This is the thread about job searching.

one place sent me a go-fuck-yourself email and then apparently added me to their promotional mailing list and spam me now

the 'paste it into a text field' part is the worst

actually no it's any application which asks you to answer an open-ended question and gives you a little undersized box to put your answer in—you're evidently expected to write more than fits in the box, but how much more??!?

So fucking bummed out today. I found a job listing at a rather large corporation to get into their architecure/building department, something I was super excited about. As a bonus, my cousin worked for them and was more than happy to help me out as much as possible.

So I spent the past 6 days just furiously updating my resume and editing it (with the input of quite a few people) over and over again, and crafting a new cover letter. It was a bigger chore than usual, since my resume was previously really specialized to target "architecture" jobs and I needed to really redo a lot of work on it. So I finally get it finished over the weekend and I go to complete the process this morning.

As mentioned above, its one of those online standardized things that makes you basically recreate your entire resume from scratch. Fine. Annoying, but fine. But it also had the added bonus of really specific questions about the job scope and qualifications for which you have to answer 'Yes' or 'No'. 99% of the questions were no problem, but there was one that was worded in such a weird, specific way that I couldn't answer 'Yes' and be truthful and there was no place or field for which I could explain or offer any nuance. I figured I'd rather be truthful and answer 'No'. I'm definitely qualified for what they are asking for with the question, just not in the super specific way they asked it. My resume and cover letter both cover how I can meet this qualification, quite easily, in another way. So I clicked 'No' and moved on, wrapped up the whole process about 30 minutes later.

Twenty-two minutes(!) after I click submit and get the confirmation email, I get the automated rejection letter. Based on what I've since researched, I can almost guarantee that it was because I clicked that 'No'. There is no possible way a human being even saw my resume and cover letter in that short of a time. Just infuriating that I was rejected by a fucking machine without any opportunity to explain the nuance or other factors involved. These automated application things are so stupid. I'm feeling crushed about losing the job, but also completely deflated after all that effort and I couldn't even get a human being to lay eyes on my resume.

Holding out slight hope that my cousin passing my resume to the hiring manager directly might improve my odds.

I think it will improve your odds. That story is exactly why those systems are bullshit for this kind of job.

22 minutes. Ugh.

Yeah, it's maddening.

Wait - if you got rejected automatically and nobody even saw it

then whats to stop you doing it again and clicking yes this time?

22 minutes is harsh, I though a 2 hr turnaround was brutal.

I feel like half the battle is getting past taleo/the HR department and getting a resume into the hands of the hiring manager. When I was hiring, I had to cut the the HR department out of screening resumes because they were dumping too many promising ones.

Interview tomorrow morning 10am. Somewhat nerve-wracked.

It's easier when you're in a job but this time I've been quite chilled about the fact that I will just fire out applications and very few of them will even get acknowledgements let alone interest.

Where I do get rejections, I think 22 mins is a pretty long time these days - my best is 6 minutes.

My favourite recent one was when an agency contacted me with a targeted email saying "this is an opportunity you're a good match for and we think you should apply. I did, and got rejected after 14 minutes. I then emailed the recruiter asking why that happened, since they had approached me in the first place, and never even got a response.

I've discovered a new thing recently - I applied for a job and got what looked like an automated email saying "congratulations! our client wants you to apply on their website - please follow this secure link". Which, security concerns notwithstanding, I did to find... another recruiter. So that's two levels of automatic sifting for a job I wasn't really that bothered about but was exceptionally handy for home.

automatic/human-drone HR firewalling is totally a thing, if you can do it at all i think you ought to be literally seeding your resume with the keywords used in the original statement of requirements, no one with any judgment capable of drawing natural inferences about what you say is going to be reading the thing

and given what i'm seeing happen to some resumes i upload into 'auto-fill' slots for jobs with additional forms to complete online, maybe you want to chill on the formatting and make the resume content appear as dumbly as possible so the shittier auto-readers don't miss anything.

i put my junk on a lot of more mercenary jobhunt sites recently and just yesterday i got a call from some recruiter trying to place me in a mortgage services phone sales job ('we see you have a car loan as well as a mortgage…'). where are the recruiters trying to place me in actual shit?!

the other day i made it to the second-interview stage for a crummy job i didn't really want, and i had a couple of promising prospects lining up, which i would have had to dump the first job to take anyway, so i made an ACTUAL DECISION and passed on the second interview. it felt pretty good! a rare chance to seem like something was up to me.

xposts

really sorry to hear that jon. :(

Just had a call from a recruiter who has sifted me in for one job and asking whether it was OK to put me forward for another three he has on his books but I "might not have seen". I had seen them, but know 100% I don't have the full advertised criteria so would have been sifted out if I'd applied for them. And considering they're for more money, I'm more than happy for him to.

Good luck with yr interview, Elvis.

I'm pretty much at the point with this where I just want to stop looking and stop interviewing and stop going through all this garbage. I am just really frazzled and fatigued and burned out and don't want to come up with any more answers about "where I see myself in 3 years."

I did a second interview (of a 3 stage process) where I am not even sure I want to go on with the interviewing but can't seem to give myself permission to back out of it. (Elvis, it's the one I was discussing with you.) Like, there are definitely good reasons to take it, and definitely huge reasons not to take it. But I can't even balance them in my mind. I don't know if it's my gut feeling that this is not the job for me (I was beginning to wonder if I would ever get the feeling that a job *was* "for me") or if it's just decision fatigue.

My feeling is kinda... "I guess I would take it, with reservations, if it were offered, because I'm running out of options" but it's one of those interview processes where I have to jump through hoops and make like I really really want it, and sell them on me, and I just feel like a used car salesman where I don't even want to make the sale. Is "well, I can't convince myself that *reason* is a good enough reason not to take the job" really enough of a reason *to* take the job?

(Even assuming I make it to the next round! Which is assuming a lot right now!)

OK, so I have an interview for a job I got HR firewalled out of, but I was talking to the agency about a different job and they brought up might be a good fit. We are trying to set the date up but I am pre-warned it will be TWO AND A HALF HOURS. Welp.

Looking on the company site it lists a number of techniques and/or alternatives to interview that they might use so I think I have an idea where they're going with it and if I'm right then the timing doesn't sound so bad. The interesting thing will be that I am trying to dictate exactly when it is, having turned down their first offer of date and time, which might test how interested they are.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/rapgenius/theseventhseal1.jpg

alt. interview procedure

no, that's the exit interview

"We all liked you a lot. We loved talking to you, but we don't believe you have the depth of knowledge we need for this role"

blam.gif

Interview feels like it went OK.

They haven't come back to the recruiter with any feedback yet ("company procedures says the interviewers get up to 10 working days to write up and pass their notes to HR") in which time I have had two interviews with a different company, the second of which was this morning and went really well. The fact I'd rather work there too is a bonus.

Y'know, you owe nothing to no one until your name is in ink on a contract. If something better comes along in the meanwhile, grab it. They snoozed, they lose.

That interview up above I talked about, I felt progressively worse and worse about the company, until I finally told the recruiter that I didn't want to pursue it any further. Which felt weird as hell to do, because their reactions to me had been favourable. But I just felt such a burst of relief to say "this doesn't feel right to me."

I took a week off job-hunting just to get my head back in some kind of order (it's so hard not to take all this stuff personally) and it's back to the grind this week. Headhunters are ringing again, so that's something, I guess.

hey guys what is a workflo and how do i shot that

http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/07/13/how-the-other-half-works-an-adventure-in-the-low-status-of-software-engineers/

this is just about the best thing i've ever read about interviewing and job-seeking

Going into the big city today for two weird interview-not-interview situations. :-/

The org I worked for (last six years) went out of business yesterday, so I guess I'm on the job hunt now.

if you're eligible, apply for unemployment IMMEDIATELY! the clock on the availability of $ probably starts right away

Thanks j. I did apply this morning.

fucked that one up in the past, myself : /

Well, the people I mentioned still haven't come back but idgaf because I will have two formal offers in the next couple of days to choose from.

Interview yesterday ended with a 45 minute code test ("don't worry, you only need to get 50% right") that was more esoteric concepts appropriate for a CS class than meat/potatoes code grinding. No interest in any of the code samples I brought with me.

Ended with the Lion/Otter/Golden Retriever/Beaver personality test (http://www.collegeliteracyacademy.com/PERSONALITY_TEST_AND_EXPLANATIONS_8-11.pdf) which was embarrassingly unnerving. Bleah.

yeah that sure simplifies things to know that my personality is like a random animal a manager is using to obfuscate the different ways he expects me to be subservient and industrious

omg elvis that thing is just

ELVIS T (thinking): "fuck, what was the deal with abstract static class methods?"

HR (drops form on table): "when you're done with that could you just fill this out?"

ET: "the hell is this?" (looks up 'LOGB personality test' on phone) "again, what the hell?"

Lion / Otter / Golden Retriever / Beaver? You are fucking kidding me.

Like, yesterday, Tom E was on a rant against the MBTI used as an HR instrument but anthropomorphising animals, like... I think I would get up out of that test and say "I'm sorry but I really am not desperate enough to want to work for anyone who thinks this is a good idea."

(This is probably why I'm still unemployed.)

I quit my job and started a webdev bootcamp. its a risk but i was going nowhere fast otherwise..leaving work has been a huge relief, the thought of going back to that type of job would probably kill me now, so this better work out

after months of unemployment i am working three different work-from-home 'jobs' to possibly barely scrape by. they are the worst jobs i have ever had.

i always hated grading papers the most when teaching. one of these jobs is like grading papers, but the same paper, written by a c student, several times a day, every day : (

So I have been putting my resume out there lately... and just got a recruiter email to my work address (which I never made public) with a job listing that I am 99% sure is my current job. O_O

O_O indeed.
i have a job interview today. hoping it goes well, i really need to shake things up.

turned out it was a company that does the exact same thing we do but decided i didn't have enough experience to do the job i am doing ?_?

i just got called for a 2nd interview for a job i interviewed one month and two days ago. zero feedback until now. job hunting sucks balls, glad i am not unemployed.

i just got called for a 2nd interview for a job i interviewed one month and two days ago. zero feedback until now. job hunting sucks balls, glad i am not unemployed.

This just happened to me now. First interview was six weeks ago then absolutely nothing until I was asked if I could meet with the CEO day after tomorrow.

Job hunting feels more like applying for college. HFS, I need something going on here...

i had an hr interviewer (kind of like a pre-interviewer) who i have spoken to before about another job schedule a phoner with me, then cancel half an hour beforehand because they had already decided to pick someone else.

meanwhile, snafu at my present 'job' led them to cut me off from being assigned new work and now as far as i can tell they appear to be letting me hang just because. besides looking around at other job ads again i consoled myself by looking up complaints about them, which does make them sound like a miserable orwellian grind of a workplace. (i work from home, which actually seems like a plus for once, reading about their workplace cameras and 5-minute break rules, mandatory unpaid overtime, etc.)

to make money i did some sweatshop work on the internet and was delighted to find a highly underpaid thing reading abstracts for psychology papers and summarizing the references in them to a given paper - apparently, doing someone's preliminary lit review for them. out of my field, underpaid, etc., but it was so refreshing to be thinking for a few moments and doing something that required my intelligence that i just… hated my actual job even more.

Any recommended Internet sweatshops where I can actually use my brain like that?

oh, i found that one through mechanical turk, but i wouldn't recommend them as a way to make money, i only do it because i'm desperate even for dollars, and there's very little overhead. also, most of the work is mindless and exploitative (typing in receipts, writing content-mill content, rating content-mill content, etc). there is a system of 'qualification' that is mostly based on numbers, but it would take a lot of work to reach the level where supposedly sweet higher-paid work opens up. and this abstract-summarizing thing was a random find; lots of psych, social science, and business/marketing academic researchers use the system as a way to gather data for studies (beats paying students), and this just happened to be a side thing one of them had available.

if you can stand the entry costs, there's a company, leapforce, that apparently has other clients but seems to be mainly a front for google, doing internal evaluations of their search results in order to help them fiddle with the algorithm. they pay well but there are very high unpaid costs - you have to study their guidelines, take a long entry exam, and then work your way up to being granted a substantial amount of work to do - and they are also fairly remorseless, with hard standards for efficiency and quality of work, constant reviewing, policies of sidelining and terminating people whose work they deem subpar, etc. i would not say the ole brain will feel like it's really aspiring to much, but their standards are very sophisticated and reasonableish (part of your job is to study them and learn to conform your own evaluations to the ones their community of raters and their in-house people have a consensus on), so it does require thought.

there's another company like that, i forget what they're called, lion something.

Is this the new thing, where jobs/headhunters just... ghost you, even after a face to face interview?

Like, I understand not getting back to each and every unsuccessful candidate whose CV they reviewed.

But these are people that I got through the first couple of rounds, went in for an actual interview, they say "we'll let you know soon, either way" and then.... NOTHING.

Headhunters may even put you off a couple of times, but stop answering your emails.

This has happened twice, in the last 2 interviews I've had, and I've got an awful feeling it's about to happen again.

Like is this just new standard operating procedure in a market where employees are considered disposable chattel? Am I being oversensitive in that I consider this really fucking rude? Because you know what? I am finding it really fucking rude, and I'm fucking tired of it.

To the recruiter who just e-mailed me and literally three-hundred-and-something other people directly in the To: line

• nice try but I kind of doubt that you'll take any application seriously
• the 'Hi <<Forename>>' bit both manages to be overly familiar and, by dint of actually putting <<Forename>> rather than properly inserting my forename, massively impersonal and incompetent
• an e-mail full of phrases like 'interim basis with a view to go permanent' tells me what you want from me, but nothing about what the job is going to offer me

I ripped into the last person who did that instead of BCCing people. Within the 5 mins it took for me to send the email I already had spam presumably from someone on that list.

Job interview on Friday. Here we go...

Headhunter number 3 did, finally, get back to me to let me know it was a no.

(And explained how he thought it was really rude when people had done that to him, so he didn't want to leave me hanging.)

((And may have another role coming up that's suitable for me, so, y'know, he may have had an incentive to keep in touch, apart from not wanting to be rude))

Jobhunting is making me so cynical about human beings; it's awful.

trawling ads again

so hopeless, so anxious