Everytime I post a job opening

[purbeast0]

Me too. Don’t post your job on Careerbuilder, Indeed, LinkedIn, etc. if I have to then spend 30-45 minutes filling out all my information on your own site. When that happens, I close the browser.

I am kind of thankful for those though, because in the end it saves a lot of wasted time for me, because any company that does that I'm pretty confident I wouldn't be a fit culture wise anyways because only huge corporate companies do that shit.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

I never minded submitting a cover letter because it gave me the opportunity to express what was important to me as opposed to how good a fit I was for the company.

 

[glenn1]

I never minded submitting a cover letter because it gave me the opportunity to express what was important to me as opposed to how good a fit I was for the company.

Every hiring manager thinks (wrongly) they have the secret sauce for making good hires. OP thinks it's a cover letter, others throw out any app with a typo, whatever wazoo thing you can come up with some hiring manager has tried or uses now. Not a single damn one of them work and for the same reason there's no simple way to tell if you'll be married to someone for the rest of your life - people lie, people are really bad at knowing themselves and what's really important to them, people change when their circumstances change, and hires and corporate culture need to mesh and adjust to each other.

 

[ImpulsE69]

eh, depends on the job. people don't really care about the suits for software developer jobs anymore, and a lot of people don't even wear one to the interview.

i've owned 1 suit my entire life, a complete suit i picked up for 100$ from a discount department store. and i tied the tie in 2001 and have not retied it since.

I've owned one suit. It is the suit I wore to a second interview where I did eventually get the job. To the first interview (I was completely new to the customer to a corporate/enterprise thing). I wore a buttoned shirt, slacks and a tie. The person who interviewed me first clearly did not want me for the position, so when it was over I was frank with him and asked what I could do better for my next interview. He said that he would prefer I had wore a suit, but that at least I had wore a tie, which was more than any of the other people he had interviewed had done. Interestingly, I got a 2nd interview, so I bought the one and only suit I ever wore...and only wore it that one time. Got the job, and since then my other jobs have been through networking where I didn't even need to bother with dress code or resumes.

I've helped hire a few people at the places I've worked over the years, and I will say I am not a good judge of character at all. I like to assume the best in people, because I was always horrible in interviews.

 

[s0me0nesmind1]

I've owned one suit. It is the suit I wore to a second interview where I did eventually get the job. To the first interview (I was completely new to the customer to a corporate/enterprise thing). I wore a buttoned shirt, slacks and a tie. The person who interviewed me first clearly did not want me for the position, so when it was over I was frank with him and asked what I could do better for my next interview. He said that he would prefer I had wore a suit, but that at least I had wore a tie, which was more than any of the other people he had interviewed had done. Interestingly, I got a 2nd interview, so I bought the one and only suit I ever wore...and only wore it that one time. Got the job, and since then my other jobs have been through networking where I didn't even need to bother with dress code or resumes.

I've helped hire a few people at the places I've worked over the years, and I will say I am not a good judge of character at all. I like to assume the best in people, because I was always horrible in interviews.

Heh, like I said earlier in the thread - a good suit is worth the investment if you really want the job.

Again, not saying it's right. Not saying it's fair - but you would be stupid to not have an easy leg-up over other candidates.

 

[jpiniero]

Don't we have low employment? I mean I'm not here to debate/argue but from what I've heard it's not like there is an ample supply of 100 qualified resumes that hit hiring manager's desks?

There's plenty of min wage jobs out there, but anything that pays half decently is going to get flooded with resumes.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Every hiring manager thinks (wrongly) they have the secret sauce for making good hires. OP thinks it's a cover letter, others throw out any app with a typo, whatever wazoo thing you can come up with some hiring manager has tried or uses now. Not a single damn one of them work and for the same reason there's no simple way to tell if you'll be married to someone for the rest of your life - people lie, people are really bad at knowing themselves and what's really important to them, people change when their circumstances change, and hires and corporate culture need to mesh and adjust to each other.

Many years ago at a previous employer, we needed to hire a systems engineer to help with projects in our global network. We received an absolutely terrible resume - the content and experience was good, but the formatting was the worst I had ever seen and there probably were spelling errors, though I can’t remember for sure. We ended up hiring the guy and he was one of the best guys I ever worked with in a corporate environment. You’re only going to know if someone is worth hiring if you talk to him/her - resumes can be faked, references can game the system, and I’d wager most people use form cover letters they googled.

What you wrote above is absolutely, 100% correct and even more so for technical positions. Let’s face it - companies are having problems filling technical positions and many candidates don’t have to waste time with BS hiring policies. If you require a cover letter from me, at the very best, you’re getting a form letter where I spend 2 minutes changing the company and position name. Even then, you’d better be freaking NASA or somewhere I REALLY would want to work for me to jump through even a little hoop like that. The same goes with online applications - if I click Apply on Indeed and it sends me to a system where I have to create an account, fill out an application, and spend valuable time correcting the resume your system screwed up while parsing, I’ll likely end up just closing the browser unless, again, it is freaking NASA or something. And if it is NASA, I’ll be pissed that they couldn’t come up with a better system.

Local/state governments and universities are among the worst offenders for this kind of garbage which is somewhat ironic, because in general, they can’t attract top talent due to low pay and the draconian bureaucracy many of these positions require in your daily work. It always amazes me to view a list of similar positions and the state government pays half of what private industry pays and universities pay maybe 60%.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

There's plenty of min wage jobs out there, but anything that pays half decently is going to get flooded with resumes.

I think that's the case in any good job market though because let's face it - in general, you won't quickly and significantly increase your compensation unless you jump ship. Additionally, in a good job market, people who work at backwards companies with old-school mentalities can move on to escape the idiocy.

I did a search on LinkedIn jobs for two terms: SharePoint and Azure. There were 37,000 job postings for SharePoint and 41,000 job postings for Azure. So while there may be more minimum wage job openings, that's always been the case and there is clearly a huge supply of highly-paid jobs as well.

 

[s0me0nesmind1]

I am kind of thankful for those though, because in the end it saves a lot of wasted time for me, because any company that does that I'm pretty confident I wouldn't be a fit culture wise anyways because only huge corporate companies do that shit.

I said it earlier in the thread - LinkedIn has gotten me my last 2 jobs (which were promotions/fat raises from my previous). Both times I didn't apply for anything - recruiters came to me. Both times the recruiters were basically able to bypass the initial HR shield.

I highly recommend having your LinkedIn up-to-date with a resume equivalent profile.

 

[s0me0nesmind1]

There's plenty of min wage jobs out there, but anything that pays half decently is going to get flooded with resumes.

I think that's the case in any good job market though because let's face it - in general, you won't quickly and significantly increase your compensation unless you jump ship. Additionally, in a good job market, people who work at backwards companies with old-school mentalities can move on to escape the idiocy.

I did a search on LinkedIn jobs for two terms: SharePoint and Azure. There were 37,000 job postings for SharePoint and 41,000 job postings for Azure. So while there may be more minimum wage job openings, that's always been the case and there is clearly a huge supply of highly-paid jobs as well.

Yeah I'm actually going to have to disagree with jpiniero here - I hear nothing but companies complaining that we don't have enough skilled workers. Minimum wage / fast food / retail are a dime a dozen.

 

[jpiniero]

I did a search on LinkedIn jobs for two terms: SharePoint and Azure. There were 37,000 job postings for SharePoint and 41,000 job postings for Azure.

How many of those are fake though? Likely a lot.

 

[purbeast0]

I said it earlier in the thread - LinkedIn has gotten me my last 2 jobs (which were promotions/fat raises from my previous). Both times I didn't apply for anything - recruiters came to me. Both times the recruiters were basically able to bypass the initial HR shield.

I highly recommend having your LinkedIn up-to-date with a resume equivalent profile.

I get spammed daily from LinkedIn by recruiters, it's annoying to me at this point. I recently turned off email notifications from LinkedIn because I'd get one every few days saying 'You have X requests and Y messages to reply to!'

I'm not looking for a new job though but I do show some interest when I see a remote position that either shows a salary range I'd fall into, or a remote position that is HQ'd in a place I know salary ranges in my field are something I would consider. Those are very few and far between, and remote positions can be SUPER picky due to the amount of potential candidates, so I have yet to land one. With my pay continuing to go up year over year here, it's only going to get harder to find a remote position with a comparable salary.

 

[s0me0nesmind1]

I get spammed daily from LinkedIn by recruiters, it's annoying to me at this point. I recently turned off email notifications from LinkedIn because I'd get one every few days saying 'You have X requests and Y messages to reply to!'

I'm not looking for a new job though but I do show some interest when I see a remote position that either shows a salary range I'd fall into, or a remote position that is HQ'd in a place I know salary ranges in my field are something I would consider. Those are very few and far between, and remote positions can be SUPER picky due to the amount of potential candidates, so I have yet to land one. With my pay continuing to go up year over year here, it's only going to get harder to find a remote position with a comparable salary.

Heh - Yeah my new position is actually a remote position. They don't even have an office in my city.

The kicker for me was greatly reduced travel instead of every Monday through Thursday.

 

[glenn1]

Yeah I'm actually going to have to disagree with jpiniero here - I hear nothing but companies complaining that we don't have enough skilled workers. Minimum wage / fast food / retail are a dime a dozen.

"Skilled workers" doesn't mean anyone with a pulse and a generic business degree from Strayer University. Some jobs actually do require very specialized skills or knowledge although most hiring managers vastly overestimate the amount that do to the high side.

 

[s0me0nesmind1]

"Skilled workers" doesn't mean anyone with a pulse and a generic business degree from Strayer University. Some jobs actually do require very specialized skills or knowledge although most hiring managers vastly overestimate the amount that do to the high side.

Absolutely. I work in tax - simply having a CPA and/or a Bachelor of business doesn't mean they know shit about tax law or tax systems. It's a very specialized niche - especially because mine revolves around implementing systems from a tech perspective while still having the tax knowledge.

Probably the biggest issue is a lot of these companies just lack entry points for people to get their foot in the door of those specializations... they just have specialized positions and expect that they learned it from another employer first.

 

[Exterous]

I'm just wondering, Exterous, do your employees have time to post on ATOT too?

Maybe. As long as they get their work done on time I don't really care.

Reference lists are also dumb - does anyone think I’d put anyone on the list who would say bad things?

Again - you'd be surprised. Our organization has actually not hired a few people because their references were terrible. And we found out 1 person lied on their resume about a fairly major thing. You can also get some additional insights into the candidate that are useful. For example: I found out the person I was hiring had a few very strong type personality traits that tied into his work style. This allowed me to rebalance a few tasks at the start to fit his style. He's very content doing certain types of work others hated. Sure I would have figured it out pretty quickly but this made the transition easier.

Every hiring manager thinks (wrongly) they have the secret sauce for making good hires. OP thinks it's a cover letter

Feel free to point out where I said it was a major factor or secret sauce.

Local/state governments and universities are among the worst offenders for this kind of garbage which is somewhat ironic, because in general, they can’t attract top talent due to low pay and the draconian bureaucracy many of these positions require in your daily work. It always amazes me to view a list of similar positions and the state government pays half of what private industry pays and universities pay maybe 60%.

You should look at major research Universities* or certain schools within a University with a lot of funding. They are able to pay market rate for employees or have a lot of money to throw at contractors and vendors.

*Even if you look at a major research University there will often be a notable pay disparity across colleges and academic units. Even if the school is highly ranked they may not get a lot of grant or donor funding so their salaries are lower. Meanwhile schools that bring in a lot of money can hire whoever they want. Internal poaching is a big problem at some places. Some (most?) of Public Universities have to make pay public so you should be able to look up which schools pay well.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

You should look at major research Universities* or certain schools within a University with a lot of funding. They are able to pay market rate for employees or have a lot of money to throw at contractors and vendors.

*Even if you look at a major research University there will often be a notable pay disparity across colleges and academic units. Even if the school is highly ranked they may not get a lot of grant or donor funding so their salaries are lower. Meanwhile schools that bring in a lot of money can hire whoever they want. Internal poaching is a big problem at some places. Some (most?) of Public Universities have to make pay public so you should be able to look up which schools pay well.

A few years ago, a friend at a major research university (110,000+ student system) contacted me because they needed a SharePoint Architect. So, I thought "why not" and spoke to the hiring manager. Compensation was the first subject that came up, because she was afraid her budget was too low but there wasn't much she could do about it. The max they could offer me was $60K under what I was making at the time. They had great benefits but not nearly enough to overcome the pay disparity. I looked at their pay scales and my salary was well within their Sr. Director/VP salary bands. To be fair, a consultant nearly always makes more than a staff employee, but even accounting for that difference and the benefits, the pay was still too low. I just did a quick scan of the University of Michigan's (another Big 10 school but out of my own state) salary DB to get a comparison, and it's pretty comparable - my salary would be in the Director/VP range there too.

Back to my original story, for my friend's part, he admitted that he could likely go make more money elsewhere but he wanted the generous vacation time (odd, since he doesn't really travel) and he also admitted to me that working there was pretty easy compared to working in private industry. It was pretty hilarious because his wife was always telling my wife how "hard" his job was, but he flat out told me it was easy with little stress (he is a Sr. Virtualization Engineer).

Again - you'd be surprised. Our organization has actually not hired a few people because their references were terrible. And we found out 1 person lied on their resume about a fairly major thing. You can also get some additional insights into the candidate that are useful. For example: I found out the person I was hiring had a few very strong type personality traits that tied into his work style. This allowed me to rebalance a few tasks at the start to fit his style. He's very content doing certain types of work others hated. Sure I would have figured it out pretty quickly but this made the transition easier.

You should be able to grill them enough on a phone interview first to see if they're worth bringing in and not relying on references when 99% of folks are smart enough to pick folks who will give them exceptional reviews. Of course, I have a reputation as an absolutely brutal interviewer so maybe that's just me. 🙂

 

[nakedfrog]

Again - you'd be surprised. Our organization has actually not hired a few people because their references were terrible. And we found out 1 person lied on their resume about a fairly major thing. You can also get some additional insights into the candidate that are useful. For example: I found out the person I was hiring had a few very strong type personality traits that tied into his work style. This allowed me to rebalance a few tasks at the start to fit his style. He's very content doing certain types of work others hated. Sure I would have figured it out pretty quickly but this made the transition easier.

Fortunately it was on a phone interview, but I did have a guy that had a specific application listed on his resume... with the way the interview was going, I was already pretty sure that he wasn't a good fit. I asked him to tell me more about his work with that application, and he said "oh, I've never really done anything with that".
I was just stretching out the interview at that point because management didn't like it if interviews didn't last at least thirty minutes because then they felt we hadn't given the person a real chance. We had a reputation for being tough/picky.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

How many of those are fake though? Likely a lot.

Not as many as you'd think. What industry or field are you in? Technology jobs are EVERYWHERE. I picked two popular search terms and came up with almost 80,000 jobs on LinkedIn. I picked a few more terms with rounded job totals showing below:

.NET: 56,000
Web Developer: 26,000
Systems Engineer: 81,000
Cisco: 31,000
Solutions Architect: 25,000
AWS: 86,000

Don't fall for the political narrative that the market only has vast quantities of minimum wage jobs - that's not true at all. Even help desk roles can approach $50K at some places nowadays, which is pretty decent money in many markets.

 

[jpiniero]

Technology jobs are EVERYWHERE. I picked two popular search terms and came up with almost 80,000 jobs on LinkedIn. I picked a few more terms with rounded job totals showing below:

You can't tell if a job is actually real or not by the posting though. Especially since I reckon a lot of them are from external recruiters who are desperate for work or are just hording resumes.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

You can't tell if a job is actually real or not by the posting though. Especially since I reckon a lot of them are from external recruiters who are desperate for work or are just hording resumes.

I'd probably trust the jobs on LinkedIn more than I would Indeed. Indeed often has multiple posts for the same job because as you say, those are different headhunters vying to place someone for the same position.

 

[brianmanahan]

i think it's safe to say none of us would get hired at exterous inc.

 

[IronWing]

i think it's safe to say none of us would get hired at exterous inc.

You have to learn to decode what is being requested. Cover letter => dick pics.

 

[Exterous]

I just did a quick scan of the University of Michigan's (another Big 10 school but out of my own state) salary DB to get a comparison, and it's pretty comparable - my salary would be in the Director/VP range there too.

Well now I'm curious what title you searched for. IT Directors\VPs at UofM start at $93,000 for the smaller schools and go up through $250,000 (Maybe higher? Their CIO makes like $500k but they have a crap ton of different titles so it makes it hard to figure out where the line is. For example a Chief Information Officer Div is different from a Chief Information Officer for some reason)

You have to learn to decode what is being requested. Cover letter => dick pics.

This man knows how to get hired

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Well now I'm curious what title you searched for. IT Directors\VPs at UofM start at $93,000 for the smaller schools and go up through $250,000 (Maybe higher? Their CIO makes like $500k but they have a crap ton of different titles so it makes it hard to figure out where the line is.

I would have to look again, but the salaries were in in the $100K-$130K range for the directors I saw, for example. There might have been one or two outliers but most were in that range.

For example a Chief Information Officer Div is different from a Chief Information Officer for some reason)

Many large companies have divisional CIOs, who all report to the main CIO. Maybe this is what they do? They might have the fancy title (CIO Div), but they're really VPs at best or IT Directors at worse. I think Title inflation is still a problem and companies sometimes will inflate titles instead of giving raises, especially at smaller companies - if I had a dime for every "IT Director" I met who was essentially a one-man department, I could probably retire.