An Open Letter to Costco
© 2024 Mark McWiggins
I have been applying for jobs to Costco (one of my favorite stores) for weeks.
I would apply for one, job then call the next day and say I wanted to talk with the HR chief. The person answering the phone always countered with ‘let me give you the number for our outside recruiter — who never answered.”
I am highly qualified: 30 years of experience in the tech industry and the last 10 years combined management and tech work. I’m also an author (a lot of writing on medium.com including this), much of it directly related to my work including but not limited to:
They are also using Workday, a possibly illegal job search site.
Please, Costco management, call me tomorrow 425–369–8286 and I can tell you how to fix this: for the record:
(a) Try my upcoming site Riverof Jobs.com … this will be much less expensive than Indeed or Workday or ICIMS.
For the record, I am not as negative on Indeed as I am on the other two, for two reasons (a) I think they’re illegal, asking for race information on the front end (before the person is hired, allowing him to be screened out before being hired with a very simple backend tweak.
A more sophisticated nefarious person could set up a scoring algorithm, scoring a person of color with a Ph.d the same as a white C student who’s just out of school the same on their scale, with maybe 1 extra point for the Ph.d. This is much more difficult to detect but if detected certainly could be proven in court to be evil in intent, unlike the simpler one that could have been setup by a team of all white guys (almost certainly) who thought they were saving a step, since this information is probably (I’m not a lawyer but I’m pretty sure of this one) a statistic used by the federal government.
My proposed solution for Costco: (1) Hire me! I can fix a lot of this without much effort. Just setting up the email alias JOBS will produce a stream of candidates that can be easily routed to your selected recruiter, and I can help set up measuring of A/B testing various ads, as well as help route the email to intended recruiter and measure all results. I also intend to explicitly rule in ChatGPT for use by the team in all things.
Or: just try the email fix. I can do a short term consulting contract if you don’t want to hire me full time. Best of luck; Costco is still my very favorite store.
Thanks, Mark McWiggins
Update: March 1 2025
Today I spent from 9am until after 4:30 filling out a job application for Costco for a great job for which I am highly qualified and I could not figure out (a) how to attach a cover letter. I then called 3 or 4 numbers of stores that should have been answering their phones today and got nobody.
Costco: you need help. I can help you, but please call me! 425–369–8286
