I’m not surprised by the length as the job hunting process is so infuriating.
Getting emails and LinkedIn messages from recruiters about jobs, responding, then they never respond. Like, I didn’t ask you to reach out to me in the first place.
Interviewers rescheduling interviews at the last minute or blowing them off.
Having your interview scheduled by a 'bot.
Interviews that seem to go really well, but then you never hear back.
Being told you are “still in the pipeline” weeks and months after never hearing back.
Endless rounds of phone interviews before you even meet someone face to face.
Being asked to study videos and pages upon pages of corporate indoctrination material.
-“Take home” technical tests
Companies just “ghosting” you midway through the process.
Now I have to fly to another state to interview for a job in my own city.
Like why does every corporate job now feel like I’m applying for the astronaut program?
You’re absolutely right, and I’m sure it’s the best path for him.
It’s just that the first path has more uncertainty to it, and as an overprotective parent, I would prefer more certainty for him. However, it’s his life and he has to live it, not me. I just need to learn to let him go and live his life.
[my bold] Holy crap, msmith! It looks like you managed to get whacked by the disaster hit list in your part of the world, but your employer getting blown up by terrorists is off the hook. I did not know that about you. All I can say is that if you’ve done well after all of that, you ought to be resilient enough for just about anything. Good luck!
msmith537, totally agree with your list. I’m in a similar position. Getting plenty of recruiter attention, steady stream of looooong interviews, then nothing. I spent over 5 hours interviewing for a very mid level job I was highly qualified for. Didn’t get the job. They took so long telling me, though, that I assumed I’d been ghosted.
Yeah, there’s also been a couple of blackouts, a manhole cover explosion, a few bomb scares, that truck terrorist a year or so ago who decided to drive down basically the same path I would walk to work and the one time I worked from home because the NJ PATH train derailed and crashed through the station. I can also see where the “Miracle on the Hudson” flight crash landed from my apartment and I ride those NYWaterway boats all the time. Most of that stuff didn’t have a direct effect on the company I worked at though.
Isn’t at least part of the difficulty now the years of career and salary advancement that you’re now trying to match?
It’s generally harder and longer to match with jobs the higher up you get in pay and responsibility - you could probably get entry level data science jobs (of which openings are legion and appetites insatiable on either coast) just throwing around some of the terms you’ve thrown around here in this thread, but that would probably be less responsibility and pay than you’re looking for.
This is, I suppose, the opposite of the problem facing the long-vanished OP, but still a source of a “tough” job market for some folk. I wish you the best on your search, and hope it ends soon and well.
(even if that’s coming from yet another “second rate school” hiring manager in the thread
“Entry level”? Then I’d have to actually DO the work!
I’m actually trying to figure out what I want to do about this take home test I’m taking for this one consulting firm. I’m only supposed to spend 15 hours on it, but realistically, it would take me a few weeks of getting to a level of Python machine learning programming to actually write the code. I may just send them a polite note thanking them and telling them I think don’t have the technical skills for the role at this time.
This week has actually been pretty good for interviews. Instead of feeling anxious about ever finding a job ever again, I’m actually getting anxious about being forced to take a job that isn’t a perfect fit. Ideally, I want to get to the point where I’m anxious about having to potentially juggle multiple offers!
The hiring process is pretty much broken. Scarface, the best way to get a job is to network, network, network. Seriously. It’s not just what you know but it is also very, very much who you know. The AI scanning resumes does a horrible job of matching. Everyone is overworked so posts for jobs might be inaccurate or out of date. Sometimes, companies with turnover issues just troll with job postings for jobs that don’t exist yet. However, managers do rely on employees to recommend friends and former coworkers for jobs because, face it, you wouldn’t want to work with an idiot so the person you recommend isn’t going to be an idiot, right? So network. Go to job clubs, networking events, and join professional organizations in your area of expertise. Give a presentation and ask for feedback. It helps. Really, it does.
In my experience, HR has been this way for the 30 years that I’ve been in the corporate world. I’ve worked at five different companies (four of them on the Fortune 500), and it’s always been very consistent (and always a pain in the ass):
Low level HR people are nearly always very well-meaning and nice, but frequently not particularly competent, and terrible at managing the nuts and bolts of the hiring process. It’s like they wanted to work in business, but couldn’t make the cut in accounting or marketing or whatever, so they wound up in HR.
Upper-echelon HR people are in the business of mitigating risk to the organization, and too often act as impediments to the organization getting the right people into the right jobs.
In fact, hiring is often where they do put beginning HR folks. And those people cannot tell if the job descriptions they are posting are actually correct for the job. I have turned interviews around and trained the HR interviewer on the job they are interviewing me for. Irritating as hell.
I do that with agents, if I have the time and the mood and they’re willing to listen. Just this morning I had a call from “blahblah agency in London” where the number started by +32 and my phone was saying “oh hey, this is Belgium”: I didn’t figure it was worth my effort to point out that little mismatch. Or that right now a lot of consultants in the EU aren’t interested in signing so much as a paper towel with anybody in London.
That only really works if you “know” someone who works for a company you want to work for and has enough influence to hire you. Like your old boss who changed companies or some more successful friend from business school. Otherwise, you just go into the HR referral system.
The problem is that everyone is now on the “networking” bandwagon, so every career coach and blogger about sales or recruiting nonsense tries to convince everyone that they can get hired by some “hidden job market” if they mine LinkedIn for nth tier connections of various randoms they met at trade shows years ago.
Right. Networking IS a valid job getting technique, but under very limited and specific conditions. I mean, now that I’ve been in the DFW area for 20 years, and been working in the same field for about 15 of that (had grad school and a weird consulting interlude in there), I know enough people who have gone on from previous jobs to new ones, and I now know enough people in management positions or with enough personal influence that networking might actually work if I wanted to switch jobs.
But if you’re like 5 years out of school, and you’ve worked one or two jobs? Your professional connections are going to be both short-term and limited, and social connections aren’t necessarily going to be in the right field anyway. Case in point- early in my career here in DFW, a lot of my social circle was either architects, construction mgmt. people or lawyers. Very few tech people were in my circle.
The vast majority of the jobs I have gotten have been through networking. My car racing club was one source, someone I met in a motorcycle racing club was another. The church I went to as a child allowed me to meet someone else, My cousin was yet another. You never know. And you guys need to know that I’m an introvert, networking isn’t so easy for me. However, networking is a necessity so if you haven’t gotten involved in a hobby where you meet people, or a professional organization with like-minded people, hop to it.
I got my last job through networking. My neighbor, who was an HR guy at the local car factory, happened to have a friend at a tech company who was in HR, and he had worked with a manager who was looking for someone just like me.
I got a fellow Doper a job through someone I knew.
Networks spread far beyond your immediate set of acquaintances, and it is possible to extend your network with a bit of effort, like going to IEEE meetings for instance.
Even though more people are talking about networking, it still works because it takes a bit of effort, and therefore most people don’t bother. Sending out a thousand resumes or posting on job boards on the other hand is pretty simple, so everyone does it.
I’m a state employee. This is my 5th year working for my agency. I am in IT and worked in other positions (mostly private industry) for about 15 years before working here. It’s a mixed bag…
My experience from my previous positions is a big help, I’ve done a LOT of different things in IT before ending up in my current (much more limited) role here. I know how to do things that I’d never learn here, and much of it is relevant in some way. For example, I’m not allowed to even sniff an Exchange server now but I’ve been an Exchange administrator before and I can fast-track a problem to our Exchange team because I can recognize a server issue instead of wasting my time troubleshooting a mail client.
But on the flip side I wish this was my twentieth year here and not my fifth, so I could have more seniority, more into my pension plan, etc. I’m not “old”, I’ll be here more than 20 years before retirement so I’ve got time to develop here. But that extra time would have been nice.
I hear you. I also work at a public agency, and have been here for 11 years. Before that, I worked in private industry (for a mid-sized engineering consulting firm) for 6 years, which was itself after ten years in the Navy.
Anyway, I’m definitely a stronger engineer because of my time working in consulting. Most of the more capable engineers here also worked in consulting early in their careers, and conversely, most of the less capable people have only worked for public agencies. With that said, I would also like to have had more time here contributing to a pension.
There are people here at my agency who started here in their early 20s who are retiring with full pensions in their 50s. They are then young enough to start a second career. On the other hand, for someone starting out now, you never know how things are going to turn out 30+ years in the future – maybe the state goes bankrupt and the pension evaporates…
I’m a firm believer that when you’re being interviewed you’re also interviewing the company and being irritated is a reasonable reaction on your part. I work in HR and I’m rather new at it and while I’m not a recruiter I do occasionally post jobs, interview, and hire people. The problem you’re describing above isn’t an HR problem it’s a company problem. Management, the people who actually run the company, needs to put their foot down and tell HR that all job descriptions need to be approved by the hiring manager. Having an accurate job description saves me time, the hiring manager time, and saves the applicant’s time as well.
Did you at least talk to the hiring manager?
I worked for tech companies, which had the advantage of the HR people not even pretending to know anything about the openings we were hiring for. My experience with HR as a hiring manager (and as an interviewee) was much better than average, and this might be why.
I don’t know about you, but pretty much every manager I knew who needed to hire (myself included) did not look forward to the job. Getting a name of someone who comes recommended by someone you know is a great relief. This doesn’t create openings where there were none before, but it does get you at the head of the line.
