Job hunt greatest hits

[JonPorobil]

My temp project ends this Friday, which will make me officially unemployed again. In this market, there are few openings, and potential employers engage in no small amount of sketchy and sometimes hilarious practices that seem to serve no purpose other than to convince me that even if I do manage to jump through their hoops, it wouldn't be worth it to work there.

This'll just be a running thread about funny things I see while looking for a new job.

For instance: THIS Craigslist posting from earlier this week.

Austin Bergstrom International Airport is looking for a General Manager, whose responsibilities will include:

• Lead, manage and direct all company operational and financial responsibilities at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.
• Maintain adequate staffing/scheduling to fulfill daily operational requirements, as well as forecasting for future needs to ensure optimum operational performance.
• Ensure complete accuracy and timeliness of payroll records, as well as legally compliant and audit personnel and training files.
• Achieve Profit & Loss goals of annually approved budget.

...and so on. The person who wins this position will be expected to have a B.S. degree and two to five years of managerial experience. That lucky person will perform all of the above duties while managing 50 other employees...

all for an annual salary of $25,000. That's not a typo. Twenty-five thousand dollars. Per year. Just over two grand a month, before taxes.

I'm pretty sure that my manager at RadioShack made more than that for managing all of six employees, three of whom were part-time.

...

...

Wow.

[signboy]

Something about Texas, Man... I've been looking around at jobs in my industry, and everyone in Texas tha does my job does it for 1/3 to 1/2 the pay. It must be the proximity to mexico.

[JonPorobil]

I'm applying for a teller job at a certain well-known bank. There is no in-person application process (the fact that fewer and fewer places allow for in-person applications is very distressing in and of itself); they've insisted that I apply online. The online application gives me the opportunity to upload my resume for their consideration. I have three up-to-date files of my resume: one is a .pdf file that is about 82 kilobytes. One is a .doc that is about 15 kilobytes. The third is one that is specially formatted to make it readable when pasted into an online field. I browse and attach the 15 kilobyte .doc file, but apparently it's too big. There's a 1.0 kilobyte limit on attachments. Good grief.

Wait, there's more. So I pull up the copy-paste version of my resume and paste it into a blank .txt file. Somehow, the new .txt file with my resume is 2.5 kilobytes!

No matter what I try, I can't get my resume into a file whose size is equal to or less than 1.0KB.

How in the hell do these people find employees?

[Billy's Little Trip]

No matter what I try, I can't get my resume into a file whose size is equal to or less than 1.0KB.

Well, I can't suggest any places for you to get a job. But I can recommend that you don't get a job doing the above.

How in the hell do these people find employees?

I can't speak for anyone else, but I go down to the local construction supplier and yell, trabajo!

[JonPorobil]

*headdesk*

YOU MUST COMPLETE THIS ASSESSMENT TO BE CONSIDERED FOR THIS POSITION.

Then there's a link to a questionnaire. The rest of the application has all been in-line in this one browser window. Why do they need an external hyperlink for this questionnaire? Who knows. I click on the link, and it tells me I need to allow pop-ups from their site to view the questionnaire. So I allow pop-ups, just from the one site, which Firefox makes somewhat simple. A pop-up appears, from a different host, and it again tells me that I can't proceed any farther without enabling pop-ups. So, what the heck, I enable pop-ups from the new host. Finally, after a quick series of windows appears and disappears on my screen, a page appears with a big red stop sign telling me that access is denied.

Seriously. Some of the most prosperous companies in America have websites that are literally so poorly-designed that won't let me apply for jobs. How do they find employees? How do they stay in business?

[Spud]

IT IS A TEST.

[JonPorobil]

How in the hell do these people find employees?

I can't speak for anyone else, but I go down to the local construction supplier and yell, trabajo!

¿Si, trabajo?

[JonPorobil]

IT IS A TEST.

I feel that way a lot, too, but this is ridiculous. And it's not just one site, either. It's every single place I apply at. About nineteen out of every twenty applications I've put in have been via e-mail on Craigslist, because the major corporations' web applets are cumbersome at best, and most of the time completely unusable.

I've been using computers all my life, but I just cannot figure out how to access certain mandatory portions of the applications (nor, in the case of one employer, how to access any part of the application at all).

Spud, I know you're not currently seeking employment, but just for kicks, find a couple of major corporations, go to their websites, and click on "Careers." You're in web design; you tell me if you find a single major company with a functional job search and application process.

[fluffy]

When I was between jobs in NYC I'd check Craigslist for various things, and at the time I was feeling burnt out on software engineering so I looked at things like music production, video editing, etc. Pretty much all of the listings which didn't require 10+ years of industry experience were for unpaid internships and "production assistants" - they had extremely high unreasonable demands for things but offered absolutely no pay. I guess they have this notion that people are so desperate to "make it big" in their industry that they'll work for free.

Oh and then there's when I was in Seattle and thinking of leaving Amazon, I applied for a job at a small local games company to work on an MMORPG. First off, they scheduled all my interviews with the ecommerce division doing PHP gruntwork (apparently they didn't read my cover letter or resume and just saw that I knew php and worked at Amazon and assumed). When I got the interview reassigned to the MMO team, the person in charge of the project didn't want to hire me because I hadn't written a shipping MMO before and he really wanted to hire "someone who had worked on Everquest." I described all of the design ideas I'd had for MMOs (since I'd been working on one for many years on the side in grad school) and since they weren't exactly how he assumed an MMO (which he'd had no experience developing at all) should be, he didn't seem terribly impressed with my skills. Then their senior VP of software engineering asked me some ridiculous questions which had nothing to do with the job domain and weren't particularly well-considered, and refused to do any sort of iterative clarification of the problem domains and I got the impression he just wanted to seem smarter than everyone else on the planet, so I didn't even bother to follow up with them to find out if I'd even gotten an offer (they also never formally rejected me).

(Also their intended design for the MMORPG would have had no interpersonal interaction and not much in the way of gaming either, which made the conversation with the team lead even funnier in retrospect.)

[Spud]

Well, Jon.

I went to callison.com, an architectural firm with offices in Seattle, L.A., N.Y., Dallas, London, Mexico City, and Shanghai. Under Careers, it let me search for job openings. I found an opening for a receptionist in New York. I was able to download a job application, which I was asked to send back with up to 10Mb of supporting documentation. Not too shabby.

I next went to harvard.org, perhaps you know them. Similarly, I was able to seek for a position, download an application, and submit the application and resume as a .doc, .docx, or .rtf document, or to cut and paste it into a form. There was also a specific form for uploading the completed application. I felt good about it.

Finally, I went to walmart.com, found the hiring center without too much trouble, decided that the logistics center was the best bet, navigated through four disclosures that I had to agree to before they would let me in, signed up for an account which included creating no less than five secret questions in case I ever lost my job application login, entered my social security number TWICE, created a PIN, answered questions about gender, race, agreed to confirm my identity if hired, and then was allowed to search through a pretty well organized database of job openings. Once I found one, I couldn't get any further without entering in ALL my personal and contact information, so I gave up, relatively satisfied that the process was working, although a bit cumbersome in terms of just getting in to look around.

Hmmm. Not finding what you found.

[fluffy]

And similarly, the various places I've applied for jobs at either just take a resume via email (which is all that ends up happening to them anyway) or have a pretty basic submission form. I've come across the horrific bullshit you're complaining about but generally if a company is that horrible, I just apply somewhere else since clearly they don't want to hire me anyway.

[jack]

here's a couple hot prospects for you generic......

http://austin.craigslist.org/adg/968065005.html

http://austin.craigslist.org/adg/967752504.html

[Spud]

When applying to Graduate Schools, I refused to apply the Berkeley because their form was just too damned long, and to Yale, because they wanted a picture with the application.

[Caravan Ray]

Hmmm. Not finding what you found.

I was in the job market a few months ago. Even in the sleepy backwaters of rural New Zealand - about 90% of companies and government departments I contacted had reasonably functioning 'positions vacant' links on their websites. The dodgy ones were few.

[roymond]

My company's and Disney's work very well. FedEx and Dominos look pretty capable, but I didn't actually apply to FedEx or Dominos. Plus, Monster, CareerBuilders, HotJobs all work quite well.

I know it can be like pulling teeth to get your resume in front of someone, but the best way is from inside. I got a great job at Time, Inc. after working as a temp. When temping, you tend to work in many different places for short periods of time, which is cool since you get to know what the place is like before applying for a real job. Once inside people got to know you, then opportunities appear. Well, if all goes well. But you might think about getting hooked up with a reputable temp agency.

[fluffy]

What Roymond said.

Also, try a temp/staffing agency. Robert Half Technology for example. They're who I worked through between graduating and getting on an actual career path, and I think it helped a lot.

[edit] Didn't notice that Roymond ended with the "try a temp agency" angle too. Oops. Anyway RHT is reputable and they have branches like everywhere.

[JonPorobil]

I'm wondering if it's something about me, or just bad luck. I've worked with a couple of temp agencies already, and for some reason, they never seem interested in offering me second assignments. The one that just ended scheduled interviews for me for two other positions with the same company, but never even appeared to try to find a temp position for me at any other company. They let my entire team go all at once and never asked if we were interested in other positions, despite most of us asking repeatedly what was going to happen when the project ended. They just avoided the questions. Then we found a listing for our positions on Craigslist, and we decided that if they were more interested in finding new blood there than they were in keeping the people who'd already proven themselves, perhaps moving on wouldn't be such a bad thing.

Still.

Spud: for me, the problems usually start around the time I start entering personal information, which I can see you never did. For me, either it doesn't take, or it redirects me to some other site that wants the same information again, and, more often than not, sends me on an infinite loop.

I applied for retail positions at several reputable chains, only to realize that the application never let me choose which location had the opening, which (aside from the obvious logistical difficulty) made it difficult to make follow-up calls. In one instance, I got all the way through a particularly long and frustrating one, only to follow-up with a phone call a week later and be told that there was never any opening to begin with. These problems I had way back during the summer.

So I've pretty much given up on online applications. E-mailing resumes. Yay.

[JonPorobil]

On a lighter note:

Also, one employer whom I'd contacted through CL sent me a response around five in the morning inviting me to a group interview session that same day. I didn't get the e-mail until the interview session was already over. Good riddance.

The same thing happened to me before I moved, only the notice was sent by snail-mail for an interview a thousand miles away, which I had already missed by the time the notice got to me. That potential employer was the IRS. I don't suppose anyone should be surprised about that. The IRS continues to send me notices about seasonal and temp openings they have, even though they've notified me that missing that interview effectively blacklisted me.

[Caravan Ray]

What are you actually looking for Jon?

Have you got qualifications or experience?

[JonPorobil]

What are you actually looking for Jon?

Have you got qualifications or experience?

I've got a B.A. in English, so none to speak of. I'll be the first to admit that this isn't making my task any easier.

[jack]

well if you think you have no skills or qualifications, others will surely see you the same way.

if you have an english degree, you can probably write well. and spell. and make complete sentences. and understand syntax. And maybe even Capitalize. and if you can do this, you can temp. because roy's advice is the best advice.

my first temp job was working for genentech doing technical publishing (proofing and editing technical documents), where i learned alot over 2 years and it opened up the doors to get me where i am now.