The state of the economy and what I get paid to do

So aside from my personal annoyance with the news reports about the economy (I have some very specific things I want to do with my money once the stock market rebounds), you may wonder if the economy has any impact on the world of Heather (or HeatherLeigh as many of you have called me....it's OK without the space in between). Many of you probably aren't wondering and clearly you have too much of a life to be reading my blog. What? You've watched everything on your DVR?

Well, there actually may be some of you intensely interested in this, specifically if your job has been impacted by all this buy-out biznazz. Because, you see, what I do, is help people at these companies who are facing lay-offs or just otherwise nervous about their continuing employment prospects to get their resumes in front of the right folks here (hello, run-on sentence). I don't meet with hiring managers, I don't do interviews. Basically, I am a dealer. Sadly, that sounds so much better than referring to myself as a resume hub. I deal in resumes. You don't have to send your resume to a bunch of recruiters at Microsoft. Send it to me and I'll do that for you. Nice, huh?

Here's what happens: first, I (well, we) find you or you find me. We have a bunch of people here on the lookout for you as you may be putting feelers out regarding job opportunities. If someone on my team finds you, you'll probably get an e-mail from us requesting your resume and/or additional information. Part of my job is being visible to folks searching online (so here I am, blogging away; totally high on Tylenol Sinus). No need to be shy if you want to send me your resume (heathham@microsoft.com). So that's the "you find me" part.

We have recruiters inside the company that have identified their core hiring needs and have "signed up" to receive resumes matching those profiles. So once we have your resume, we can push it out directly to those recruiters. Incidentally, I would also recommend applying on our career site as this will shorten the process time, if we decide to engage you in discussions for that specific position. By doing both, your resume will be in the resume database (which is keyword searchable and used all day long by recruiters) as well as in the inbox of the recruiters that are most likely to have a match for your background.

I know that for job seekers, especially those looking in the current climate, the idea of sending in a resume without any feedback is less than exciting. The fact is that we do receive a huge volume of resumes at Microsoft. And unfortunately, we cannot follow up with each person. So recruiters spend their time identifying resumes of the folks that most closely match their needs and talking to them, versus responding to the people that they don't want to move forward with. This is a good thing because it results in people getting offers. There is absolutely nothing that would keep a recruiter from contacting you if they have a position that matches your background. But I know that the "not knowing" and the "be patient" parts kind of suck. I know.

But I think we are offering more than most employers would under the circumstances (because, yes indeed, I am a real-live person). And I am offering to pluck your resume out of the black hole and put it in front of other real-live people (I can vouch for the recruiters...they are real).

Right now, there are more distressed companies than I can shake a stick at (the stick is tired and my arm hurts). And it's my team's job to figure out whether we can help some of the talent at these companies; we develop our strategy around competitive intelligence, identification and engagement of this talent; kind of like a swat team. So I thought I would do the easy thing and just put a reminder out here to anyone looking that it's totally OK to get in touch with me. Don't feel weird. And we do have positions that could match folks at financial companies.