Stories from my latest job hunt: some stupid, some informational
I recently have been looking for a job again for the first time in a couple of years. Here’s what I found … first, the stupid:
- some companies don’t understand remote work
- age discrimination still exists big time
- some background check instructions are still from 1975
- the crummy resume parser is still used by too many companies
- You look for remote workers when there aren’t enough candidates in the local area. If you advertise ‘remote anywhere in the U.S.’ you can access a larger pool of remote workers by far than if you restricted your search to those within commuting distance.
So WHY say EST only or CST or EST only or one even said “mountain time only” … with any of these restrictions you’re just eliminating a large chunk of potential candidates right off the bat.
A closely related Stupid Thing is “we work 9am to 5pm EST” … for most of us on the West Coast, that’s a non-starter. Even for local workers: why? Couldn’t you work 9 to 3, take a nap, work a couple of hours in the evening and be more productive? What’s wrong with that?
2. Age discrimination wins the Stupid Award … if you have a candidate that can do the job, why discriminate because he or she is “too old?” I’ve even seen ads that say “10 years maximum experience” … why??? Could be they think they’ll have to pay extra for a more experienced worker, but this job was listed over $100K anyway, and we have had a tech slowdown lately … looks like age discrimination to me. The guidelines even say “can take notice of hair/beard color”. (Solution: dye your hair if you’re going gray) … but this also gives the basis for discriminating against … ugly people … black people (still exists, you’d better believe it) …
I wrote this article about the resume scanning system that doesn’t work, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of companies still using it. (I note: the Large Bureaucratic Organization’s contract agency that I’ll be working under is using one that appears to work better … maybe they bought the premium version, or maybe the whole thing got fixed. (Readers?)
4. Background check instructions from 1975 … the instructions on my background check form said “the answers you give here will be checked against your resume” … and if we aren’t able to contact your supervisor listed on the form you will need to supply the two latest paychecks from this job … really?
I think all modern background checks are done electronically with just a social security number and maybe a few more questions like listing the last 3 years’ addresses, etc.
So this large bureaucratic organization (from whom I received a job offer and who I’m very interested in working with) … must certainly be using one of the more cost effective options … but somebody failed to report this to the back end users and contract firms … who are still putting out the 1975 instructions
Now, the informational: … if you want to make sure you have a job, learn data science. That seems to be the most common job listing on Indeed these days.
There is a Udemy course called Data Science Bootcamp that was very helpful in helping me relearn a bunch of statistics that I hadn’t seen since I was in college the first time (Central Limit Theorem? I knew that rang a bell). Anyway, all this underpins data science and the Udemy course covers a huge chunk of it. I think it said “32 hours long” but expect to spend more, especially if you don’t know Python, which is a large part of the course.
Three other tips:
(1) modify your Dice and Monster profiles once per week during your job search, which blasts it out to a bunch of recruiters … I mostly use my mark@pythonsoftwarewa.com email address for this sort of work, and for most of this season my Monster account didn’t work .. I finally reset it with another email address … I have several, but the most effective for a computing job is the ACM email forwarding system that fine organization offers. I used that email address, and that’s how I got the job offer from the Large Bureaucratic Organization I mention above.
(2) Join ACM! They have a fine technically deep monthly print (or electronic) montly magazine, a Digital Library without parallel, and many other benefits.
(3) The resume format. Put everything in the ad on the front page … here’s the Monster one that I wound up attracting my employer with:
That’s all for now … if you have comments, corrections or criticism: mark@pythonsoftwarewa.com. Thanks for reading.
