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Unbeknownst to many, the SDMB is actually just an elaborate online application process to be my butler (but just until technology can replace my current monkey butler with a robot monkey butler.
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You need to read and understand the maserati example. By looking for a job you are participating in a market, sodon’t cry to me that green beans are a dollar when you’d rather apply in person (if you get my drift).
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Blah blah blah.
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I would probably hire you as a court jester, but NO BENEFITS!
I would never work for anyone who refers to themselves in the third person on a message board.
I love this. I have my elderly Comcast account, my paid (sorta, it’s off my website) freelancing account, and my moderator account from another forum all forwarded to my gmail account.
Just agreeing/endorsing/adding that your multiple accounts can be from several different sources rather than just from Google mail.
Here is the problem - some people really screw up their resumes and make them hard to follow.
I want the company, the titles you held, the time periods and the accomplishments you achieved. I want those in easy to find places.
I want your actual degrees, not just that you attended a particular school - did you graduate? I also want your major.
I want the best phone, address and email for contact.
If you are under the age of 30, you should be able to get that onto one page. If you are over the age of 40, you are probably hitting two pages of experience now. 3 pages only counts for PhDs or for the attachment of patents or other exhibits.
I don’t use online forms, but I do insist on emailing a resume with a good email. I don’t want it mailed, I don’t want a phone call (cuts into my SDMB surfing time), and I don’t want a FedEx package.
Once you INTERVIEW, you get treated as a human. Prior to that you are a piece (or two) of 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper that we are hoping might represent a human being that we want to share our space with every day. The only way to jump to human status is to come in through one of my employees or through my network.
It sucks, but that is life.
You are being very un-Dude.
Yup. I did my fair share of jobhunting as I arrived on the US’ rosy shores, and the online application system tend to be absolutely appalling. Who’s going to complain? Certainly not those applicants trying to win the favor of a prospective employee.
Reformatting the information in my carefully crafted resume to fit into some HR drone’s preconceived notion of what a network professional’s resume ought to look like gets really tiresome roughly the third time. Particularly when the systems won’t let you cut-and-paste - no, you have to pick between a dozen not-quite-right options in 50 different pull-down menus. (Playing “Hunt the misspellings” was always fun, though. The job descriptions tend to be filled with the sort of grammar that’d get an application tossed. But I digress.) The hit rate was ridiculously low, too, so I judged it a bad use of my time.
E-mailing a resume is no problem at all and I’ve certainly done so at any number of occasions.
Taking a broader view, what people like Rand Rover seem to miss is that the power gap between job hunter and potential employer is huge and understood quite well by both parties. Which is why reasonably polite people, when faced with the task of picking a new employee, do their best to not rub it in. Besides being basically uncouth, it’s counterproductive. The market works both ways. Those who treat jobhunters like crap presort the applicant pool. A company projecting an attitude of “applicants can expect demeaning treatment” is pretty much broadcasting that employees will be treated poorly, too.
And so those job hunters qualified enough to get a job elsewhere will do so. While the Ayn Rand fanboys don’t understand why they don’t get the pick of the crop and have to go through life with their socks sorted by the guy who couldn’t find anything else and who can’t wait to be elsewhere.
That’s kind of what U of C had going. It was a generalized online application system for many/most university jobs. It was a bit of a pain in the ass, but I hardly felt insulted as a human being for going through the system. I figured, hey, they have a standardized application process that works for them, I’m the one who wants the job, the pay is good, the fringe benefits are fine (half off university classes, free classes if it’s related to the job), the people I know who work there like their jobs, who am I to complain?
Now, I totally agree that the company should treat its employees well if it wants good employees. But something like an online employment application doesn’t strike me as being egregious.
Whatever gave you the impression that I don’t fully understand this? Your post gave me the impression that you are a remarkably unintelligent individual.
Well, the pay stinks!
I sure won’t get wound up over that!
C’mon–those had to be said.
I’ll add that I got my first job after college through this very online application system, and that it was a kick-ass job that I loved and only left because I had to move halfway across the country. I was employed the week I graduated.
I’ve since gotten another awesome job via Craigslist (left that one to go back to school), and I just had an interview on Tuesday that came from an online application. I’m having a tough time finding a job right now, but I still think I’ll be employed in a few weeks, all thanks to online apps. (Check back with me though…even RNs are suffering in this economy.)
Yes, they’re a PITA and kind of de-humanizing, but the cream really does rise to the top, and if you’re who they’re looking for, you can and will get the job.
Terrible!
Your posts. You’re arguing that it’s somehow unreasonable to expect non-demeaning treatment in a professional setting, which doesn’t exactly strike me as insightful.
Your opinion is duly noted.
I’ve had mixed results with on-line applications.
On one hand, they’re usually fairly quick to fill out, but on the other hand I’ve had far too many applications for jobs I am most definitely qualified for (Wanted: Assistant Manager with at least 12 months experience working in Electronics Retail) vanish into the ether.
Then again, I got my Assistant Manager’s job online, and they were surprisingly quick about it- I applied on a Tuesday, got a phone call on the Thursday for an interview on Monday and got the “You’re Hired” call on Tuesday.
So I won’t say that on-line applications are a complete waste of time, but I certainly don’t like the formulaic ones that are full of options that don’t quite apply and still want you to attach a copy of your resume, even though you’ve basically typed all the information in your resume into their forms already anyway.
I read the Maserati hypothetical the first time through, and it was a stupid analogy and not worth commenting on. But at your insistence, I went back and read it again.
Nope, no different.
Here’s a more accurate analogy: Our friend Lizard is like the guy who wants to pay 30 grand for a Honda. So he goes to the Honda dealership and sees that they expect Lizard to pay 60 grand for one, because they’re Honda, doesn’t Lizard realize that? And Honda can charge anything they want to for a car, and expect the world to pay it and be happy about it. And you know what? There will be plenty of numbskulls who will pay it. But Lizard decides, I’ve worked too hard for my money to spend 60 grand of it on a Honda. And he walks across the street to the Toyota dealership and pays 30 grand for a car. And the dealership was happy about it.
Dude, I’m the one that introduced the concept of a market in this thread, so of course I realice the market goes both ways. Your post was not some exciting revelation that I hadn’t thought about before.
Also, you suffer from the SDMB low-thinking malady that lots of liberal douches here have. That is, I said something that was not “pro job seeker,” so you decided I was “pro-employer” and reacted accordingly.
A number of us in this thread have taken a reading comprehension stance.
If it makes me a liberal douche to parse a fairly straightforward sentence in the way the poster intended rather than go off on an “entitlement” rant that no one but you have been claiming, well…then just shove me up into a hippy vagina.
The one I’d be most interested in hearing the answer to is: “True or false: my personality is such that I wouldn’t care too much if I forgot to screw in the oil filter beyond a token half-turn and the customer’s oil poured out in a stream while he was on the interstate, frying his engine before he could figure out what was happening.”
I would’ve flunked the Keirsey temper test after that event.
We accept in-person applications at our location. We don’t have any open positions right now, and we don’t post online when we do have open positions. We pull from our hiring pool of applications. I tell people who hand me an application that it is “valid” for 30 days. If they still want me to consider them after 30 days, they just have to call me and tell me they are still interested.
That being said, I just hired 3 people from my hiring pool to replace employees that we had to let go.
I meet great people every day who really need a job. And then I meet people who show up at my location looking like crap, with a half-completed mess of an application and a typo-strewn resume or cover letter. Before they leave my office, I mark on their application whether I was impressed or not.
I have one guy who faxes his resume to me every few months with no cover letter and no application. I would never hire him - because he shows no desire to actually apply for a job, he’s just announcing his existence in the world to me.
However, I’ll also tell you the story about the guy who walked in our office by accident while looking for another company. He was well-groomed - even though he was in jeans, well-spoken, and thought enough to ask if we were hiring. He sat down and filled out the application, was polite not presumptive, and even though we were not technically hiring, my boss and I were impressed enough to hire him on the spot. He’s one of our best employees.
On the other side of the fence - I have been applying for jobs. And I do call after emailing. I will usually wait about a week once the email was sent and just confirm they received my emails and that the attachments went through okay. It’s a short, friendly message on someone’s answering machine. I make sure to spell out my name and give my cell phone, and just ask if they could email me back and let me know if they received it or if I should resend it.
One of the times I called, it was because the interviewer had asked for samples of our work and I was attaching a commercial I had written for radio. I wanted to make sure the 3MB attachment hadn’t clogged up their email. My phone call caused the hiring manager to search through the hundreds of responses and find my email. Then she listened to it and called me back.
Did I get the job? No. But I got an interview back in October. And after the interview, I would email her occassionally in a friendly, non-stalkerish way to just touch base. The result? 2 weeks ago - I got a call from her company. They wanted me to apply for another job because she recommended me. I go for my second interview today (the motivation for me reading this thread - trying to get my game face on.)
So, I think the phone calls can be helpful - if done properly. As for emailing when they ask you to apply online - I will usually only email to ask if the position is still open (usually if I find it on their website, not CL or Monster). Once again, short & friendly. If I get a response back, I will apply online. Because now my name has a better chance of sticking out when they are going through the pile.
Just my 2 cents (and 5,000 keystrokes).
Go get 'em Mel. Good luck.
Thanks!