Charlottesville Tech-job-market
I’ve found myself about half a dozen times over the last 6 months sending friends or friends-of-friends info on companies in town who hire programmers, software testers, tech-writers or project managers. Before I send it out one more time, I thought I’d put it up here for general reference and to solicit comments. I’m going to quickly put it up without fully linking each company trusting that you all can use Google as well as I can.
Charlottesville Tech Companies in no particular order
- Commonwealth Computer Research
- OpenSource Connections
- Perrin Quarles Associates
- ScholarOne (now owned by Thomson Scientific)
- Hotelicopter
- Dominion Digital
- Lucid Imagination
- SNL Financial
- Perrone Robotics
- Meddius health care tech
- Rimm-Kaufman Group does search engine optimization and has an in-house team to help the marketing reps with data mining etc.
- University of Virginia
- and separately: the University of Virginia Medical Center
These government contractors have offices all over so be sure to specify Charlottesville:
- SAIC
- Booz Allen Hamilton
- CACI
- Pragmatics
- Northrop Grumman
- General Dynamics
When finding jobs by going directly to company websites, remember that a company busy enough to need to hire may be busy enough not to be able to get a job on their site. If a site doesn’t have a job you’re looking for, use their website to find out the name of a manager in the department you’d like to work or just call the front desk and ask for the name of the person in charge of developers, tech writers, testing, hiring project managers, etc. Ask for the HR manager. Ask if they’re hiring now or expect to in the near future. Do some research ahead of time so you have some idea of what their industry is like so you can ask informed questions. Then you can follow this sequence:
- Give them a reason to expect your Coverletter (and resume)
- Write a coverletter that makes them want to read your resume
- Write a resume (customize it for each job) that makes them want to give you an interview
- Interview so they know they can work with you
That last point is often important. A lack of domain experience can be made up for in a month on the job. Being someone no one can get along with is really unlikely to be corrected.