Yesterday someone I know found a job ad from the national arm of a well-known international company. The ad was for an administrative assistant, with rather typical duties (arranging business travel, coordinating communication and schedules for projects, helping with newsletters and social media) and no formal qualifications other than some past experience with said duties and the usual things like “able to work in a team”. The promised salary was slightly above average for this sort of position. She noticed that the ad was already several months old and had no application deadline listed, which is unusual, so she thought it might have been left up in error. But since she met all the requirements given in the ad, she applied anyway. Within a few hours(!) she got a call requesting an interview for only a few hours(!!) later. The interview was genuine and seemed to go well enough, but just minutes(!!!) later she got an e-mailed rejection notice.
We’ve both had plenty of experience applying for jobs and it’s never, ever gone this fast before. What might account for the fact that the company has been advertising a fairly unremarkable position (i.e., one for which they must be getting hundreds of seemingly qualified applicants) for such a long time, and yet ended up interviewing and rejecting such an applicant at such a lightning pace? My first thought was that there’s some important requirement for the position that isn’t stated in the ad, but if so, there was no indication about this from the interviewer, who asked only questions relevant to the posted requirements.
Obviously nobody here has any way of knowing for sure, but I’d welcome informed and uninformed speculation.
My best guess: The employer has some sort of legal/contractual/fiduciary obligation to advertise for the position, but has no interest in actually filling it, and so is merely going through the motions with anyone who applies so that they can show on paper that they’ve been trying to fill it but they haven’t found a fitting applicant.
Is the company in question related or involved in ANY way with U.S. Defense Industry? Is it possible she was rejected on some obscure but pointless trouble in her background check such as being arrested for having a joint in her bag in 1972?
My best guess is that while there are no ‘official’ education requirements, they’re getting enough applications that they’re applying them unofficially.
Why not list this educational qualification in the ad itself instead of inciting hundreds or maybe even thousands of unqualified people to apply for the job?
Why invite applicants to an interview if their application/CV makes it clear that they don’t have this unstated educational qualification?
How high and important could this qualification possibly be given that the applicant I know already has a graduate degree in the company’s line of business, plus all the work experience requested in the ad?
I suppose that’s a possibility, but what would be the circumstances in which such a scenario might arise? That is, what sort of contract might require them to hire an administrative assistant, and what might lead them to shirk this responsibility and instead waste company resources maintaining the charade of a recruitment action for several months?
I had a situation like that occur when I was job hunting. I got called in for an interview, but they didn’t specify the position. I was desperate, so I went. I wound up in a room with about a dozen other people. Eventually, a guy in a suit came in and started talking about how working for this company turned his life around, he was able to care for his disabled mother, blah blah blah. It sounded a little too culty for me.
Basically, he was recruiting people to sell insurance to employees of some company. We’d visit their homes and become their guardian angels or something. When a break finally came up, I got up to leave. The suit guy said something like “Don’t you want to help people?” I said this wasn’t what I was qualified for and left.
I’m guessing it might be some kind of position that has a high turnover rate, like guardian angel or telemarketing.
Perhaps an agreement with a union where they’re ostensibly supposed to have X number of positions when they’re really only interested in having X - 2. Or they’re trying to prevent accusations of discrimination by showing that they’re interviewing a diverse crowd of potential applicants.
Anecdotally, when I ran a fast food restaurant 10+ years ago, corporate expected me to conduct a certain number of interviews every week, so there would be times I’d interview people even if I didn’t have an opening I was looking to fill, so that I could hit the numbers I was expected to hit.
Another option is that is a permanently open position. They need 200 admins country wide and expect 5% turn over per year so then need a new person basically every month. They may have just had a waive of resignations so they need to back fill quickly but your friend with the masters degree was over qualified for a position with no educational requirements.
My guess is that they’re allowed to hire Susan Jones, whom they know, and who is qualified, but they’re required to advertise the position and interview all qualified applicants. They’re doing that, and in due course will hire Susan Jones, whom they know and whom they’ve known all along is the person they wish for the position.
That’s also a good point. But I’m not sure about the overqualification bit, as in the applicant’s experience, interviewers are usually quite frank about this issue when it arises: if she gets invited to an interview at all, the interviewer explicitly asks why she applied for the job in light of her better-than-usual qualifications. But in this particular case, the interviewer never brought up the question.
For a position where an applicant has been pre-selected? Surely you’d instruct the interviewer to invite the bare minimum number of candidates, not incentivize them to interview as many as possible.
This is what I thought when I read the OP. The position is really a cold-calling sales position for some service or widget. Either on the phone or in person. In the interview, your friend might have come across as too smart and capable. IOW not the sort of person who could be induced to fall into line with the other sheep and stick to a script hour after hour without complaint. If a phone position, maybe your friend didn’t have the right kind of voice.
The salient thing in this scenario is that after a brief in-person contact your friend was instantly disqualified. Therefore it must have been something about your friend’s person, i.e., appearance, attitude, voice that disqualified her.
Having been heavily involved in recruiting for years, the part that sticks out to me is the actual screening interview. It’s not uncommon to have “always open” jobs that are abundant in an organization. But usually it ends with a review of the application, ending in rejection. An actual screening interview is a (somewhat) costly step.
We are “guided” not to bring up “over qualification” in any guise during an interview. Because it is too often it is an indicator of age discrimination.
I know having a masters degree and applying for a job that doesn’t require a college degree shouldn’t in an of itself trigger a concern about age discrimination but “overqualified” has just become a dirty word now in recruitment.
Why someone wants a job that they are very overqualified for is something that should come out naturally in the applicants statement of why they want this job.
Do big-name international companies really do this? I mean, create recruitment ads with a completely false job description in order to lure call centre salespeople? If so, wow. I’m not going to name the company in question, but it’s one that everyone here has probably heard of. If I gave the industry and asked people to name major companies in that industry off the top of their heads, it would probably be in the top three or four answers.
Well, maybe not cold-calling sales, but even big companies need lots of fodder candidates for their customer service phone lines, expanding distributors, etc. AT&T comes to mind or any of the communication giants. Same with insurance.
I don’t think the word “lure” is appropriate here. Any company that needs lots of warm bodies is going to have to get the word out.
And was the job description completely false? In fact, WAS there even a “job description” beyond a vague list of qualifications? “Administrative assistant” can be anything.