Networking
The Apple employee blogosphere is talking this evening about a recent college graduate who emailed a number of us (including myself, Erik Barzeski, Eric Albert, Chuq Von Rospach, and Alexei Kosut) a rather thorough questionnaire asking what it’s like to work at Apple, how we got our jobs, what the interview process was like, etc.
Essentially, the discussion hinges on Eric’s surprise at discovering, through Alexei and Chuqui, that this enterprising young man had sent the exact same email to a number of us. Eric’s problem isn’t so much with providing a little advice (which he did), but rather with the fact that the guy didn’t make it more clear that his was a mass mailing.
My take, for the record, is this: I agree that what our job seeker did was cheezy, but then, so is almost everything else about trying to find a job. Any college career office or “how to get hired” manual will tell you to use similar tactics (deceptive tricks to learn the name of the hiring manager, for example), and I personally think this young man was simply trying to work smarter not harder by harnessing the innate networking power of “social software” (incidentally, I was aware of the guy well before he emailed me—I had seen him asking similar questions of the “Apple Alumni” tribe on Tribe.net!).
(Update: I must have mistaken someone else for the person I’m talking about here, since the job seeker claims never to have visited Tribe.net. Apologies…)
It’s easy, when you’re ensconced in a relatively secure job at a company you love, to forget how frustrating and demoralizing it can be to be a freshly minted college graduate looking for an “in” in this economy. I’ve been on both sides of the table, and I know acutely how difficult it can be knowing that you have the passion and ability to do a job well but not knowing how to get people to even give you the time of day (there was an excellent “My Turn” piece in Newsweek a few weeks ago that explains this problem poignantly). Knowing this, I have a strong tendency to cut people like our boy a fair amount of slack.