Earlier this summer I found out the local Transit Authority was in desperate need of vehicle operators. While it wasn’t exactly my dream to graduate college and go on as a bus driver, the pay and benefits are very good (I’d start at 2x what I’m making now and the health benefits would save me thousands a year compared to my current insurance, increasing my effective income). Plus, there were many jobs there besides just operating a vehicle. My plan is to get hired in the entry level position and work my way up.
The process, unfortunately, is very, very slow. I applied back in June- and about three weeks after that I was given a date to take a test. The test is a customer service test to see if you have the right personality to deal with customers. There are no materials to study, which is kind of frustrating- many people fail the first time around and you have to wait 45 days to re-take it. As luck would have it, I barely passed (getting a 70 which happened to be the minimum passing score) and got put on a list for interviews.
Now the sucky part- I was notified of passing the test a month ago and still haven’t gotten notification of when to come in for an interview. I’m pretty confident I can get the job at this point, its the waiting that drives me nuts. If I pass the interview I then have 8 weeks of training, which I’d like to finish BEFORE I go on vacation in January, but the longer this takes the more likely I’ll have to wait until after my vacation to start training. Which will mean a six-month wait from when I applied to when I got hired (and even then, still no guarantee I’ll pass the training )
Has anyone else had to wait this long for a job? I’m sure a lot of people would say, “Why bother?” but the fact is this is the best job I’ve found benefits-wise in two years, and the rules regarding being prompt and consistent (+1 vacation day for every quarter of a year you don’t call in sick, and another bonus +1 vacation day if you don’t call in sick for an entire year) plus a pension.
I talked to my landlord, who currently works there. He said when he got hired 10 years ago, he didn’t get a chance to get interviewed (after 6 months they take you off the wait list) and actually had to retake the test. I’m really hoping that won’t happen to me. Its not like I’m desperate for a job, I’m just sick of what I’m doing now, and would like to move on to a job that would actually be worth working for more than 1 years (my current jobs don’t have raises that scale with inflation :mad: nor do they have any health benefits)
My daughter applied for a job in early 2004, I believe. She got hired last week. Of course, she had to get a security clearance, which does take some time. But we were beginning to think that they’d NEVER hire her.
My longest was only about 4 months, but it was more a matter of me repeatedly NOT getting hired as positions opened up in the company, until finally I was the best candidate (or, rather, the supervisor I had as a student brow-beat the new guy into hiring me). Since I ended up interviewing with the Director of the department, I think it was a case of brow-beating as much as anything else!
Funny, how they didn’t want to let me go when I resigned, though!
This last job I waited 4 months. I kept getting delayed and the hirer went out of town after the interview, then they had a restructure, then they called me like nothing had happened and I should still be available. I was.
I left a really good position in Feb 2001 to take advantage of a really great opportunity that just didn’t work out as anyone had hoped. By the fall, I was ready to move on. As it happened, my former employer had a position open, and in October they asked me to come in to talk with them about it (I’d left on excellent terms and stayed in contact with everyone). At the time, nothing came of it, as they started having financial problems about that time and they decided not to fill the position at all. In January 2002 I was laid off, and began freelancing, contracting, baking bread – whatever I could come up with, as those were dark days in the tech industry.
In late July, my former employer asked me to work on a contract basis on one project. By mid-August, I was working on three projects, and in October they hired me back full-time. So interview-to-hire time on that one was essentially one year. My boss later told me that when he realized things were about to get ugly, he deliberately scuttled their plans to re-hire me, since I’d have been the first to go when the layoffs there started, and he didn’t want me to leave another job to walk into that.
I graduated from college in May of 1999, and a couple weeks before I did, I applied for a job with the state. I returned to the summer job I had the year before, and applied to other jobs too. Mid-August I got a letter from the state job saying that they were planning to schedule interviews “soon.” Months went by and I never heard from them. In November I took a different job. While I was in NY for a training the week before Thanksgiving, my dad took a phone call for me - it was the state wanting to schedule an interview! He said the person he talked to seemed rather put out that I was no longer interested. God only knows how long it would have gone on after that had I interviewed. Another six months?
About eight years ago I interviewed for a summer internship with Ford in September. They got back to me in June. Just after exams. While I was packing up for my summer internship with someone else.
I was honestly confused. My end of the conversation was something like:
Are you kidding?
This is a joke, right?
Steve put you up to this, didn’t he?
After ten minutes I established that it really was Ford, they had a position for me, and it started next week. At which point I was forced to decline, because I had the aforementioned rather nice internship I was going to that I had been offered in October.
I never could figure out if I was just way back on the waiting list or if their HR department did not own a calendar.
)