Wildcards (or How I've Taken Up Writing Essays For No Profit and Long Shot Chances)

I've had no interviews this week, but do have one four hour interview scheduled for next week.  Having come out of a "glom" of screenings and interviews, I've been using this time to work on my job submissions and to focus on enjoying this time off...  Well, that and work on my coursera class on Practical Machine Learning. 

One of the things I started doing this week though is applying to some companies I might not shouldn't.  But here's the thing, that seven hour interview (which dropped down to only five) came about because I saw a job I had some of the qualifications for, but only a few, but the company was cool.  So, I figured, "Why the hell not?"  Shit.  I got called in so quick it made my head spin.

We all know I am not a square peg.  In fact, my cubicle doth overfloweth theth cubicle gridth. 

So, why am I applying to square peg jobs?  Be that as it may, this week I started having fun with some of my submissions.  (This is what comes of one positive response to my bad behavior.)  So, I've found some interesting places to submit and research different organizations.  I'm going all out with my cover letters.  I have my "blurbs" done, but the introductions are fully personalized and I continue to expand upon my blurts.

So, onto this list of "Out There" job boards (besides the normal:  Indeed, LinkedIn, Dice, Monster, TelecomCareers, and TheLadders)

AngelList - they have the catch phrase:  "A new way to find a job at a great startup"  You can make a profile with your resume.  Your profile won't show "completed" unless / until you have three references submitted by others to that site / through that site.  Well, I've done mine through LinkedIn, so maybe I'll ask future ones for AngelList (probably not, but whatevahhh....).  Also, your profile won't show complete without your graduation dates.  I've already written to them about that little age revealing piece of information.  That said, I have received one (make that) two inquiries from a founder from my profile posted here.  Unfortunately, it was in New York, so not only did I have to respond that it wouldn't work, I had to go figure out how to modify my profile even further so I wouldn't encourage requests outside of the Seattle area.

PowerToFly - Remote work (i.e., telecommuting), however this is focused on women.  So the only profiles I've seen in here are those with breasts attached.  That said, I have not received any inquiries from this site.  There are not that many jobs either.


Pymetrics - is only in beta.  The initial setup is 12 "games" which are supposed to create a profile of your cognitive, emotional, and social skills which would then be used to "match" you up with companies or a career.  However, they don't have any engineering work outside of Finance Reserch, Product Development, or Marketing.  The company list is small, but the filters are "interesting" in that you can filter on company size as "type" (i.e., privately held, public, non profit).  They have a total of 20 games you can use.  I got tired after the first 12, and because the list of matching "careers" was so limited, I was somewhat disappointed.  That said, I could review my "results" against those other careers which were available.

AnalyticTalent - I only have my resume loaded up here.  I continue to receive an email saying there's a match between myself and Amazon.  I haven't found a way to modify the profile so I could refine my preferences.  It does have a View counter, fwiw, and fwetm (for whatever that means).  Interestingly, the job match hyperlinks to a NY Times classified job description, so maybe they're scraping far and wide.