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 spaceelf wrote:
To get hired you have to get noticed by an employer. It has been my experience that sending in job applications is not the way to do this. When an employer posts a job opening, they receive thousands of applications. It is all too easy to get lost in the stack. It is also worth noting that many employers avoid job postings and find new employees through referrals. The reasons for this are that it is costly to have an employee sift through the stacks of applications.

I would advise you to ask everyone you know if they know of any job openings where they work, or openings with people they know well.

In terms of the CV, I would not include wargaming unless it relates in some way to the job. Thus, if I were applying for a job at GW I would mention wargaming.

You may be surprised that your CV is stronger than you think. Having a single sick day in four years is very admirable.

It is important to stay positive, in life, on your CV, and in an interview.

This is true. You literally need to phone places you want to work and say 'have you got a job/opening' as recruitment websites are pointless.
I put 'table top gaming' which covers RPGS, boardgames and wargaming on my CV. The fact that I helped to set up a club was a point in my favour too.

Basically avoid 'marketese' such as:

I'm a responsible creative person who is driven and motivated. I am strategic in my orginisational skills and am driven to be effective in my patient analysis of problems in order to provide innovative customer-driven solutions.

or corporate BS like this. Nobody but idiots who haven't a clue speak like that. A good employer will want the genuine you not the SMILE EFFECTIVE INNOVATIVE DRONE you.

Be concise and to the point. If you want to send me a CV with your personal info stripped out I can cobble it into a snappy format.

 monders wrote:
I'd phrase it along the lines of you're a creative, artistic person, and you like to find interesting and varied methods of persuing these interests, such as...

Good luck.

This guy's done politics.

As it happens, I had a similar idea.

I described my hobby skills as...

Strength with simple statistics
Attention to detail
Quick decision maker

and finally, and most tongue-in-cheek,

A strict adherent to the spirit of any expressed company policy


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Soteks Prophet wrote:

This is true. You literally need to phone places you want to work and say 'have you got a job/opening' as recruitment websites are pointless.
I put 'table top gaming' which covers RPGS, boardgames and wargaming on my CV. The fact that I helped to set up a club was a point in my favour too.

Basically avoid 'marketese' such as:

I'm a responsible creative person who is driven and motivated. I am strategic in my orginisational skills and am driven to be effective in my patient analysis of problems in order to provide innovative customer-driven solutions.

or corporate BS like this. Nobody but idiots who haven't a clue speak like that. A good employer will want the genuine you not the SMILE EFFECTIVE INNOVATIVE DRONE you.

Be concise and to the point. If you want to send me a CV with your personal info stripped out I can cobble it into a snappy format.

The first bit's called canvassing, Also, you haven't read much Scott Adams, have you? He has divergent beliefs.
The best thing to do is, once you get an interview, do a bit of research on what the company actually does. If you can display an interest and/or a good insight given timely on the company's particular product, that can be job interview in the hole

For example, if in an interview for a computer parts company that, say, specialises in repairs, give them an enthusiastic gesture of knowledge, something like "I know in most of the cases I've read about, this is the reason behind this malfunction/problem." and avoid umming and ahhing, because if you sound indecisive you sound like deadweight to a team. The most important thing, past your CV, is that you can pull off a good salesman to the interviewer. Even if your potential position isn't sales, you're still selling your skills and services.

This whole interests/hobbies section is an interesting cultural divide.

I recently got a job with an American employer, for which I flew into the US, and was interviewed by 8 different people in the course of a day.

One guy picked up on the wargaming thing, as he was a "recovered" magic player and it really broke the ice. The rest of them ignore it / didn't bring it up.

Since taking that job, I myself have conducted half a dozen interviews for new candidates and I've always been struck by the lack of the personal stuff on a CV. My opening question to all of them, without fail, is along the lines of: "What do you like to do when you're not doing all this work crap?"

Most candidates are prepared for questions about their CV, and their career to date, but if you really want to find out whether you want to work with someone or not you need to get out of the corporate drone mentality.

Now I totally get that in large multinationals, regular staff don't necessarily interview their colleagues and nor does "being an donkey-cave" disqualify you from getting a job, but working for a midsized (~250 employee) company, I think the donkey-cave factor is important. Until you get people talking in a more relaxed fashion you don't always get a sense of who they are.

To answer the OP - Wargaming has been on my CV since I first wrote one, it ain't ever coming off!

Large multinationals are made of lots of small teams, however.

It's pretty much a standard in human psychology that efficient work teams are about 8-10 people and depend on socialisation to work well (Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing). Once you get much larger than that you group them into teams of teams.

The ability to get on with colleagues is very important.