Aren't employers supposed to be a little interested?

The BBQ Pit
1

Numbers-wise, we’re in a very good job market. And I can see it. There are ltos of new jobs being advertised and so on. I get called back for interviews.

However.

I am pissed.

I don’t have a job yet. OK. Not my choice, but fine. I had to turn down one cold-calling position, because it’s just wasn’t going to work. I can live with the consequences.

But that was the only place which even gave the remotest, slightest, meagerest interest in me. How many times have I been waiting forlornly for a promioed - Nay! - oathbound - callback, only to make one myself at the last minute. And thence to find that, yes, I was invited back for an interview. They’re doing it tommorow.

Errr… aren’t you supposed to, y’know, call me back when you promise it? Is this the behavior I should expect from “professional” outfits. When you promised me I’d know in a week, then tell me after that week that it will be two more weeks, what happened? Did your workload really just increase 300%?

When you advertised in the paper, and I came down, why did you suddenly reveal a month later that, in fact, there really wasn’t any such position? What kind of twisted jest is this? Were you just kidding? Why would you pay for an ad if you didn’t want anyone?

2

Sorry I don’t have any constructive advice, but I just wanted to say I loved the way you put that. I hope you’re looking to do something related to writing.

3

Hah! I laugh the bitter laugh of recognition. This has happened to me more than once. I still don’t understand it.
Here’s something else to chew on – the HR people you talk to the most , unless you’re looking at a small company, won’t have anything to do with your future job. You may never see them again. Talk to your co-workers after you get the job and ask them about what they heard of you before you were hired. They’ll answer:

1.) Nothing
2.) Nothing except when I interviewed you
3.) Something irrelevant or incorrect.

They probably won’t have seen your resume. Even if they were desperate for someone to fill your position.

It’s a wonder to me how people get hired.

4

I actually am a writer. And I am working on a no-quite-fantasy fiction novel. It has fantastic elements, but are limited to things like crazy prophets with (real? made-up? insane?) visions of the future, men with incredibly potent charisma, and so on. Something like The 13th Warrior, where there’s just enough room to make you wonder…

At the moment, I’m looking at jobs in tech, mostly. I find that jobs involved with serious writing are hard to come by. No one gives a second glance at me if I’m more than 10 miles away. I could move, but not until after I get a job. And Knoxville is not a big publishing city.

5

I think EEO laws require them to post the job publicly even if they’re hiring in-house. It’s a pro forma thing, kinda like how the NFL has to interview a black coach even if everybody in the world already knows who they really want.

6

The one I just loved–the call to tell me that I was a wonderful person, but they hired someone internally. If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have bothered to drive all the way to the interview–I’d have let them arrange the phone interview.

My next interview is with someone who failed to provide me with a phone number when he left a message on the answering machine asking me to call him back–Google found it, but the phone number had not been included in the original job listing. Plus, the guy did NOT want to give me a street address for the interview–the job listing only had a PO box.

But the phone interview I decided I didn’t want to turn into a job? Turned into an site visit where they pay for the travel expenses. (Note: they still haven’t told me that they haven’t hired me, but enough time has passed I think that is a safe assumption.)

7

smiling bandit, I’m a writer too, and I haven’t even been able to hold a simple part-time gig in two years.

I’m an Army veteran with four years experience writing for a newspaper and currently working on a degree, and I can’t even get an interview to tend the counter at CVS.

I’ve sent dozens of e-mails and made scores of calls and yet the only call-back I’ve gotten was to do morning paper delivery, something I found my bad back can’t handle anyway.

I’ve held two part-time positions for only a few months each before being laid off - in two years.

I’m a reletively young guy with a family and a mortgage and I feel like it’s the Great Depression.
Anyway, yeah, I feel where you are coming from.

8

My least favorite interview was a few years ago. The idiot told me they’d already hired someone but in the meantime they were just “seeing what’s out there!”

Gee thanks asshole. :rolleyes: Because of course I have nothing better to do with my time than put on a pair of panty hose and my best suit in 100 degree August heat. The 40 minute bus ride and hour spent waiting for you to come out of your office was also another great perk.

I so feel your pain. I hope you get a good job soon.

9

My (former, now retired) boss used to schedule interviews when his schedule got light. He really wasn’t much interested in hiring, but it helped to pass the time. He once scheduled an appointment with a guy flying up from Florida because his work experience was interesting, and my boss wanted to hear about his previous employer. There were no positions open. I did question him on that one, and he said that the guy told him he would be in town anyway. :rolleyes: We all say something like that to get our foot in the door. I just wanted to give him a dopeslap. I don’t think he had any idea of the importance of an interview to someone who really needs the job.

10

Part of this is, as Airman Doors said, legal ass-covering. But I’ve also seen cases where the company is doing great, hiring at full speed, and then wham – budget cuts and retrenchment. The ad is already paid for, so it gets run anyway. And I think for bigger companies, they pay for ads by the year. I worked for a place where they were actually laying off, but ads continued to appear in the paper that suggested they were hiring. Do they care? No, they do not care.

11

Yep, we wasted three months interviewing, doing second interviews, writing an offer letter - and wham! “we’ve decided that you don’t really need that headcount.”

It was no more fun for us (who now all had to take on the workload) than it was for the poor suckers we interviewed.

12

I have been a victim of the made up job as well. I have also been told I was interviewing for one position and then found out it is a different one when I got there. Last summer, I supposedly had a great job. “You are perfect. We have been looking forever and it is just a matter of paperwork” they said. They strung me along for two weeks and then stopped responding to not only my calls but the recruiting agency that sent me to the interview.

My only luck has been with people that acted fast. I got my last two jobs with less than a one hour interview each and an offer later that day.

13

Weeeeeell, the story I got from the job that wasn’t simply came to: the manager ran the ad. He didn’t actually consult with the department in question, so the department manager didn’t even know if she could hire me or not.

But yeah, it’s irritating.

14

My experience with jobs from the classifieds has been poor at best. Two of the jobs I was interested in, it turns out, never take their ads out of the paper due to turnover rates.

The one had me go to a brief “you sound perfect for the job” interview, and then a group orientation a week later. Once we all found out that we would not be “managing a sales force in the cleaning products industry” but rather selling Kirby vacuums door to door, most of us left.

The other job was misrepresented from the start, and turned out to be commission only door to door sales. :mad: I tried to quit numerous times. Each time I did, the manager would come to my house and sweet talk me into going back out. It got to the point that I could not pay rent, so I told him to go fuck himself, because I was going to have to find a way to pay the rent within the week. He put cash in my hand (more than enough for rent) and said “just pay me back once sales start picking back up”. Now you owe me, and can’t quit scenario. Well, I did.

Uh, yeah, lots of newspaper ads are for companies that suck.

15

bandit, here’s an excellent article by someone in a very similar position to you (a writer who is seeking a half-decent professional salary in the US).

Barbara Ehrenreich looks for a “good” job.

After nearly a year of essentially full time work looking for employment involving 200 applications, neither she nor the vast majority of the highly qualified fellow jobseekers she met had that “good” job, nor anything even approaching it. This article geniunely opened my eyes to how cliquey and exclusive middle-income employment has become in the US. I know it might be scary reading, but I hope it helps you develop a strategy to crack through the absurdly disconnected hiring process.

16

I’m job hunting right now. It is damn frustrating.

Every so often, one of the local Clear Channel stations airs a help-wanted ad to recruit people for a Saturday afternoon airshift. That, technically, doesn’t exist. CC runs these to solicit resumes for its EEO file.

I know this, of course, and I don’t bother sending a resume and aircheck. My asshole father-in-law, OTOH, tells me about these ads, thinks this station is the bee’s knees and wouldn’t it be swell if I could work there as a DJ? They could watch the kidlet while I work on Saturday afternoons and all. It really took a long time to make him understand that radio stations don’t air legitimate “help wanted” ads for DJs, and like the civil service for whom he works, radio and TV stations have EEO requirements.

I don’t bother to talk to him about my job search anymore. I was spending too much money on Zantac. :wally

Robin

17

Man, with GE in control, hiring has gotten weird for us. After interviews we have to call all the folks who didn’t get the job back and let them know that we went with someone else. What’s that? A great and curtious idea you say? A way to let folks know to keep on looking? Well sure, but we have to make these calls before we call the person we chose. Two positions ago, they turned us down. Do you know what an ass my coworker sounds like calling someone we turned down to see if they want the job because our first choice passed? We had to do a whole new set of interviews.

I’ll bet some yahoo is beaming over his or her great contribution to the end less bureaucracy. I swear, if the folks doing the work were as disconnected as management, heads would roll.

18

I applied for a tenure track teaching position a three years ago . . . Got a rejection letter two weeks after the submission deadline. Hmmm . . .

Then I got an email from them, telling me that they had a one-year position opening up that they very much hoped I would apply for. And there was the possibility that this would result in a tenure-track appointment. Uh, flattering, but I told them that I was not interested in relocating across the country, with my husband, for a one-year position. But, they protested, this position is a “good chance” of leading to a “more permanent position.”

Look bastards, if you’re interested in me, I have only two words for you: tenure track. That’s the job I applied for, because, curiously enough, that’s the job I want. Not to pack up my life and move, just to get dicked around for a year and then hear that the trial period is up and they’ve decided that I don’t have that certain je ne sais quoi, and I have to look for another job. I had the luxury of being a part-timer in a department that wanted me back in the fall; I wasn’t going to melt into a puddle because they dangled the possibility of a suck-ass adjunct position under my nose.

I applied for jobs again this year, and I saw they were advertising for another tenure track position. It was one of those “applications will be accepted until the position is filled” ones, and I found it a bit late in the season, so I emailed them to ask if the position was still open. They emailed me back twice practically begging me to apply. I don’t know if they recognized my name from their last search, or what. I was a bit skeptical given past experience, but what the hey, it’s a good school, exactly the sort of place I was looking for, and they seemed really interested in me, so I sent off an app. I got the “we have received your application” letter, followed a week later by the “we recieved many excellent applications, but” letter. Asshats.

If they contact me about another one-year position, I swear to Og I will make a photocopy of my letter of appointment from the school that hired me (on the tenure track, naturally), and write them a pleasant letter that asks sweetly why the fuck they think desirable applicants would want to screw around with a one-year adjunct appointment that may or may not get them on the tenure track, and if they realize that their hiring practices are only going to hook sloppy seconds that didn’t get an offer anywhere else and are desperate for work. Great plan, guys.

19

My husband is going through this right now. I’m getting kind of annoyed at one of the places - he had a positive interview on Monday, and had to take some sort of assessment test (it’s for a management position, though). Since my current co-worker had this job previously, she’s been able to talk to them about him and said he has a very good shot. There’s only one other person up for the job, and they’re supposed to make a decision this week.

Well, the manager who interviewed him said that she would call him the next morning by about 10:30 to let him know if he passed the assessment (if he didn’t, the process stops). No call. My friend’s called a couple of times to her friend and he’s not sure what’s going on - he thought they hadn’t gotten the results back, and then he said she probably just got caught up in something else. So ElzaHub called this morning just to see how things are going, got voicemail. Still no response.

If he didn’t pass the assessment test, all they have to do is call and let him know so he can stop wondering (which is what they said they would do). If he did, all they need to do is let him know that they’re just planning their next steps.

This job would be a great opportunity for him, and while I’m hoping he does get it, I’m getting a little tired of waiting. How hard is it to make a quick phone call to one of TWO candidates to let him know what’s going on?

E.

20

On a shiny note, I just witnessed something that I had never experienced in my life…

My wife is looking for work, and got a polite rejection email saying she wasn’t qualified. This is merely improbable, but not unheard of.

That email was sent promptly the next day. :eek: Wow, if I could hug someone through the computer I would, no spinning in the wind wondering.

Now it really gets twilight zoney…

That same email explained with helpful criticism the specific deficencies in her resume that resulted in her rejection. I’m getting dizzy…no air…feel faint…

That same email requested that she call and contact them to discuss other positions in the company that she would qualify for! World spinning…Auntie Em…Auntie Em…

She called back and the HR person talked with her for a half hour and they chatted about all of the other company positions, what she was looking for in a career, etc.

Ultimately, my wife couldn’t take any of the jobs for insane-hellish-commute reasons. However, we think we are going to send flowers to the HR person for actually doing their damned job. :cool: