Never in the history of the world has job hunting been such a royal pain in the ass.
I'm not talking about the shitty job market. I'm talking about the websites. Oh my god, the damn websites.
Six years ago, you could enter a profile on Monster and similar sites, and then apply for those jobs by clicking Apply. That wasn't too bad.
You'd think that six years later, these websites would be even more robust and easier to use. Not all of them are. I have found Monster to be particularly moody. Sometimes it seems to accept my edits, but when I check later they're not there. I never know at any time whether all of my info is up there or not, so I refer people to my LinkedIn or Dice profile instead.
Monster is also semi-unusable in Firefox, much to my profound annoyance.
LinkedIn and Dice are much more reliable, but I have yet to find a good lead on Dice (everything worth looking at there is also on Monster), and LinkedIn is suffering from a bad case of overload, as is USAjobs. There are too many people hitting these sites at the same time. There's nothing like entering lots of information on one of those forms, only to click Save and get an error. Sometimes you can click again and it resubmits okay, but sometimes your info is lost and you have to try again. And again. And again.
Now for the even bigger annoyance: employers post their jobs on various job search sites and presumably also search them for your resume, but because some of these job search sites have performance issues, not to mention that Monster got hacked recently, many (actually, all of them so far) make you go to their own website to apply.
So now you have to enter all of your info. Again.
Some let you paste in your resume and call it a day, but others want you to enter every data element individually. Then you hit Save and hope it takes.
But that is not annoying enough, so a great many of these sites make you create an account with a password.
For Christ's sake. This is fucking ridiculous.
Funniest of all is that many of these companies are using the same forms. It would be nice if I could just enter all of this info just once, into a single password-protected account, and then let them each refer to it at their leisure.
Oh wait, that already exists! It's called Monster, Dice, LinkedIn, etc... (I used to use HotJobs and CareerBuilder, but they never got me anything except phone calls from MLM companies.)
I can understand why companies do this. I really can. There are probably legal reasons I don't even know about. And it ensures that they get all the data they need, even if it's not in your Monster profile. If they don't make you jump through hoops, they get inundated with frivolous applications.
Still, it's insane. My day is way too short already. I don't want to spend hours cutting and pasting the same information in multiple places, but that's my new hobby.
In other news, I may be getting some editing work on the side. It won't pay much, and my first client is a university which means it's going to be reported to the IRS, which means I'm going to have to go legit. But if I get enough editing work, I can raise my rates. Then I'll have to decide how much time I'm willing to spend on fruitless cutting and pasting.
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Wow - that's ridiculous.
ReplyDeleteDidn't we have a way to handle this before? Oh yeah, it was called "a resume."
I'm sure companies have cut their human resources staffs, but it seems to me that everywhere you turn employees and applicants are expected to do the work that human resources used to do. WHAT DOES A HUMAN RESOURCES DEPARTMENT DO, ANYMORE ANYWAY?
They don't fill out forms; they make you do that.
They don't provide you with important information; you have to find it yourself.
WTF do they do????!!?!?!?!?
They've added every technology they can to make their lives easier, which basically means shunting the work off to you. THAT's what they spend their time doing.
What do HR people do?
ReplyDeleteAre you serious?
They provide a "cushion" between qualified job seekers and desperate hiring managers, to minimize contact between the interested parties. Without the HR person's "help," there's a good chance that the manager will somehow pick the person who is the most ideal fit for the manager, job, and company.
Just think how awful that would be for a business, if everyone loved their job and their coworkers.
Also, if there's a dispute between you and your boss, the HR person protects the company and threatens your job.
And they sign severance letters.
(There are also non-useless HR people... I met one once... she eventually quit when the company's new president discouraged her from siding with the humans.)
I would love to hear about HR from the perspective of an HR person, because they really do seem to be useless/the devil incarnate.
ReplyDeleteI empathize with you. To spend your day feeling like you're wasting your time must be enormously frustrating. But congrats on the editing work!
I had a problem with BCC's job site. It said that I could upload my resume in pdf form. I did, and it told me it wasn't a pdf. This was pretty late at night, and I spent a lot of time using web converters from various formats because I don't have Microsoft Word, so I assumed that somehow Open Office was creating a pdf that wasn't being recognized as a pdf. I went to bed frustrated. Then I woke up and thought, I can't be the first person with this error. But since I obviously am, I'm doing something differently from everybody else. And that's when I realized it was Firefox. I switched to IE, the error went away. It had nothing to do with the file not being a proper pdf, it was just giving me an error message that was completely unrelated to whatever the actual error was. It doesn't pay to rebel against the man. :-P
I have the impression that HR departments are badly understaffed and that they pretty much have to side with management in order to keep their jobs.
ReplyDeleteAs for IE vs. Firefox, I keep running into this problem with job sites. (Almost never with commercial sites where you can buy things!) Yesterday I saw a great job in CA that was willing to pay for relocation. It was a civilian job with the Navy. I kept getting server timeouts when I submitted my data, and the data I had entered (not cut-n-paste text, but dozens of tedious checkboxes) was all gone.
Then I finally got it submitted and it complained that I hadn't specified a pay grade, but there wasn't any place on the form to do that.
I had wasted so much time by this point (it had taken me a long time just to get to this form) that I wasn't willing to restart in IE. I'll try again today if I have time, but I have editing to do.
So why don't I just do all my job-hunting in IE? Duh, I really don't know!