[TriLUG] OT: Job and request for help!

[John Vaughters via TriLUG]

Steve T,
In this email and previous email I have to strongly agree with you. The job boards are EXTREMELY frustrating and generally lead to disappointing emails. Job postings that look exactly the same for the same company are often opened and closed each with the same DENIED email. I once had an inside contact to a multi-national company that will go unnamed. They would post and close positions for the same job multiple times due to various reasons, of which much was regulation, company policies and just plain old oops mistakes. Each one of those postings while not even a valid posting came with a DENIED email AND they had not even hired anyone yet. So yes my personal experience is this method: 

foreach job ad
    send resume
    if called for interview
        research the company
        go to interview
I would play the numbers game. However, the next worst part of job boards is the impersonal nature of the entire situation. You never meet anyone, you mostly only get phone interviews and then second phone interviews, and then hopefully a meeting with a person eventually. During the last 2009 job crusher, I was in this game and it was a horrendous process leading to the exact attitude you described. On top of that I barely got person to person interviews, which is where I shine. Almost all of my person to person interviews came through networking contacts. This leads me to your next point. That both parties of the hiring process will be better off with networking hiring methods. This is why the best recruiters that I have known ask to meet with you before they even start considering you for jobs. The recruiters that play the numbers game may do alright, but they risk reputation by not providing good candidates. 
Having said all that to say this. Both sides of hiring process should Network, Network, Network. Despite trying everything I could on the Job boards, Pretty much every job I ever got, came from someone finding me through networking, linked-in and once upon a time Monster. And even farther back in the day, an actual job fair.
The message being to work hard for the face to face meeting. This is why so many companies these days rely on recruiters to find qualified candidates. And for company policy or regulation/lawsuit protection companies often use a job board to say they did their due diligence on job fairness practices and the job board makes this effort low cost.
And just as a general statement, nothing you said in the previous emails made me object. I think you are pretty much spot on in your assessment and solution.
John Vaughters

    On Sunday, February 28, 2016 2:44 PM, Steve Litt via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:
 

 On Sat, 27 Feb 2016 23:16:55 -0500
"Lance A. Brown via TriLUG" <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:

> Steve Litt via TriLUG wrote on 2/27/2016 3:10 PM:
> > On Sat, 27 Feb 2016 12:27:24 -0500
> > "Paul G. Szabady via TriLUG" <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:
> >  
> >> * Include link(s) to benefits information so that applicants can 
> >> estimate total compensation package, not just base salary.
> >> I may be naive, but this is something I would expect the applicant
> >> to do in their investigation of the position and it's entity.  
> > 
> > Reread the preceding two sentences, and think about what you're
> > really saying.
> > 
> > There are two kinds of technologists: The employed and the
> > unemployed. Employed technologists are too busy, and fielding too
> > many offers as it is. The last thing they'll spend time on is
> > jumping through hoops that could have been replaced by a few links.
> > So the employed technologists skip over your posting.  
> 
> Bullpucky.
> 
> Speaking anecdotally, if I were in NC (I'm not), working (I am), and
> interested in this position (maybe, if I were in NC), I'd take the
> time to track down the information I needed to make an informed
> decision about the position before/during the application process.

In the preceding sentence, the distinction is in "before/during".
During? Certainly. You don't want to find out, in week 3 of the job,
that you're working for a death march slavedriver.

But before? Consider these two algorithms, assuming 90% of all
responses to job ads result in nothing at all, and 10% result in an
interview:

foreach job ad
    research the company
    modify resume
    send resume
    if called for interview
        go to interview

foreach job ad
    send resume
    if called for interview
        research the company
        go to interview

There's also a matter of degree when it comes to researching a company.
To me, you need to spend about 5 hours, including some time talking to
people who work there.

An alternate route would be to spend 5 minutes on the company's website
finding what they do and what buzzwords they use, and then 5 minutes
inserting their buzzwords into the resume. I'd imagine that might be an
excellent use of 10 minutes because it might double your interviews per
resume sent.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
February 2016 featured book: The Key to Everyday Excellence
http://www.troubleshooters.com/key
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