Mr. Pug was laid off almost two months ago. He’s fifty, and here in Silicon Valley, the job situation is pretty grim. I’m helping him in his job search, because I’m good at internet research, and I see many jobs for which he is qualified on Monster.com, Flipdog.com, etc., etc. Now, I know that the competition is tough, but if they don’t call him for a position which fits him to a T, why does the job listing still appear week after week? Are they that picky? Why continue to list a job if you’re not interested in hiring?! It costs money to do so, after all. Aaaaargh!
I am led to believe that some companies post job vacancies as means of testing the job market. Reviewing job applications and resumes can tell you[ul][li]what the size of the talent pool is for the kind of job you advertised,[]what kind of salaries people applying for that kind of job expect, and[]whether any of your people are looking for other jobs.[/ul][/li]IANAPersonnel Administrator, though, and this is just info I learned from my management courses in grad school and from various discussions with the personnel administrator where I worked a while back. He used to tell me things like how unethical interviewers can get you to say things about yourself that they’re not supposed to ask without actually asking the questions they’re not supposed to ask.
What you have to remember is the the human resources (HR) people who put in the job listing may not be working on the same time frame as you. Quite often, they run the ad for weeks because they want to collect a pool of resumes before they respond to anyone so they can see what available applicants are out there. Maybe Mr. Pug fits 90% of the qualifications, but if they run it another week, someone with 95% of the qualifications who would take the job at a lower salary will show up in the resume pile. Maybe not, but they figure they can wait an extra week or two and chance it.
The other thing is that if he is applying to any kind of large company, priorities change and projects change from week to week. When I was at SAIC, which is a 35,000 employee consulting company down here in San Diego, we found our HR department so inept because they were getting swamped with requests that we did our own job searching. It took them months to even find candidates for an open position, whereas we could find them right away. Also, if it is anything technical, keep in mind that your typical high school graduate HR person is going to have no clue what half the technical terms mean which will greatly slow them down in finding good people.
I’ve learned from that experience, and now when I apply for a job, unless it is a small company, I make sure I find out who the hiring manager is and at least send him/ her a resume as well in hopes of getting around that HR roadblock.
It took me over 80 job applications - obtained through everything from Internet job sites to the rumor mill - before I found the job I have now. BTW, that did turn up about 2-3 other possible jobs I might have picked up, as several finally showed up at the same time. One thing I did was to be sure to follow up on every last application. I would call a week after applying if I could find a phone number, which sometimes took a bit of poking around as I would try to get that even for ads which made no mention of a phone number. And I’d stay at it until I received a clear no - usually my lack of experience meant that this came on the first call about half the time. But while it was pretty tough for me (at least straight out of college during last year’s horrible job market), following through is something that’s likely to improve your chances. Or at least let you know why you didn’t get selected for an interview.
It’s a matter of time; two months is not very long for a job search (I know how hard that is to believe, but I’ve twice been out of work for over six months).
“What Color is Your Parachute” spread the concept that most want ads are phony. My experience is otherwise – I’ve gotten nearly all my jobs by answering want ads. It seems odd that HR would keep springing for the cost of ads just to gather information that is probably easily available to them (and somewhat irrelevant).
I have noticed that the same jobs keep coming back on the job sites (MONSTER, BRASSRING, etc.). This leads me to suspect that the job boards are paid partly on the basis of how many hits the ad generates. Thus, there may be an open job, but authorization to actually hire somebody doesn’t exist-so MONSTER (in an effort to prove its worth to employers) happily keeps posting the same job ads. I feel your pain-I’ve been out for a few months myself-and there is NO hiring going on!
I agree that a lot of job listings are phony. Other reasons why companies do it:
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They want to appear as if they are doing well;
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They are window shopping for someone with super-duper qualifications who will work for next-to-nothing;
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They already know who will be hired, but some rule requires them to advertise the job. (For example, a lady I know who works for an immigration lawyer once showed me the resumes she’d received in response to an advert. she’d placed and she was trying to think of ways she could argue to the INS that the applicants were unqualified so that her client could get hired and get a visa.)
I also understand that there is a lot of age discrimination in certain industries. Does Mr. Pug’s resume contain anything that would let people figure out how old he is?
Oh, another phenomenon that I have heard about is that some ads are actually placed by headhunters looking to build up their pool of resumes.
I hate fake job ads! I wish there was a law against them. I’ve been out for three months now, and I’ve applied for over a hundred jobs. I’ve got good experience, I know that I’m perfectly qualified the jobs I’m applying for and that there aren’t that many qualified people who do what I do (project scheduler), yet I’m still hitting a big brick wall. :mad:
This frustration permeates every aspect of my life, and I’m sick of it. I know eventually one of these jobs will come through, but sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring is driving me up the wall! Employers, quit f@#king around and hire me!
IMO, this is the primary factor. Appearing to have lots of job openings gives people the impression that your business is growing so fast you can’t keep up with the demand for it. My old employer permanently kept want ads up on their web site when they had absolutely no intention of hiring. These ads appeared right under a blurb that talked about how they were undergoing a “period of rapid growth and expansion.”
lucwarm’s suggestion that some ads are run with prior knowledge of who is going to fill the position is dead-on in the federal government, according to my personal experience. For most federal jobs an open announcement is a requirement. A great many of those announcements are mere formalities.
As an example, I once worked for a library within the executive branch, and the head librarian had recently retired. It was plainly apparent that his deputy librarian was best suited for the job (since, I was told, she had been doing it all along), and she made it clear that if she was superceded she was going to leave, which would have been catastrophic. When the head librarian left, the bureaucrats dissolved his position and created a new position which, among other things, did not require a degree but did require years of experience as deputy librarian, detailed knowledge of the library’s subject matter, and extensive experience with the library’s unique inventory system.
Then everyone sat around for three months until the application period passed, and lo and behold only one applicant was found to meet the unique requirements of the position. End of story.
Thanks for the info and the commiseration, everyone. On a related note, there’s a bill being kicked around right now (H.R.5491) to extend unemployment benefits for at least 13 more weeks for most states, more for “high unemployment” states, if I read it correctly. This site has some more info on it. Find out who your local representative is and email him or her and urge them to support it. The economy ain’t lookin’ good, and we’re going to need a little help to squeak through.