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> You are pretty far along the management track if you think
> job-hunting is "asking for a favor." (Brother, can you spare a
> dime?) I prefer to think of it as a business relationship.
It is a business relationship, but he/she who has the money makes the rules.
> I think psyching out their screening process is a pretty good
> survival skill. Besides, it's fun to see if you can do it. I
> wouldn't want to depend on that as the only way to find a job,
> though.
Hacking web servers is fun too, but it can also wind you up on the wrong side
of courtroom. Likewise, psyching out screening processes may be fun, but it
holds the chance of doing more harm than good.
> Besides, the employers are doing exactly the same thing.
> Employers are concealing their identities, cross-posting in
> multiple markets, salting their ads with irrelevant keywords,
> posting bogus jobs, and posting the same lonely little job with
> six different recruiters. If applicants wake up and use the same
> tactics, well that's just business. When you are invited to a
> knife fight you need to bring a knife.
Mike, why would a company that is honestly looking to hire a qualified person
make the application process misleading? That would only lead them to get
unqualified people. I mean, if that's the case, then you could extrapolate that
the employer was stupid and therefore - why would you want to work for them in
the first place?
It makes no logical sense for an employer to needlessly throw out potentially
qualified people.
However, it does make sense for them to spread the word as far and wide as they
can. Hence, using multiple recruiters (why anybody uses recruiters anymore is a
mystery to me) and cross posting to multiple sites.
Likewise, there is a very good reason some companies hide their identities.
They don't want to be bombarded by lame sales pitches from every work-at-home
tech writer who is trying to build a tech pubs empire.
> The desparate ones are the managers or recruiters who use layers
> of restrictive web forms instead of actually reading resumes and
> having human conversations with people. Their cute option lists,
> radio buttons, and cookies are the real desparate stuff.
The process of whittling down resumes and applicants to a managable hit list
has to start somewhere. Web forms are arguably a poor way to do that, but
sometimes such measures are necessary.
> The recruiters themselves told me they didn't read them. I
> actually discussed this with many of the people who called me
> back. They usually say "Yeah, the forms are really ugly... Can
> you send me a Word doc?" Remember, I'm not relying much on
> Monster et al anymore, I no longer take them seriously. In fact
> I think my accounts expire next week. I mainly use the
> activity/quality on the job boards as an unscientific barometer
> of the market.
Yeah, the recruiter probably doesn't. That's because recruiters are worthless.
But the hiring manager DOES. And he/she isn't going to find your pages of
searchbait (I like that word, by the way) very clever.
> > Moreover, some companies have security measures on their web
> > databases that will automatically kick out text in fields
> > that is too long or contains long strings.
> Well, if you successfully retrieve your data and it's intact,
> that's a pretty good indication the database didn't kick it out.
> Sounds like FUD to me.
That's because the DMZ database doesn't have that kind of security. When the
data gets transferred via a stored proc through the firewall to a backend
system, fields with too many characters get dropped because they might contain
a buffer overflow.
FUD or not - it happens.
Andrew Plato
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