Your Future Endeavors

No matter how used I get to the incompetence of employers, they still manage to amaze me.  Case in point, I apply to a job, and two days later, the employer messages me asking if I am still interested. Um, yeah . . . I mean I am a pretty awesome job applicant, but reaching out 48 hours later isn't like reaching out two weeks later, the employer should reasonably expect me to be open to the opportunity.  This whole communication is pointless; just set up an interview already. In this case, I replied, and then it was crickets.  It's been over two weeks, and I didn't get a response.  If I were dealing with rational people, then I'd assume perhaps my response got lost in the proverbial shuffle, and I would follow up.  But this is an employer.  As much as they gripe about candidates ghosting them, they do the same.  I've had multiple potential employers say they were going to get back to me, and then you never hear from them again.  Following up tends ...

  I still come across job ads requiring COVID-19 vaccinations.  Apparently, these companies, mostly in healthcare but also other industries, either seldom update their job descriptions, a problem in itself and a red flag that the company is kind of clueless in general, or in 2023, they are actually still caught up in the virus panic of 2020, an even worse sign of a shitty company.  Even if those vaccinations worked to prevent transmission, which they don't--even the companies who make the vaccines know that--, this sort of paternalistic knowing better than the potential employee about her or his health is offensive.  When I see that in an ad (and the only good thing you can say about the ad is that at least don't spring this bullshit on you later so you don't have to waste time applying and whatnot), I know to skip applying for that job.  No thanks, I don't need to risk winning the clottery just to work your stupid job.  It's like the company equivalent of ...

Corporate America continues to be run badly.  If I ran a company and I needed to hire someone, so I could make more money because I'm not hiring someone unless it makes me more money than I will be shelling out for the hire, I would hire someone quickly.  Otherwise, I'm wasting money by leaving a needed position unfilled.  I'm either paying overtime or burning someone else out to cover it in the meantime or I'm just leaving potential revenue on the proverbial table, which may not show up on the accounting books but has a cost in revenue foregone or opportunity cost. Why then do I see garbage like the image posted above on LinkedIn?  I see this all the time.  A company advertises a job.  Presumably, unless they're wasting money paying HR morons to do stuff that doesn't need to be done, they need this position filled.  This position has been open for at least a month.  They keep relisting it once a week or so in order to put it on top of the help wa...

Pundits love to yap about how easy it is to get a job these days. Horseshit! Sure, there are some shit jobs you can work, and you can plug into the gig economy at will and get exploited, but, otherwise, it's as miserable as ever trying to get a job.  The job listings are filled with scammers and companies that want to exploit you.  Assuming you avoid those pitfalls, there is still the employment agency ads, the jobs of which are nonexistent.  What the staffing agency is trying to do is to get you to come in, so you can be added to their candidate database.  So when an employer shows up with a job order, they can pull out a candidate from the database and send her or him over.  Then they write up an ad for the job they already filled and post it. Isn't that illegal though?  Like false advertising? Well, probably, but good luck proving it.  They'd spin the procedure as just making sure they have a backup in case the first candidate craps out. That's a li...

  Look at this picture of geese and tell me what you feel.  On second thought, let's not waste the time of both of us; this exercise, while perhaps fun, will not tell us much, despite what psychologists might claim otherwise.  The hucksters who sell personality assessments to HR morons are just doing the social science version of astrology.  Hell, doing real astrology probably would have as much of a success rate in terms of actually predicting who's a good hire or not ("Hey, you're a Libra!  That's great!  We need one to balance out the team.  We have too many Leos at the moment.").   Unfortunately, expect more of this nonsense, especially as the recession worsens and more people are seeking jobs.  1 job I applied to has 1,545 applicants. How the fuck do you sort through 1,545 applicants?  Well, you use bullshit like personality assessments and whatnot, but you might as well just pick someone randomly.  If he or she looks good...

  The most awkward portion of a job interview is when the candidates is asked why he or she (or these days, they) left a previous position or wants to leave the current position.  The interviewer knows that the last job sucked, but the candidate is not permitted to say anything negative.  One has to dance around the truth saying things such as "It was time for a change", "I was looking for new challenges", "I wanted to grow my skills with a new opportunity", or some other such piffle.  There is no good answer.  Say you left for personal reasons and the interviewer will think you're an alcoholic or drug addict and you won't get the new gig.  Say you left to help a family member and the interviewer will worry the family member will get sick again and you won't get the new gig.  The interviewer is probing for any reason to ax you and make the field narrower, so the decision is easier.  The best policy seems to be to spout some plausible piffle and...

Companies seem to delight in making the job application process as cumbersome as possible.  It should be a simple matter of just sending a resume along, but the larger companies often want you to do free data entry for them (working for free is, of course, always a bad sign) and enter in manually again the information you already uploaded in the form of a resume.  Sometimes, the company computer manages to get the resume material in the right fields, but usually a candidate has to go through this whole annoying process of reentering the information.  Basically, one is doing free data entry, so a human resources drone can have an easier time ignoring you when they search a resume database by keywords. If that weren't bad enough, really awful companies repeat this tiresome tendency across the entire hiring process.  Recently, I had the misfortune to apply at a company that's always hiring (another sign of a bad company) and not only did I have to do the free data entry...

  Companies need a lot of help, so good thing I'm here.  I should probably charge a high consulting fee for this stuff, but I will be satisfied if companies just did less dumb shit. One of the dumbest things companies do is to have their human resources folks waste time doing phone screeners.  I get why HR folks like doing these calls because they need to create work for themselves and justify their otherwise useless jobs, but why companies don't just fucking fire half their HR departments is beyond me.  You don't need to pay money for an HR peon to read people's resumes back at them.  You need someone to read the fucking resumes, pick a few good candidates to interview (if there are too many good candidates to manually pick, then just assign the resumes each a number and use Random.Org to pick a few--or if you like to waste paper and have more fun, print them all out and throw a dart a few times to narrow the field down), invite the chosen candidates in or have...

Let me count the ways I loathe LinkedIn. No, we don't have all day. Today, I log in to look for jobs, and here's what's on my feed:  a guy shilling for his grill company, a therapist advertising her services, a guy shilling for his carpet-cleaning company, a guy trying to get people to invest in his real estate pyramid scheme, some business organization babble bullshit, a guy shilling for his construction company, and I couldn't read any more.  What's most scary is that people I know post this crap. Not only is the feed basically all commercials, but they're boring commercials.  LinkedIn must be the most boring of the social networks.  Admittedly, it's focused on business, but business can still be interesting.  It was more refreshing when the crazed Catholic guy would go on pro-life rants and the crazed business professor would rant about a local business, but it looks like LinkedIn threw all the interesting people out (I doubt those guys would have unfrien...

If one were looking for the proverbial red flag as a job applicant, then a human resources person so desperate to leave that he's advertising his availability to other employers would certainly register as a company to avoid.  I would say maybe he just picked the wrong banner (it should read, "I'm hiring"), but his headline also indicates he's looking.  Given that H.R. folks are usually the thickest and most gung-ho in an organization, this is a bad, bad sign.  If I were the company, I would have fired this guy rather than have him continue to lead job searches, but maybe they're so bad, they can't find anyone to replace him.  Either way, this ad screams avoid.

  Sometimes, as a jobseeker, I wonder if these unicorn candidates even exist.  For example, with this one, if the ideal candidate were a successful large project commercial sales representative", then why would he or she be looking for a new position? Presumably, either ads such as this must work, or the company has no idea what it is doing. My bet, given my experience working in corporate America, is on the latter.