What's it like to "work for" a company?

In preparation for our ENG 3353 resume and cover letter assignment, we talked a little about workplace culture and about whether or not a paycheck is (should be?) enough. Of course, any time I think about workplace culture, I'm reminded of some of CBS' coverage of Zappos.

60 Minutes covered the company a few years ago (5/25/08) in the context of hiring millenials. A big part of their claim is that workplaces have to offer young talent more than just a paycheck. Well, there's more to their claim than just that, so watch the video.



In addition to the 60 Minutes segment, CBS covered the launch party of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh's new book, Delivering Happiness. In the video, you can hear evidence again of Hsieh's workplace mentalty, speaking of which, I just found out that Zappos has a "family" of employee-written blogs.




I also had my numbers wrong in class when I talked about Amazon's purchase of Zappos. It turns out that Amazon only paid the measly sum of $850 million, about $40 million of which went directly into employee's pockets.

So, as my students are putting together their work-related compositions, I want us all to ask ourselves, "What kind of company do I want (hope? ideally?) to work for?" Put another way, you want to think about crafting documents based on those fundamentals we've discussed about audience awareness, and that depends on lots of variables, including theorizing about ideal audiences, researching real audiences, logos, pathos, etc.

What to make of the skills we've been developing

In one way, this post is geared more towards a Technical Communications class, but in another way it speaks to the continued development of the skills we worked on in Professional Writing Technologies, too. When you create a resume, you're basically creating a marketing document. You're organizing information that makes the argument that you, as a product, are worth the money the employer is willing to pay as salary.

I told my Tech Writing class, during the Spring '09 semester, that it's "better to admit than omit," as a general rule. That is, it's better to deliver all relevant information up front, even if some of it is unfavorable, rather than have that information rear its ugly head down the road and have a reader ask, "Why wasn't I told about this back then?!"

However, I also admitted (see, there it is in action) that, like "spin" or any other language manipulation, there's omitting and then there's "omitting," if that makes sense. A writer can leave out information in an effort to divert attention or even mislead (BAD), or a writer can leave out information because it's not really relevant to the rhetorical situation.

I thought about that subtle distinction today when I saw this article on Yahoo! Lots of blog have written about job-hunt issues like polishing up your resume, not including dumb (even offensive) information, and controlling public information that might hurt your resume. This Yahoo! article, though, deals with omitting information about your marketable skills because they make you seem "overqualified," a word I've always found problematic.

Depending on the field you're interested in, it can be a rough time to look for a job. If you're a world-famous rocket-scientist, for example, but you can't find work in that field, should you leave off that part of your skill set so you can get the 6th grade science teaching job you found? Whereas NASA might look at those lines of your resume and think, "Mmmm, looks good," Austin Independent School District might look at it and think, "Yikes, we can't afford her/him!"

In that case, what do you do with your valuable marketing information (about how skilled you are)?