As I have stated on numerous occasions, I hate the place where I work. Unfortuantely, decent paying jobs are hard to come by here. I did have an interview today at a hospital today for a position in their billing department. The job entails making sure insurance companies pay what they are supposed to when they are supposed to. While I have no specific experience in that field, I have the ability to quickly absorb information and adapt myself to most any task. This particular job pays less than my current job (by about $2/hr), but I am willing to make the sacrifice. There is potential to advance in this place where the place I’m at now would require someone’s death for me to move in any direction (and believe me, as cruel as it sounds, the ones who would have to die would not be missed). I have a friend who works at the hospital (which is how I heard about the job) tells me that the “no experience” aspect is what’s holding me back.
If they hire me, they will be able to do so at the lowest pay level and have to wait a few weeks for to acclimate, while if they hire an experienced person, they will, in all likelyhood, have to pay that person a much higher salary based on that experience and would, possibly, have to train that person in their particular system.
The hospital also prefers to hire from within. once you’re in, everything’s fine. Getting in, however, is apparently no easy task, experienced or not.
I should know something by the end of the week. If I don’t get the job, I’ll get the Postcard of Doom informing me that, while they appreciate my interest, I do not meet their requirements at this time.
Man, do I feel your pain! I have been looking for a job for more than a year. Between an economy that has been heading south for the last two years, and I working in a field where there are less than 1000 people doing what I do it seems like an impossible task.
I loathe my job. A first in my life, and the fact that it has been so difficult for me to find a job when I know I am qualified is not helping my self-esteem.
I know the feeling as well. Theres a medical branch here that I have completely gave up on because they prefer to “recycle” employees instead of hiring new people. Not to mention the common practice to hire there relatives first.
I hope this advice will be of value, and it assumes a couple of things. That you’re smart and fast on the uptake. In which case: lie. You would be simply amazed how few HR departments actually check up on shit. I’m sort of a low-level type geek and the number of times I’ve lied my way into shit is simply amazing. Mostly it isn’t that big a lie, usually it involves experience with software I’ve never heard of.
Lie your way in, hit the ground running. You get caught, you grin sheepishly and take it. No hurt, no foul. You don’t, you get the job, you do the sterling sort of job we Dopers are known for, and you’re cool as a moose.
Maybe this kind of thing ain’t for you. Myself, all my ethics are entirely reserved for people. Machines, corporations and governments are fair game. Got for it. Lie.
As CrazyCatLady has been frantically looking for a job ever since we moved to Greensboro (anyone out there know of any job openings in Greensboro?), I have been shocked by the specificity of required degrees and experience.
A job shoveling goat shit into compost barrels requires three years’ experience in shoveling goat shit into compost barrels. (Not horse, not sheep, not piles, but goat shit into compost barrels.) A job selling big puffy hands at hockey games requries a master’s degree in Big Puffy Hand Sales, with an emphasis in Hockey Games. (Your emphasis was in Basketball Games, you say? Don’t waste our time!)
Is on the job training a foreign concept these days?
Don’t so much lie as creatively enhance your workplace experience. Thus a task like adding up the small change could become “reconciling and balancing accounts”.
I would also never advise anyone to lie. But people I know and respect (oh, and they also get jobs) say that it is absolutely necessary to lie in order to get a job these days.
Why? I don’t know. Globalization? Enron? Hypercompetition? Original sin? The Golf Channel?
Yeah, thats what I really meant! “Creative enhancement”. Yeah, thats it, sorry if I confused you. What you want is to be misoverestimated. “Creative enhancement” works! All the way to the Oval Office, in some cirumstances.
IMHO elucidator, FranticMad, leechbabe, and lucwarm posts should all have a giant YMMV in them.
Over the years, I have seen several cases of “resume enhancement” blow up right in the applicant’s face.
When I got my present job they hired another guy the same day. A couple of days after I started I asked when he was starting. My boss told me that there was a problem with his degree from UCLA, it seems that UCLA had never heard of him. :smack:
Funny thing is that companys don’t have much of a sense of humor when it comes to things like this, particulary if the position has anything to do with money.
The OP doesn’t say how old he is, but I have been in the old “no experience, no job” place myself.
Ways to get experience. Volunteer. Yes, you get to put it on your resume even if you don’t get paid, or paid much.
Part-time it. See if you can find something in your area in which the company is NOT looking for a full time person.
See if you can expand your knowledge in the company in which you work now.
I knew a bit about computers, when my then boss said to me “defrag?? What’s defrag???” when I asked, referrring to some “boggy” computers, when the last time they’d been defragged, I suddenly found myself in a position to say “hey? need help? I can spare some time doing THIS position too”.
Small, just getting started companies are GREAT places to “wear a lot of hats” and use your full potential.
Sure, Rick, nobody’s talking fool proof. Shit happens. What are they gonna do to you, scowl? Tell your Mom? The race is not always to the swift, nor is victory always to the cunning. But that’s the way to bet.
But keep something in mind here. I’m assuming, just as he says, that he wants the job and can do the job if he can only get the fershlugginer job. On balance, the karma here is pretty close to neutral. Now, if he couldn’t do it, I’d say forget it, it ain’t worth it.
Funny, I thought you obtained experience by first accepting a position for $.23/hr as third assistant to the toilet plunger, and demonstrating talent, a good work ethic, and patience while waiting for the right moment. [Gratification, Instant] is not the file in which most success stories are found.
Opportunity is missed by most people, because it is dressed in overalls, and looks like work. -Thomas Edison
Funny, I thought you obtained experience by first accepting a position for $.23/hr as third assistant to the toilet plunger, and demonstrating talent, a good work ethic, and patience while waiting for the right moment. [Gratification, Instant] is not the file in which most success stories are found.
Opportunity is missed by most people, because it is dressed in overalls, and looks like work. -Thomas Edison
Or you can get a job working for .23/hour as assistant to the toilet plunger and slave away for years while everyone around you gets promoted not because of their talent or work ethic but because they spend their time kissing the manager’s ass while you do all the work.
In every place I’ve worked, I’ve ended up doing a LOT more than I was hired for. I have a pretty good memory for small details. Volumes of trivial information stick in my brain wether I want them to or not. I’m not one to say “that’s not my job” unless I’m physically or mentally unable to do it.
Unfortunately, companies don’t care about this in interviews. Which is strange since that’s what they are really after in the first place. There needs to be a complete overhaul of the hiring process, IMHO.
As my luck would have it, the supervisor in my last job (he was a power hungry jerk) is no longer with that company. Even better, the job before that, the business has shut down since then and both supervisors are dead. Really hard to get a good reference from the dead, they never return your calls. Hmmmmm, I wonder what John Edwards is doing?
Be careful about inflating your job skills in an interview or on your resume. I manage a desktop publishing department. We work in PageMaker (you can debate the wiseness or stupidity of that decision elsewhere.) I ask all candidates if they know PageMaker. I don’t even interview them unless it’s on their resume.
They all say they know it.
After the interview, I take them out to the cube farm, sit them down in front of a Mac and give them a page from one of our books. “Open the file indicated in the folder on your desktop. All the design elements and text are there. Duplicate the layout.”
If they don’t really know PageMaker, I’ll know it. And they won’t get the job. Even if the candidates could BS their way through it and I hired them – I still have 90 days “adjustment period” in which to fire them for lying, ahem, misrepresenting themselves.
If you get caught, it’s fraud. And it’s against the law. If you don’t – way to work the system. Kudos to you for lying and scheming to make your way to the top. :rolleyes:
Anyone who lies on a resume and gets caught deserves what they get. Why lie about something that could be easily checked? I think employers should go a little deeper in a person’s qualifications. They’ll find that a lot of people can be greater assets than resumes can indicate.
I have to agree with many people here, including the people who say to lie, embellish, etc.
However, do not lie (much) if you are leaving a job to go to another one. If you say you have a skill, then you need to know the basics of it. If you are caught, you can be fired and then you are out of a job. However, if you are currently unemployed…
About lies/embellishments…Never manufacture degrees or say you know something about something you’ve never seen before. However, if you’ve used a software package a little and they ask if you know it well…sure you do! If hired, make damn sure you spend some hours becoming familiar with it before your first day!
Young people ask how do you get a job with no experience and how do you get experience without a job?
The answer is something like this. Almost all entry level jobs are shit. Low pay, little possibility of promotion. You try for a ‘real’ job and take the crappy one because you have to. Learn the skills and then look around for a better one in 2-3 years.
There will be some aspects on the job you do that will be very ‘spinable’ (embellish-able). When you interview for newer jobs, concentrate on those topics. When I left teaching, I took a position as a lower level data scrubber. However, about 1% of my job involved statistics. When applying/interviewing for a new job, what did I talk about? I spent 90%+ of my time talking about that 1% of what I did. Combined with my Math degrees and the fact that I was actually studying this stuff in my spare time, it easily holds up to scrutiny. Eventually, you get a ‘real’ job for real pay and real status. It still goes on because I could (and will) do the same thing in the future by applying for positions in which it is even more stat intensive and what will I concentrate on? The higher level stats I do in my current position…and I’ve been studying in my spare time.
How to get in/advance? Take a job in the field, study up on what the field values and spin, spin, spin…However, this probably only works if you have a related degree to give you weight.
