Writing in hiring employees (Resumes and Cover letters)

`1:08:22`

not a programmer that's a problem. But the first thing we look at is not the resume. It's how have they responded to our call for applications. And we say like write a cover letter. And if the cover letter is written in a way where it's a generic cover letter they're gone immediately. Um even if it's well written. If we can tell that it was like written for anyone and they just replaced our name, I'm just not interested in that person. And we we might lose good people because of that, but it's okay. I'm not interested in that. I want someone who I'm going to write something to them. Uh I'm going to say something to them. And so that is the first filter. It's their writing ability. Their ability to communicate who they are, what they're about, why they're And if it's like dear hiring manager,

`1:09:07`

like that's a problem. And if it's like very generic and buzzwordy, that's a problem. It's really the best filter we to get to the kind of person that we want to hire. Uh not every company is going to want to hire like we hire, but we know that the majority of our communication is written and we write a lot internally in a lot of different ways and we found that the best way not to waste time is to write something right the first time versus having someone write something like what what does that mean and they have to rewrite it and like re-explain it or they say it they write it in a wrong way that freaks people out and then someone else has to explain I want to cut all that out from the beginning so it's a very important thing and in every position we hire the best writer. Wow I mean we They have if there's a tiebreaker the best writer

`1:09:54`

gets gets an app. Yeah. Is there a lot of long form writing that you're doing or is most of the writing multi paragraph sort of in Basecamp and Um there's like I mean long form for us is the I don't know 800 words 1200 words something like that like a pitch an idea. Yes. every 6 weeks every team lead has to write what's called a heartbeat which is quite a long thing it can be quite long summarizing all the work their team did over the last 6 weeks and the way that's written is really important because this is how we disseminate information internally we don't have meetings there's no status meetings. It's all written up. It's all published to Basecamp internally so people can read it on their own schedule on their own time but it has to be good. This is really like the summary of our company's activities over the last 6