for position at both payscale.com & Indeed.com.  I just noticed that information is no longer available on my LinkedIn account since I downgraded, but then they source their info from Payscale, so why bother.  My assumed rate of pay would be in line with what would be covered by the job description that I could find.  But really, it's all a "wait and see."  The interview also gave me some better phrases about how to explain my need for fun.  FUN = BUSINESS PROBLEM.  See, I can do business speak bingo.

Business problems are fun, if they're data related.  Either data acquisition, data cleaning, analysis, and reporting.  That phrase really, Really, REALLY worked for me.  I'm all plagarizing it all over the place now.  So, I scrubbed my newly reformatted cover letter and crew-cut resume off again so he could forward to recruiters.

Next up:  I'm putting together a list of questions which would be deal-breakers for me.  Email me your suggestions.