An Interesting Note on How To Not Hire A Job Applicant.

This guy makes an interesting inventory of no-nos on his blog.

In my experience I encountered situations:
#1 "Make sure the job's responsibilities are unclear",
#6 "Make it clear in the interview that you're reading the applicant's resume for the first time" (very often, apparently hiring managers are busy-busy people),
#7 "Take personal calls during the interview",
#9 "Be absolutely inflexible about benefits" (very much so with big companies; stingy small companies also chime in on this)
and especially often
#10 "Be evasive about your company's financial health and market strategy" with start-ups.

And the best part comes in a comment of his entry:

Fill the job requirement with every computer language, operating system, database, application, middleware product, and hardware brand the last employee ever touched and require 10 years of experience in each. Pair that with a salary offer appropriate to a new college grad.

-ulianov

A Toronto Recruiter is Green to Boot

Got a call today from a young recruiter working for a local agency. She asked to speak to me and said she had a job. She wanted to know whether I am still looking for work.

Then I started to ask the "golden three" questions (location, pay rate, job description).

She said that the job is in the Greater Toronto Area (which is pretty big). I tried to get her to narrow it down (for there are some areas of the GTA where I don't go because of a ridiculously overpriced toll motorway that's involved). She said that before seeing my Word Resume she can only say "Toronto".

Hmm, then I asked about pay rate and she started to give me super-BS about how she won't do that until she sees a Resume. Oh my. I stated my last hourly pay rate which is about double what the average annual salary [in my line of work] in Toronto is. She started quoting from my workopolis profile where I listed "between 75 and 100k" which is a wide range which makes it useless.

I tried to explain to her that she's kind of new in this block and "time=$$" thinking that she gets the idea that she's wasting my time. She stared to blabber about her time being precious too and that she must "follow procedure".

Well, faced with such blatant pigheadedness I said "goodbye" and hung up on her.

Dear Recruiter, whoever you are, please keep these things in mind:
1. you are annoying people in various ways;
2. being inflexible and trying to have people follow your script makes you even more annoying;
3. unwillingness to talk about dough makes you look like a conceited stiff as the candidate will have to learn about that eventually, preferably before wasting his/her time to go for a face-to-face interview;
4. sometimes the people you call do know about your profession more than you do.

-ulianov