morgulblade:

Basically I have been blessed to be close to people who work in hiring and were very, very willing to pass along their knowledge and tips and since a lot of people I know on here seem mystified by these things, I will share my vast wealth of knowledge with you*

*Some of this knowledge might be contradicted by specifics from your own field. If you’re a chemical engineer some of these things might not apply and that’s fine. This is just ~*widely applicable*~ stuff.

Cover Letters

Cover letters are the stupidest part of a job application. The cover letter is really only there to show two things: 1) That you have a command of language that is both accurate and appropriate; 2) you read the job listing.

• Your cover letter should be short. The hirer has likely read hundreds that day, and by read, I mean “skimmed over lightly.” You don’t need to fill up an entire page. 
• It should only contain pertinent information. Do not try to be cutesy or “creative” unless the job listing SPECIFICALLY asks for that. Trust me, I’ve had to hire people. Those people’s letters got passed around for mocking. DO NOT BE THAT PERSON.
• It should speak to the job listing, but only enough that it shows that you read it. If the job listing emphasizes that they’re looking for somebody who is willing to work odd hours, throw in a line that in your past experience you have been noted for being flexible with time. It doesn’t need a Faulkner-length explanation.
• If you know the name of the person to whom the letter is addressed, address it to them. If you it is a blind application, you don’t need to put “To Whom It May Concern” or “Dear Sir/Madam;” just don’t say anything.
• Stop freaking out about it. Seriously, your CL is not nearly as scary as you think it is. If you want to see a screenshot if an example cover letter that is a “catch all,” click here. I just pulled this out of my ass for a fictional job/person.

Resumes

Your resume is not an “employment record.” Unless you have no experience, it should only list the things that are the most impressive or demonstrate your abilities the clearest. 

• If you have an “Objective” on your resume, take it off. All of the employers I know said, “We KNOW your objective—you want the job! It just takes up space.” 
• Always make sure that your resume is formatted cleanly and with maximum readability in mind. I strongly, strongly suggest visiting this link to see how to format your resume best. Visual cleanliness matters. 
• Your resume should be ONE page. Just one. Not two or more. 
• You can’t lie on your resume; you can learn how to make things sound more impressive. If you worked at a hair salon cleaning up, don’t say “Swept floors.” Instead write, “Contributed to the efficiency and cleanliness of the salon by sweeping floors.” It sounds like bullshit to you, but to a prospective employer, it sounds like you’re happy being part of a team. Try to describe what you did in at least 7 words.
• You can divide your resume if you want to highlight certain experiences over others. Making two sections such as “Relevant Experience” and “Other Experience” breaks it up, allows the reader to skip around, and let’s you highlight what you want to highlight.
• Learn to weed things out. Unless you can make it look like it taught you something huge, don’t waste the space. At the same time, if a job sucked but you can make it appear like it really impacted you, use it. This is not the truth about how you felt about that last job. This is you advertising yourself. You’re trying to get a job, not a Nobel Prize for emotional honesty. 

Now, what about the Skills section? You should have one, but as one friend said, “Nobody gives a shit if you went to France and had a great time. What we care about is if you’re proficient in French.” That should be your metric for things:

• Only list experiences that would aid you in this job or a similar one—not things that were “cool.” This is the place for things that you’ve learned but perhaps can’t tie to a job. Examples: foreign language skills, clerical training, courses/certifications, etc. 
• List all of the software that you know. Even if it doesn’t seem relevant to that job, weird things happen. List any MS Office/equivalent software, if you are familiar with both Mac and PC, any graphics editing software you know… 
• SOCIAL MEDIA IS A THING THAT YOU SHOULD DEFINITELY MAKE KNOWN. To people ~30 and under, social media seems like a given. But to many employers, it’s a mystical world filled with equal amounts of marketing opportunities and terror. Make it clear what social networking sites you know how to use—obviously Facebook and Twitter, but also LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, etc. 

Applying to Jobs/Interviewing

Unfortunately, I can give you less specific advice here because we are not likely working in the same field—but here are just some general things to file away:

• If there’s a job listing that you feel qualified for but the listing says it wants more years of experience than you have, apply anyway. Those employers are unlikely to find that unicorn that has 4+ years of experience and is willing to work basically minimum wage. While more experience is a plus, they really just want somebody who can do the job. When it comes to applying to jobs, you really have nothing to lose by applying to anything that tickles your fancy. 
• Interviewing is an entire post unto itself, but I’ll give you the tips that I’ve been given by my people: be calm, be on time, and ask good questions. Always have some questions lined up, even if you already know the answer. “What are you looking for in the right candidate?” is a good example, or “Are there opportunities for growth within the company?” etc. 

Accepting a Job

So you got a job offer; exciting! Before you immediately accept, really vet the place to make sure it’s somewhere you’d like to work. Months of unemployment make you desperate, but sometimes jumping at the first opportunity it isn’t worth it. THIS HAPPENED TO ME, LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES. 

Things you should think about:

• Do I know ALL things about the job, including: what I will be paid/how often, if there are benefits and when I get them, what hours I am working, how overtime is handled, how sick time is handled, etc. These are all incredibly important to know and if your employer is legitimate they will welcome you asking them. 
• Is the distance commutable, or is it too far from home? (Think about how transit/gasoline will cut into your paycheck.)
• Does the job give me the time necessary to do other important things?
• Does the office environment seem like one I can spend at least six months in? (Every month at a bad job feels like an eternity—if you have bad feelings, trust them.) 
• Does the job offer me anything besides a paycheck? Will I be learning any skills at this job or making important connections that can help me down the road?

IMPORTANT: If an employer tries to give you a W-9 tax form upon your hiring and you are NOT a freelancer (independent contractor), RUN. This is tax fraud and is very messy and is entirely there to screw you. Become familiar with the legal definition of a freelancer so you know if you’re walking into a shady place. It happens more than you’d think, and it sucks, and is weird.

If you have any questions, feel free to send me a message or whatever, I’ll gladly answer to the best of my ability! GO GET ‘EM. 

(via emmaswanned)

A fuckload of classic literature:

1. 1984 by George Orwell
2. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
4. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
5. Aesop’s Fables by Aesop
6. Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë
7. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll
8. Andersen’s Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen
9. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
10. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
11. Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne
12. Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
13. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
14. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
15. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
16. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
17. Dracula by Bram Stoker
18. Dubliners by James Joyce
19. Emma by Jane Austen
20. Erewhon by Samuel Butler
21. For the Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke
22. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
23. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
24. Grimms Fairy Tales by the brothers Grimm
25. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
26. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
27. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
28. Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
29. Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
30. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
31. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
32. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
33. Middlemarch by George Eliot
34. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
35. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
36. Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard by Joseph Conrad
37. Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
38. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
39. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
40. Paradise Lost by John Milton
41. Persuasion by Jane Austen
42. Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter
43. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
44. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
45. Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen
46. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
47. Swanns Way by Marcel Proust
48. Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
49. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
50. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
51. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
52. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
53. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
54. The Great Gatsby
55. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
56. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
57. The Iliad by Homer
58. The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells
59. The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
60. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
61. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
62. The Odyssey by Homer
63. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle
64. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
65. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
66. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
67. The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli
68. The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
69. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
70. The Tales of Mother Goose by Charles Perrault
71. The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buchan
72. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Duma
73. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
74. The Trial by Franz Kafka
75. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
76. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
77. Ulysses by James Joyce
78. Utopia by Sir Thomas More
79. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Within A Budding Grove by Marcel Proust
81. Women In Love by D. H. Lawrence
82. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Click on the motherfucking Hypelinks bitches.

Here! Have a fuckload of modern literature, too!

1. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
2. A Study In Scarlet - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
3. Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter - Seth Grahame-Smith
4. An Abundance of Katherines - John Green
5. Artemis Fowl - Eoin Colfer
6. Bossypants - Tina Fey
7. Breakfast At Tiffany’s - Truman Capote
8. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
9. Catcher In The Rye - J.D. Salinger
10. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
11. City of Bones - Cassandra Clare
12. Clockwork Angel - Cassandra Clare
13. Damned - Chuck Palahniuk
14. Darkly Dreaming Dexter - Jeff Lindsay
15. Dead Until Dark - Charlaine Harris
16. Ender’s Game - Orson Scott Card
17. Everything Is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer
18. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
19. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
20. Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
21. Go The Fuck To Sleep - Adam Mansbach
22. I Am America (And So Can You!) - Stephen Colbert
23. I Am Number Four - Pittacus Lore
24. Inkheart - Cornelia Funke
25. It - Stephen King
26. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
27. Lolita - Vladmir Nabokov
28. Marked - Kristin Cast
29. Memoirs Of A Geisha - Arthur Golden
30. My Sister’s Keeper - Jodi Picoult
31. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
32. One Day - David Nicholls
33. Paper Towns - John Green
34. Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightening Thief - Rick Riordan
35. Pretty Little Liars - Sara Shepard
36. Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
37. Snow White And The Huntsman - Lily Blake
38. The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
39. The Bourne Identity - Robert Ludlum
40. The Giver - Lois Lowry
41. The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
42. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
43. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
44. The Notebook - Nicholas Sparks
45. The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton
46. The Perks of Being A Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky
47. The Princess Diaries - Meg Cabot
48. The Things They Carried - Tim O’Brien
49. The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
50. The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
51. Tuesdays With Morrie - Mitch Albom
52. Uglies - Scott Westerfeld
53. Vampire Diaries: The Awakening - L.J. Smith
54. Water For Elephants - Sara Gruen
55. Wicked - Gregory Maguire

(via bestweapons)

aneira-hailey:

1. Absent: preoccupied
2. Agonized: as if in pain or tormented
3. Alluring: attractive, in the sense of arousing desire
4. Appealing: attractive, in the sense of encouraging goodwill and/or interest
5. Beatific: see blissful
6. Bilious: ill-natured
7. Black: angry or sad, or see hostile
8. Bleak: see grim and hopeless
9. Blinking: surprise, or lack of concern
10. Blissful: showing a state of happiness or divine contentment
11. Blithe: carefree, lighthearted, or heedlessly indifferent
12. Brooding: see anxious and gloomy
13. Bug eyed: frightened or surprised
14. Chagrined: humiliated or disappointed
15. Cheeky: cocky, insolent
16. Cheerless: sad
17. Choleric: hot-tempered, irate
18. Coy: flirtily playful, or evasive
19. Crestfallen: see despondent
20. Darkly: with depressed or malevolent feelings
21. Deadpan: expressionless, to conceal emotion or heighten humor
22. Dejected: see despondent
23. Derisive: see sardonic
24. Despondent: depressed or discouraged
25. Doleful: sad or afflicted
26. Dour: stern or obstinate; see also despondent
27. Downcast: see despondent
28. Dreamy: distracted by daydreaming or fantasizing
29. Ecstatic: delighted or entranced
30. Etched: see fixed
31. Faint: cowardly, weak, or barely perceptible
32. Fixed: concentrated or immobile
33. Furtive: stealthy
34. Gazing: staring intently
35. Glancing: staring briefly as if curious but evasive
36. Glaring: see hostile
37. Glazed: expressionless due to fatigue or confusion
38. Gloomy: see despondent and sullen
39. Glowering: annoyed or angry
40. Glowing: see radiant
41. Grim: see despondent; also, fatalistic or pessimistic
42. Grave: serious, expressing emotion due to loss or sadness
43. Haunted: frightened, worried, or guilty
44. Hopeless: depressed by a lack of encouragement or optimism
45. Hostile: aggressively angry, intimidating, or resistant
46. Hunted: tense as if worried about pursuit
47. Impassive: see deadpan
48. Inscrutable: mysterious, unreadable
49. Jeering: insulting or mocking
50. Languid: lazy or weak
51. Leering: see meaningful; also, sexually suggestive
52. Meaningful: to convey an implicit connotation or shared secret
53. Mild: easygoing
54. Mischievous: annoyingly or maliciously playful
55. Moody: see sullen
56. Pained: affected with discomfort or pain
57. Pallid: see wan
58. Peering: with curiosity or suspicion
59. Peeved: annoyed
60. Petulant: see cheeky and peeved
61. Pitying: sympathetic
62. Pleading: seeking apology or assistance
63. Pouting: see sullen
64. Quizzical: questioning or confused
65. Radiant: bright, happy
66. Roguish: see mischievous
67. Sanguine: bloodthirsty, confident
68. Sardonic: mocking
69. Scornful: contemptuous or mocking
70. Scowling: displeased or threatening
71. Searching: curious or suspicious
72. Set: see fixed
73. Shamefaced: ashamed or bashful
74. Slack-jawed: dumbfounded or surprised
75. Sly: cunning; see also furtive and mischievous
76. Snarling: surly
77. Sneering: see scornful
78. Somber: see grave
79. Sour: unpleasant
80. Stolid: inexpressive
81. Straight-faced: see deadpan
82. Sulky: see sullen
83. Sullen: resentful
84. Taunting: see jeering
85. Taut: high-strung
86. Tense: see taut
87. Tight: see pained and taut
88. Unblinking: see fixed
89. Vacant: blank or stupid looking
90. Veiled: see inscrutable
91. Wan: pale, sickly; see also faint
92. Wary: cautious or cunning
93. Wide eyed: frightened or surprised
94. Wild eyed: excited, frightened, or stressful
95. Wistful: yearning or sadly thoughtful
96. Withering: devastating; see also wrathful
97. Woeful: full of grief or lamentation
98. Wolfish: see leering and mischievous
99. Wrathful: indignant or vengeful
100. Wry: twisted or crooked to express cleverness or a dark or ironic feeling

(via queen-poehler)