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Showing posts from January, 2014

I Welcome Our Robot Overlords

Resume scanning software. Ghastly. Gone are the days of the whimsically written resume and the manual review. Toss in a handful of keywords, delete the word creative, and voila, maybe someone will pay attention to you. Fortunately, the way to evade being passed over by the robots is to add more robots. I popped my resume over to Jobscan  and threw a few job descriptions into the other field. I haven't updated my resume in a while (whoops), so it was expected that I only matched the descriptions at about a 56 percent rate. If you're new to seeding your resume with keywords, this is a great place to test what words work for you.

In praise of an emergency fund

Today I came out to my car to find the front left tire completely flat. A bit of Fix-a-Flat later, I was off to the mechanic. In months past I would be freaking out, "I can't afford this!" But this time, I had the assurance of an emergency fund. Building savings while unemployed or digging out of debt is horribly difficult, but it can be done. Best of all, it helps to break the debt cycle. It's not fun or glamorous, but it helps. My mode was to automate my emergency fund and save spare change until I had enough to deposit. Not having the dull feeling of doom made it worth the months of scrimping.