Bill Alexander: Landed at Nuance Communications in Burlington

billdalexander wdalexander@gmail.com 

Sun Oct 25, 2009 7:21 pm (PDT)

I'm happy to report that I've accepted an offer for
a permanent position at Nuance Communications in
Burlington, working on their embedded voice recognition
software. I start this coming Monday.

The position was posted on several online job boards.
I applied in September, and two weeks ago I went
through a phone screen, a programming test, and a
day of interviews. They made a verbal offer soon
afterwards.

I didn't have some of the experience that they would
have preferred, but they were not as rigid about
that as many companies have been. Getting a programming
test was somewhat unusual. I tried pretty hard to do
well on it, in both substance and style, and I guess
that helped.

I got another offer through networking. I had stayed
in contact with some colleagues from a previous
job, but hadn't expected much to come of it because
they had just had a layoff (including one of these
contacts) around the time I started looking. In
August, one of my contacts told me that there
might be a job available maintaining the code I had
written there earlier. I applied for the job,
and over the next few months I went through a phone
screen, two sets of interviews, discussions about salary
and benefits, and finally got a verbal offer, about the
same time as the one from Nuance. It would have been
a comfortable work environment, but a step backwards
professionally.

I had two near misses using online job boards.
One came through a recruiter who had posted a job
on craigslist. I met with him, then had two rounds
of interviews with the employer. It seemed to
go well until the last interview.

The other near miss came from posting my resume
online. I put it up on a few sites, and when things
were slow I made minor changes so that recruiters
would see it again. One of the calls I got from this
looked like it would turn into a three month contract,
but family issues got in the way.

It's been a long and sometimes frustrating search.
Best of luck to everyone out there still looking.

-Bill Alexander