Magic Pot of Jobs

Oh, my beloved MagicPotHeads, I have such a rant for you today.

The phone rings this morning, and I pick it up: “Thank you for calling [Major International Staffing Firm]. This is Tiffany, may I help you?”

“Hi this is [Angry Woman] from [Client with Spammy-sounding Name]. My rep was [Departed Coworker], and she told me I should be contacting [Current Coworker], but I’ve emailed him several times and I haven’t heard back. And I wasn’t going to use [MISF] anymore, because you clearly don’t want my business, but I thought I’d give you one more chance because maybe there was an error on your end about who my rep is.”

What I want to say: “Well, maybe we DON’T want your business.” What I actually say: “It’s very unlike [Current Coworker] to not respond promptly, are you sure you have the correct email address?”

We go round and round about this until my coworker returns to the office, and I let him deal with her. She was, of course, nasty to him for the whole conversation.

It turns out, she emailed him once. A week ago. And had never actually worked with us before, so none of us would have recognized her name.

There are some lessons here, boys and girls. First of all, email is not so reliable that you can trust it as the only method of communication with someone. We have an aggressive spam filter here that routinely eats legitimate emails, particularly from a client who has a common spam word in its name. No, we can’t control it, and no, we can’t just whitelist a whole domain from the field.

Secondly, why would you just assume that someone is ignoring you if you don’t get an answer to one email? The aforementioned spam filter issue could be causing the problem. You could have gotten the email address wrong. Your message could have just gotten buried in the literally hundreds of messages we receive per day.

Thirdly, why would you wait 6 business days to follow up with a phone call if your need is that urgent?

Fourth, is it really necessary to be a raging bitch? Do you think that’s going to make us want to work with you more? Guess what y’all, in this market, the individual client needs us a lot more than we need it most of the time. We can choose not to work with the assholes.

I went to a job fair yesterday. I hate job fairs. It cost $2100 for a small table in a crowded room, where the jobseekers had to stand in line outside to get in because, even with all those recruiters paying over two grand a pop to exhibit, they hadn’t bothered to rent a room of sufficient size. What a freakin’ racket.

Last year at the same event, my manager decided to take a little initiative and start talking to the people standing around outside. The organizers got angry and told her to stop, saying it wasn’t fair to the other people who had paid to be there. (Um, their lack of creativity is unfair to them?) For the record, once those attendees got inside, they sought my boss out to thank her for trying to help them. They were there to find jobs, and she was trying to give them jobs, until the organizers of the JOB FAIR stepped in. Whatev.

Anyway, here are just a couple of other scattered thoughts about job fairs-

• If you’re going to try to sell yourself to a roomful of people who might be interested in you as a potential employee, and you’re not in a creative field… maybe you don’t want to bring the purse with the blinged-out Playboy Bunny logo on it.
• I realize the black suit is the foundation of the Serious Professional Wardrobe, but is it really THAT much more popular than navy blue and pinstripes? (Full Disclosure: I own exactly one suit. It’s charcoal grey with pink pinstripes, and bows on the pockets. It is not a Serious Professional Suit, because I don’t want to work with people who expect a Serious Professional. Life is too short.)
• If you go to a job fair, bring a big tote bag. Job fair organizers are cheap and are likely to provide you with a substandard bag, but everyone there is going to have schwag and brochures and stuff. Also, bring something to put recruiters’ business cards into.
• Speaking of, why don’t more recruiters bring business cards to job fairs? You don’t have to give them to people you don’t want to talk to, but if you meet someone good, you want them to be able to find you again.
• If you’re charging $2100 per table at your job fair, maybe you want to make sure that the breakfast pastries you provide the recruiters (which are really important, by the way) aren’t so stale that the croissants make a THUNK! sound if you drop one on the table.
• I get total tchotchke envy at these things. The MISF used to have really cool and fun tchotchkes, but lately they’ve edged more toward boring stuff like Post-It cubes and calculators and stuff. So when I see another company with cool schwag, I try to arrange a schwag-exchange so I can come home with the cool stuff.

All in all, I talked to one person who I can likely put to work. She was the first person I talked to, and she got my hopes up, only to have them dashed on the rocks of people who either don’t do what I specialize in, or who are unemployed for a reason obvious to everyone but them. Sigh.

I’ve been getting slammed with trackback spam across all my blogs for the last 24 hours- I woke up this morning to find nearly 150 new ones that will have to be cleared out manually. So I have deleted the trackback script from the server until I can find a good way to prevent it from happening (disabling trackbacks in wordpress doesn’t stop the spam flood). Or, you know, until spamming becomes a capital offense akin to treason or espionage.

If you link to me, I’d totally appreciate a comment in the comment box- I’ve got a pretty good solution for spam there.

The topic came up in the office today about people who transition from working for very small companies to working to very large companies and how happy they’ll be in the new environment. Before coming to the MISF, I worked for a series of very small companies, and there are definite advantages and disadvantages.

In a large company it’s nice to not have to worry about things which are peripheral to your job. At all my previous employers, whether it was formally my job or not, I was always the one who fixed the computers. Now, if I’m having a computer issue, I call corporate IT and tell them to fix it. While they’re working on that, I can go get lunch. It’s nice that keeping my computer running, updating software, keeping virus definitions up-to-date, etc. are all someone else’s problem.

On the other hand, since our IT department is at HQ and they have to keep thousands of Windows PCs across the country running, and most of my counterparts don’t have an IT background, it also means that my computer is locked down pretty tight. If I want to so much as update the Flash plugin for my browser, I have to call corporate IT and explain why I need it (because I place Flash designers/developers, duh). I’m stuck using IE instead of Firefox. But it’s not my job to fix it, so it seems like a fair trade. Most of the time.

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I’m making my reservations now for the Recruiting 2006 Conference in New York City in November. You can spot me in the Blogger’s Corner, fighting the good fight to clue in corporate America about what a little transparency can do for their image as an employer-of-choice. Many thanks to Jason Davis of Recruiting.com for organizing this adventure.

I’ve never been to a conference of this magnitude- at my last job, I was always the one who got left behind at the office while everyone else went to the trade show- and certainly never as a “blogger,” so I’m not quite sure what to expect yet. But I’m looking forward to the trip and hope to post lots from the road.

In the meantime, I’m going to be formulating some talking points about corporate blogging, so I’ll be soliciting your thoughts along the way.

A colleague of mine from another branch who places mostly administrative people forwarded me a technical resume yesterday. I wasn’t that impressed with the resume for a number of reasons, but they weren’t necessarily dealbreakers, so I hadn’t made a decision about it yet.

The candidate called me today to follow up. I opened his resume and tried to get some detail out of him about it, figuring that lots of perfectly good tech people write terrible resumes, and maybe I had a diamond in the rough on my hands.

I didn’t. It was one of the most painful phone conversations I’ve had recently. But that’s not the reason for this post. What I want to know is…

…What do you do when the reason you don’t want to work with the person on the phone is that he’s dumb as bricks?

One of the things I recommend to people for networking purposes is to always, ALWAYS ALWAYS carry business cards. It’s a simple way to be prepared for unexpected connection opportunities. But what if you don’t have a job? Or what if you’re looking for a new one? Or maybe the person you met is really more of a personal contact and you’d prefer not to use your job’s card?

Well, duh, get personal cards printed. It’s so cheap to do it that there’s really no excuse not to.

A lot of people go with VistaPrint because you can get cards for free there, and that’s an okay option. If you do that, though, please just suck it up and pay the extra $10 to have the VistaPrint ad removed from the back of the card. Please. The ad makes you look JV. The other hazard is that the free designs look like… well, they look like you got your cards for free.

So consider other options for the card you give people to remember you by. For those of you with Flickr accounts, a new service just launched that I can’t recommend highly enough. Moo.com’s Flickr MiniCards are little cards with your contact info on the front, and your Flickr photos on the back. You can get 100 cards for $20- 20 cents per card isn’t bad at all.

The Moo application is ridiculously well-thought out and easy to use. It uses the Flickr API to show you your photos in order in your photostream, by set, or by tag. You drag the photos you want into a holding area, and then the system shows you the crop area for each photo, and you just drag the photo around the crop area until you get the desired effect. The system is even smart enough to guess whether the subject of your photo is vertical or horizontal. For a usability dork like me, it’s heaven.

Then you order your cards, and your photos are evenly distributed across the hundred cards. So if you use 20 photos, each photo will appear on 5 cards in the set. Neat!

You’ll get free shipping if you order before the end of September, and they ship internationally (unlike some of the other Flickr photo products). Cheap, unique, and really beautiful. What’s not to love?

Get your cards, and get connecting.

Say what y’all like about the new Recruiting.com format (I haven’t totally made up my mind yet), I do have to say that I’m finding a lot more interesting stuff from other blogs on it.

Like this fantastic post I read today about why big companies lose their best talent. This is a topic I feel particularly passionate about these days.

My favorite one is #5:

Shifting Whims/Strategic Priorities. I applaud Yahoo!’s plans to build an incubator or “brickhouse” around their talent, by giving them new exciting projects to work on. The challenge for most organizations is not setting up a strategic priority, like establishing an incubator, but sticking with it a year or two from now. Top talent hates to be “jerked around.” If you commit to a project that they will be heading up, you’ve got to give them enough opportunity to deliver what they’ve promised.

Aside from just generally hating to be jerked around, top talent craves interesting work, and if you take away their proverbial cookie, they don’t have much reason to stay. If you aren’t providing your top talent with interesting work, I guarantee your competitors will.

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Search for jobs and careers at JobCentral.

It’s been a hard week at the MISF, so my coworkers and I are feeling a little wrung-out, and it’s only Thursday. As a result, some pretty off the wall things have been overheard in our office…

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“No, I don’t want to talk to him right now. I’m in a very important meeting with my chocolate graham cracker.”

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“Geez, it’s like the Brotherhood of the Travelling CrankyPants around here. [Client] took them off and now [coworker] is wearing them.”

——

“They’ve only decided not to give us in the future what they weren’t giving us to begin with. So we haven’t lost anything but hope.”

——

pointing to the office teddy bear, sitting at a recently vacated desk “LOOK at him! He’s not even trying to LOOK busy anymore. Hey, Bear! MAKE SOME DAMN CALLS!”

I hesitated for a while to write this entry, because at least one of the clients in question has the link to this blog, and I didn’t want it to be weird, but… what the hell. (If you’re reading this, hi!)

There’s a confluence of factors at work at a couple of our clients, and we’re having trouble sorting out the extent to which these factors are related.

Factor 1: Our contacts at these clients have presented us with organizational charts showing the current makeup of their departments, the existing staff in those departments, and empty boxes for the positions which need to be filled. In one case, the empty boxes were even numbered in order of priority.

Factor 2: The client contacts who have brought us these charts are also, shall we say, rather attractive people. In one case, it’s a good thing he works with us so much, because I’ve had plenty of time to get over the staring. So unprofessional. And of course, being married now totally helps.

So, here’s the question- and it’s really just for theoretical purposes- would these clients be as hot without the org charts, or do the org charts positively influence our opinion of their overall level of attractiveness? If it’s the latter, exactly how much does it matter?

After all:

• Org charts are geeky, and we’re tech recruiters
• It’s good information design, which appeals to my not-so-inner geek
• It makes our job SO much easier, and being considerate is hot
• It gives us something to show our corporate overlords about how important these clients are

Or is it there a causal relationship the other way around? Do the attractive clients provide org charts to give the opposite-sex recruiters something ELSE to stare at?