I agree, it sucks ass. It’s a waste of my time, and a waste of time, energy, and the expectations of decent people.
Why? Because it’s the rules of MassiveCorp™ that I have to follow - and as Gary says, in some cases the immigration service.
nm
From a management experience I have to agree strongly. In my last job I had to advertise in several places, even though I had already decided who I was going to hire. It always seemed unfair to the applicants.
I’m back at the other end of the spectrum. In my town, when looking for lab techs, almost every position is looking for minimum 2 years experience, a BS in chemistry, some assorted non-related technical background, and all for $19,000 a year!
I spent one summer running gels and culturing, and another summer running an AFM and some confocal microscopes (quite a few years ago at this point), and I don’t stand a chance of getting a position in a lab around here.
I work with several homely, homophobic balding men with large breasts, and it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
You’re way off base with this remark. You don’t know me. If I had the power to hire whomever I wanted, there’s no way I’d hire my friends.
And have experience.
Or you could wonder what is wrong with the job and fix that. My guess: you aren’t paying enough.
I say just lie, and hope you get the job. If you’re hired, the manager who approved you will just pass you on to someone else who will have to deal with your deficiencies. Sad, but true.
I work for an engineering firm, and over the last 15 years we have gone from a situation where engineers pass their work to CAD drafters, to that where engineers do their own CAD work. Every engineer we interview will say that they are proficient in CAD, and the managers believe them. And you know what? A year later, they are correct. And usually moving on to another position.
As much as I grit my teeth in saying this: Get your experience however you can.
Could be, but AFAIK we aren’t advertising a salary.
I actually do have entry level positions. But it’s hard to fill them because, while they actually pay pretty well, they’re part-time. The people who usually end up filling them are looking to gain exactly what I can give them, which is work experience, and a foot in the door of the IT industry.
My ex-wife is/was (I don’t know anymore) a technical recruiter…
Let me tell you, this was tough, because I think these people are just about the lowest form of scum, and I was married to one. Anyway…
She worked for both recruiting firms and company HR departments, it was same in both. She’d scan resumes for buzzwords and if those words matched up, the people got interviews. It was that simple. They got the jobs because they marginally passed the bullshit questions on the interview, or rather, the hiring managers simply liked the person. If you’re intelligent and feel you can answer the bullshit interview questions or just be generally likeable, feel free to be a tad dishonest on your resume to get an interview. Companies are certainly less than honest – HR departments, recruiters, and hiring managers WILL OUTRIGHT LIE. Don’t get caught up in the “honesty is the best policy” bullshit, because whether you realize it or not, it is already being used against you. The corporate world is full of dishonest cocksuckers and part of successfully playing the game is being honest to only those close to you (read: loved ones, NOT people with which you work). Learn to speak in half-truths and cliche.
An easy way to lie on a resume without getting caught: Write that you worked for a company that no longer exists. Don’t lie about things that can be easily checked (college degrees – unless it’s graduate level, it doesn’t really matter anyway). Always lie about what you made in your previous job.
Use friends as references. Understand that it is most likely some HR bimbo on the other end who either can’t comprehend your answers or doesn’t care anyway and is just writing down what you say to pass it on to someone who isn’t going to read it anyway.
Do never be intimidated by corporatespeak. The lexicon is pure bullshit and more than half the people don’t understand what they’re spewing.
Hell, you couldn’t even work for Jimi Hendrix unless you were experienced!
Leaper, I don’t know how old you are, but maybe not to old to do what I did while still in school. I worked as an unpaid volunteer in college while I had a job at the local Dairy Queen for bills. The unpaid volunteer job, as a dj and radio commercial producer at the college radio station, was what led directly to my first professional job in Champaign, IL. I moved with that employer to Washington DC, it later led to all kinds of professional gigs for lots of well-known institutions.
Find an internship or a volunteer position. It needs to have a title, and it needs to be something technical, not necessarily very difficult or complex. Now, I didn’t do this as a career strategy. I got hooked up with the college station because I thought it would be fun, and it was, and between spending all hours at the station or getting stoned, it came to pass that I flunked out of college. But I had already hooked up with that first professional gig, and they didn’t care about a degree one way or another.
And I’ve found through my whole life that skills learned on one job or another are a thousand times more useful than most of the education past grade school. So really, get a job learning a relevant skill even if it costs YOU money. And volunteer positions do cost you – think of it as an investment.
I wasn’t hired at a Starbucks because I “did not have enough coffee experience.” I think the real reason was that I was flirting with my interviewer and didn’t notice the ring on her finger >_<;
Everything I’ve heard has been along the lines of “Forget the experience required line: if you think you can do the job and can fudge your resume just enough to get you the interview, go for it.”
Besides, most job openings I see talk about the ‘ideal candidate’ or ‘preferred requirements’. Sure, they’ll probably favor the person with 5 years of experience over the one with 2, but if 2 is the best they can get, they’ll go with that.
Back in the day, I refered to this as: “They want GOD for $25k a year.”
In the IT world, like clockwork as a new software package/programming language/platform came out, some dumbass HR person would start throwing out ads demanding 5 or 10 years of experience with something that didn’t exist last week.
10 years of Windows 2000 experience!
Actually, stations must meet EEO requirements anytime they have a position open, regardless of when their licenses come up for renewal. And if they have a website, they have to post EEO information there to demonstrate that they’ve advertised/posted their positions in media and with organizations so that the positions are made known to female and minority candidates. They also have to keep this information in their Public File subject to review by the FCC and the public at anytime.
For radio stations, it’s not that they mean to pull your chain. It’s that they’re required to.
Yeah, this is all pretty much in line with the hiring philosophy at my old workplace, which appeared to be:
[ul][]Ask for the sun, moon, and stars in the ad; []offer absolute shit for pay; then hire the best thing that shows up.[/ul] Didn’t really matter if what showed up fell way short of the stated “requirements”, what mattered was, it was someone willing to work for the crap wages, which were absolutely fixed.