Observations on job application procedures
Someone on a library listserv posted a query earlier today about strange documentation requests in library job postings. I composed the following unhinged screed in response, but instead of sending it to the listserv where it belongs, I'm posting it here.
The most amusing and irritating job postings are the ones, typically from municipal and community-college libraries, that demand official transcripts, plus X number of personal letters of reference, PLUS an essay or two or three on some abstruse topic particularly addressing the institution's needs, PLUS completion of an online application. "Resumes are not acceptable."
The online appliation, of course, seems to work only on alternate Tuesdays between the hours of midnight and 5:45 a.m., takes 45 minutes to partially complete, and demands abstruse information that no actual human beings have available. (Do you know the exact date that you began and quit *all* past jobs, including that part-time pizza delivery job during the summer of your sophomore year? How about *all* former supervisors' name and rank and current contact information? Invariably, there is no option for "information not available".)
Note the reference to *partial* completion of the online application. This is all you will accomplish, because after 45 minutes of laboriously retyping the information which one has already organized into a simple, attractive, easy-to-read resume, the "online application" website crashes and loses all the data and refuses to reconnect. No telephone contact information is supplied.
"Ha Ha! Better luck next time, sucker!"
When I compare this to the usual "resume, cover letter, and references" requirements for most job postings at major reputable colleges and university, I am tempted to draw a universal conclusion from my anecdotal experiences : The desirability of a job is in inverse proportion to the difficulty of applying for it.
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Carlos @ 11:44PM | 2004-09-21| permalink
It's true. I recently filled out a job app that asked for all of my addresses for the past ten years. Considering how much I've moved around, I'm lucky if I can even remember what states I've lived in, let alone street addresses.
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Felix @ 11:42AM | 2004-09-22| permalink
Unless the job involved being custodian of top-secret national-security information (say, atomic-bomb activation codes or something similar), that seems a bit excessive.
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Pablo @ 8:45PM | 2004-09-22| permalink
The Evil Veggies once posted a position or two on hotjobs. We were getting over 200 e-mail per day. Of course, very few even met the very specific and explicit minimum requirements. It got so bad, we even called hotjobs and asked if it was possible that the bottom few lines (usually foreign language skills) were somehow being deleted from the e-mails.
Actually finding a "qualified" person (let alone an "ideal" person) was like finding a needle in a haystack.
So it makes perfect sense that an employer would make things harder on 1000 people to make things easier on itself.
On the plus side, if you are qualified and you do spend the hour to apply in some burdensome way, you won't be lost among hundreds and hundreds of unqualified applicants.
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