Incompetent recruiters
So, in my never-ending search for a new job, I am forced to work with recruiters who are listing jobs for various companies I’m interested in working for. Recently, I found a very interesting job that was listed on a major job site, here is what happened:
- Click on “Apply for this job” link on the major job site
- Fill out some additional information, e.g., cover letter, and submit
- Wait
- 2 days later, receive an email from the listing agent that they don’t accept applications from any other job site, so I need to go fill it out on their web site
- Get yet another freaking account I’ll never use on this company’s web site
- Fill out the form and upload my resume
- Receive an email saying “thank you” and including a text-based survey they want me to fill out
- Fill out survey and email to the provided address
- Email bounces
- Bang head on table
Really, how hard is this? This company has a “flashy” web site, but they can’t be bothered to put this survey up as a couple of
TEXTAREAelements? I am not impressed.This entry was posted at 8:17 am on 7 August 2006 and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
Interesting that Adam was contacted cold and the recruiter asked for references. That happened to me recently, too. Seems like references are provided late in the interview process, when the prospective employer is close to making an offer, just as a sanity check. You shouldn’t give away all sorts of contact information to a recruiter just because they ask for it.
One reason why companies that ostensibly offer technical jobs seem to be utterly inept with the most basic technologies may be that we’re dealing with their HR departments, and not with the people we’d end up working with. I had an HR person ask me to send her a resume in Word format by email, although I had already sent her a link to my website where she could download the same thing. I’ve had recruiters ask for a printed copy of a resume, although they can download it and print it at their leisure. They don’t seem to realize they can do that. Bizarre. I’ve had recruiters ask for a copy of my resume to put in their database. I tell them it’s already online, so it’s effectively in their database as well as everyone else’s. They don’t understand what I mean. Sigh.
I share Chris’ frustration with online job application sites. They seem to go out of their way to violate every principle of usability design. What they end up seeing on their end is anyone’s guess. Sometimes the only way they’ll accept a resume is if you convert it to plain text and paste it into a textarea. That’s got to be all but unreadable by the time anyone sees it.
The whole recruitment industry seems to be engineered to prevent employers and prospective employees from hooking up. It’s amazing that any of us can find a job anywhere, ever.
You think that’s bad? I get to touch a lot of hardware before it’s available to the market. Several months ago I got to test a new CPU from a certain HUGE chip maker… I won’t name names, but their name rhymes with shmintel. :)
Anyway.. Huge computer company, everything about them should be high-tech right? Well this bleeding edge system (it was one of their new CPUs on their own motherboard and all that) had a bleeding edge NIC in it that no linux kernel has support for out of the box yet (did I mention I admin Linux systems?). The test system came with a bunch of paperwork with a link to sign up for tester support online, and mentions that’s where I can get the driver for the NIC (The windows NIC driver came on a CD with it.. figures).
So I log into the system. First off I have to enter the serial number and part number. Then I wait for 24 hours for a confirmation email… their super, high-tech system required serial/part numbers, but required a human to verify this data on the other end! That’s WTF #1.
Now I log into the system using the info in the email… oh look, I have to enter the serial number as confirmation.. again! WTF #2 (the email had me follow a specific URL that had all kinds of confirmation data in it already).
I finally get in and look under support info for the system and find a link to the driver. This link is… a pdf file. Um, what? Open PDF file, the gist of which is: “To get the driver for this test system, open a trouble ticket and ask for it.” WTF #3.
I open the ticket.. next day I get the driver (I’ve already lost 2 full days of possible testing due to this convoluted setup). It’s nothing but a tarball of the directory out of the linux kernel. No patch files, no pre-built driver for the main supported distributions to assist in the install.. nothing. WTF#4
So I have to boot the system off the net using our image’s installer, but then copy on the driver tarball, and rebuild a kernel myself with the driver built in so that I can then, finally install the image we need to test with.
Talk about a frustrating experience.. with a company that should be far better. These guys want us to test more of their CPUs too… if I have to go through that everytime.. no way.
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Way back in the late ‘90s I was looking for a job for after graduation. Some company got my email address through the school’s placement department.
They emailed me asking if I was interested in interviews, and at that point I wasn’t turning anything down. Eventually they emailed me about the interview process, when it was, directions, etc.
The email contained a Word document. A poorly formatted Word document. A poorly formatted Word document that referenced non-standard fonts that Joe Random Student was unlikely to have. There was an embedded map that had all the fidelity of a printed and scanned fax, poorly resized.
I figured if they didn’t know how to type a list of street names into an email file, I probably didn’t want to work there.
I’ve had plenty of opportunaties to be unimpressed by potential employers since then.
I had a recruiter cold-email me a few weeks ago, asking for references and salary requirements without giving me any job information. I wasn’t looking for a position anyway, but I did reply with a small list of problems their site had under Firefox, and my price for web consulting. Haven’t heard back yet.