01/27/2007
I got a job!!
I can hardly believe this, since I've been looking for so long, but I start work on Monday! I did two interviews with this company back in late November/early December, and they've finally gotten back to me to offer me the position. About a week and a half ago I had an interview with another company, whom I'd applied to back in October, but at this point they were actually hiring for another position and I think it became obvious fairly quickly that I was probably not the sort of person they were looking for. ("I'm an engineer, not a political analyst!")
Anyway, so after spending the end of this week filling out all the required forms included with the offer (I need to find a less labour-intensive signature), today was shopping day. See, I've been a student for quite a while, and while doing my undergrad, I was a software designer/tester, so it didn't really matter all that much what I wore to work. As a result, most of my wardrobe is jeans, t-shirts, and sweatshirts. Now, I actually need to look decent. To top it all off, part of my New Year's resolution included a clothing purge which ended up purging most of my more professional clothing (didn't fit anymore, or maybe never did!).
So, today was clothes shopping day. I think I might be getting the hang of this shopping thing. Somehow though, I'm still trying to wrap my head around sizing. I actually bought a pair of size 4 pants today, and they fit nicely. This may not seem like much to jump up and down about, but considering about 2 months ago I thought I was a size 9/10, that's pretty crazy. I've lost a little weight, by accident - haven't been on a diet, I just got away from the university fast food I guess! But what's hard to believe is that clothing-wise, I'm such a small size (and same thing for shirts - I take a size small), but when I look around me at my friends, I'm somehow among the tallest so I feel much larger than the clothes sizes tell me.
Maybe I'm just really twiggy. I still can't seem to find blouses with sleeves long enough for my arms. I'd say the majority of the blouses I own are 3/4 sleeve, a great invention for people like me who can never find a full-length sleeve that fits. On the other hand, I like long sleeves better because they're warmer. We'll have to see what this company does about their office temperatures, but I know I've worked for some companies in the past where I would be dressed up as if it was January in the middle of July, just because they had the A/C cranked up so high. I wonder if they make thermal underwear with 3/4 length sleeves!!
So that's the scoop. New pants, new blouses, new winter boots, new bookbag, and my VISA bill will probably come by parcel post in a month. Oh well. I'll actually have a salary to pay the bill with! (I'm still in awe!)
19:39 Posted in Job Hunting | Permalink | Comments (3) | Email this
11/23/2006
Job Search: Don't bother making sense of it
Sometimes, in the job hunting process, I just have to shake my head at the irony of it all. You'd think that the closer your resume matches the job description and requirements, the more likely you are to get an interview.
Apparently not.
Recently I applied for a job that was so closely matched to my qualifications, skills, and experience, it almost looked like the job description text was plagiarized from my cover letter. It really was that close.
Then there was a completely different job, and all I seemed to have in common with the sort of person they were ideally looking for is that we were both engineers. Not even the same field of engineering! This particular job opening was for someone on the chemical/mechanical/manufacturing side. I'm electrical/software.
So which one did I get an interview for? Right, you guessed it. The chemical/mechanical/manufacturing one that's almost wholly unrelated to my previous work and academic experience. Go figure! The place with the opening that was basically a carbon copy of my talents turned me down without even an interview.
This is not to say I'm not happy about the interview I did do for that other position. I love learning new things and this should definitely be an eye-opening departure from the status quo, even if I do need to sip gently from the fire hose at the beginning. (Question at the interview: "What do you know about injection molding?" Ummm.... I've heard of it - that's about it!) It would be great if I got the job, though the commute would be a killer. I live in the extreme east end of Ottawa, and this place is in the extreme west end of Ottawa, and in between is about an hour and a half bus ride in each direction. Yikes! That's three hours a day just sitting on the bus. Anyway, I'll cross that bridge when I get there. Step one: get job!
13:10 Posted in Job Hunting | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
09/09/2006
Buzzword-itis
I'm not sure how it got started, but I think it's about time that companies stopped using impressive-sounding (yet meaningless) buzzwords when they talk about themselves. Instead, they should just say what they do. Be blunt, for heaven's sake. I shouldn't have to read through paragraphs of mission statement, goals, values, vision, etc., only to find that at the end, the only things making sense were the words "the", "and" and "is". I swear, if I ever see the words "value-added", "paradigm", "outside the box", or "innovative" (or its derivatives) one more time, I'm going to scream. "Value-added" is the one I hate the most. I originally thought there must be some other meaning to it, but apparently, something that's value-added means it's had value added to it. Oh, how clever. Where's a punching bag?
I'm not sure if the dot-com bubble led to out-of-control buzzword use, as an army of cloned vapourware companies all tried to one-up each other. Whatever the case, I think the single-best thing a company could do these days is dispense with the fluffy vocabulary and just say, "We produce software that does [whatever]." As the old adage goes for creative writers, show, don't tell! Don't say you're innovative or value-added - just show us what you do and we'll decide for ourselves. And if you're not that innovative, put your energy into making your product better, rather than wasting your resources on refining smoke-and-mirrors talk that never made sense in the first place.
The same goes for job descriptions. I think I ranted about this earlier. Companies, you might as well leave out the requirement that your potential employee be brilliant and a hard worker. I mean, that's what everyone wants. Nobody will ever advertise that they want someone who's a lazy bum with the IQ of a tree. I'd like to see what it is that makes your position (and your company) unique and interesting. And, of course, I mean you should describe, not just say "Our company has a unique and interesting job for you!" One step up might be: "Photocopy like never before! Sharpen your boss' pencils with the ancient lost art of Japanese pencil-sharpening! Make coffee in the Mayan tradition - grind it yourself, by hand, before everyone else gets to the office, using fresh rainwater that you stood outside collecting all night!". The best option, of course, is to have a job that is actually (*gasp*) interesting for your employees, no matter how recently they left school. :-)
One can only hope!
01:20 Posted in Job Hunting | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
06/30/2006
The Job-Hunting Circus: Part 3
As a sequel to Part 1 and Part 2 of the Job-Hunting Circus rants, here we are for Part 3 - Job-hunting Government-style!
On Monday, June 26, the major headline on the front page of the Ottawa Citizen was "PS [Public Service] faces critical loss of workers". The subtitle below it was "As boomers leave, young people don't want their jobs, new survey suggests". (The rest of the article can be read here.) The premise seems reasonable - after all, everyone knows about the boomers who are starting to approach retirement age. The subtitle makes sense at first glance too, from what I know of my friends' government jobs, namely, that none of them liked their jobs.
However, the article is a bit confusing, both literally and figuratively. Check out this quote in the last paragraph:
"They have to recognize that the market is so different now and will be for a long time to come, and the problem is that public servants are an attractive source of labour especially the older workers and Gen Xers so they will get nabbed and the young ones may go for a year or two to get it on their resume," she said.
*boggle* What exactly did she say? "They" are the Gen Xers from what I gathered from the previous paragraph, but then everything stops making sense about halfway through the quote and goes downhill from there. Anyway, I think what's going on is that they're concluding that the Boomers will retire, the Gen Xers will leave the gov't to make loads of cash in the private sector, and the Gen Y (28 and under) will dabble in gov't jobs for a year or two to get it on their resume, then follow the Gen Xers to the private sector to make loads of cash. Gen Y is the key to solving the long-term problem, but we're barely mentioned in the article.
There were a couple more problems with the article that were more than just the necessity of heavy-duty grammatical parsing. First of all, the subtitle said that young people don't want the gov't jobs, but concluded that young people would get gov't jobs to spruce up their resumes. So in a way, they do want gov't jobs. They just don't want to keep the gov't jobs. Really, then, the problem is not that no young people want to work for the government, but that in general, the job quality isn't very good (which was quite nicely described in the article) and that translates to a retention problem.
The second problem is that, well, it's news to me that they're looking for young people to replace the loss of Boomers. I think they must mean young people = Gen Xers (baby bust), not young people = Gen Y, who are in their 20s. I've given up on applying for government jobs, because as far as I can tell, the resumes and applications go into a black hole. If they are really that desperate for people, they have an odd way of showing it!
In any case, I'm not losing sleep over it. When it takes 8 months to go through a job selection process, and even the chances of them reading the application are about as remote as Harper actually having a plan to replace the EnerGuide and One-Tonne Challenge programs, who would want to apply for a government job? And then, for those who miraculously do get hired, and then usually end up hating their job, while getting raises/promotions only if they threaten to quit, who would want a government job anyway?
I think that's about it for now on the government topic. They have issues, and finally an article has outlined the problem, as long as you can follow the roundabout logic!
I'll conclude with this cute little gem I found in a (non-government) job description recently:
You will be analytically inclined and able to meet aggressive timelines in a multi-disciplinary environment focused on teamwork. You will also have demonstrated an ability to work independently with a great attention to detail while maintaining a high level of initiative.
In other words: we set an impossible deadline. Then you and your team members must have the initiative to figure out how to make us as much money as possible and then have the determination (or stupidity) to work 24/7 to make it happen. (and what’s up with “focused on teamwork” and then “work independently”?) No wonder Dilbert comics are so popular these days...
14:26 Posted in Job Hunting | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
05/09/2006
The Job Hunting Circus: Part 2
Quite a while ago, I wrote The Job Hunting Circus: Part 1, which was a rant about the seemingly common practice of posting a job listing when the reality is that the "competition" is rigged (or just a plain waste of time and money for everyone involved).
This time around, I feel like talking about some of the more general things I've come across in my little job hunt - things just make me shake my head, wondering if I should laugh or cry.
First up, a listing which, in the line below the job title, specifically said that the job was "entry-level". Reading further down the page, the requirements state that the candidate should have two years' experience in each of three different job-related things, plus "demonstrated experience" in a fourth. I think I'm going to just double-check a dictionary for the meaning of "entry-level", because I appear to have missed something. I wonder, then, what the term would be for someone who really does have no experience? "Please-gimme-a-job-because-you-feel-sorry-for-me level"?
Then comes my next pet peeve - job ads which say applications should be sent to: Human Resources [+ address of company], or emailed to hr@[companyname].com. Oh, and no phone calls please. Alrighty. So, assuming all those cover letter books are right, and that companies toss all applications which start with "Dear Sir or Madam", it basically means the company is wasting its time posting applications online. I also suspect that this would be a case of what I described in Part 1 - they already have someone in mind but can't hire them on a whim. They have to drag it out, spend money (bonus points if it's spending taxpayers' money), make the Chosen One wait, waste the time of 150 other candidates, and make the whole process like pulling teeth.
Now let's assume that a company is actually planning to at least look at the applications it receives from a public job posting. I've been to a few where actually finding the postings is already an achievement. Sometimes, the process goes like this.
1. Bring up the company web page (bonus points for having to skip a flash intro, mega bonus points if there's no way to skip the flash intro and you have to sit through the whole thing).
2. Try to find which header the job postings might be under. Usually it's in About Us, second most common is Contact Us. Bonus points if you have to bring up the site map.
3. Click on Careers.
4. Click on Opportunities.
5. Click on Current Opportunities.
6. This brings up a page which is blank except for a button which says "Current Opportunities". Click the nice button.
7. Click on the "Current Opportunities" hyperlink.
8. On the resulting blank page with one drop-down list containing "Current Opportunities" and "Completed Listings", select "Current Opportunities" and click Go.
9. A new window pops up with Search parameters. Leave everything blank and click Search.
10. Click the "View Results" link on the page that comes up.
11. Pull your hair out as the whole thing crashes and you have to start over. (Or, if you're me, find a different company.)
Hey companies, you wouldn't do this to your clients. Why do this to potential employees who are going to be the ones busting their butts to make your company rich and successful?! Your clients would see the warning signs - so will your brightest potential employees.
That's my two cents for the day. I've got more in my "Gotta Laugh.doc" file, so I'll pull more out of there soon. Happy job hunting!
15:45 Posted in Job Hunting | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
02/01/2006
The Job Hunting Circus: Part 1
I've been looking for a job for about a month or so, and even then, not too seriously. (Living with my parents has its merits!) The more I look though, the more I feel like standing back and watching the show rather than actually participating. Gone are the days where you go to school, learn about something specific, and then get a job doing that something specific. These days, it seems, I not only have to be an engineer, but have five years' experience in this, that, the other thing, as well as proficiency in about 20 different software packages, only about 3 of which the university can actually afford, and less than half of which any reasonable person might even have heard of. Then you must be an all-round individual so you need to be outgoing, über-motivated, willing to work long hours (including evenings, weekends, and holidays), serve on the board of no less than three committees, be president of a club (two is better), have international experience, and last but not least, play a musical instrument and participate in a variety of rewarding leisure activities such as golf, tennis, sailing, and/or mountain climbing (a successful Everest climb is an asset). And this is all for an entry-level position which pays peanuts, and is not likely very interesting in the first place. True, there are exceptions to this, but I see enough of these types of job ads that it has actually become funny rather than depressing. When I see some job ads like this I'll try to post on this blog in the "Job Hunting" category, as is this particular blog entry.
The above requirements, however, really only matter if there actually is a competition for a particular job, which is surprisingly, not necessarily the case when a job ad is posted. Three recent situations stick out in my mind.
1. My boyfriend, through contacts, was about to be appointed to a job for which he was highly qualified. Being a government job, the union wouldn't allow appointments to a job, so they set up a competition and posted the job so others could apply. The idea was, if he was that skilled, he'd have no problems jumping through all the hoops, and end up with the job anyway. (A huge waste of time, but OK.) The only problem with the theory was that they included geographical restrictions to the job, which disqualified him from the position. It's a wonder it's legal to do that, since both he and the job are Canadian.
2. Another friend was also almost appointed to a government position because she was already working in exactly the field they needed, and was very qualified. Once again, she had to go through all this bureacratic nonsense of creating a job description, posting it, waiting for applications, interview (when the interviewers basically already know everything they need to know, since they nearly appointed her), and get hired anyway. Of course, well over half a year has gone by in the process...
3. Yet another friend of mine was on the other side of the coin. She saw a job ad that she thought would be perfect, and went to the trouble of sending in her application. She never heard anything back, and later found out (through someone else working there) that they never looked at any of the applications; they already had someone in mind and the whole job ad was just for show. This friend has been making ends meet by working at a deli in a small grocery store for years, a job which she hates and can't wait to quit. She really had her hopes up for this new job. It isn't fair to do this to her. If her application was considered but wasn't as good as someone else's, fine. Life's like that. But to get her hopes up when she never had a chance in the first place? Not fine.
4. The best example I've ever seen though, was a job ad which just made me shake my head. It had all the typical information about the responsibilities of the position, the required experience and education, and so on. At the bottom there was room for notes, and the note read something like: We already have a candidate in mind for this position; her name is [full name of candidate was given right there in the ad]. (I have to paraphrase because the closing date of the position has gone by and the ad is no longer online. I should've copied it when I had the chance, because it was just such a jewel.) For heaven's sake, why bother posting the ad??
All this headache stems from the rule that you have to have a fair competition for every job. I guess the idea was to prevent friends from giving jobs to other friends who weren't necessarily qualified, but were just appointed as a friend-to-friend favour. Fair enough. The current "adaptation" of this rule is just ridiculous though. I didn't have to look very far to find these examples, and they all happened within this past year, so I wonder how rampant this really is! If you want to appoint someone because they're qualified, just make sure they have the qualifications and are suitable for the job, then hire them. Don't put them (or other hopefuls who really don't have a hope) through all this misery. I've seen enough of this for my liking...
14:20 Posted in Job Hunting | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this