Okay, for obvious reasons I’m looking for tidbits to distract my thoughts from an OR at Loma Linda Hospital this morning. So God bless the decline in standards of communication that would produce this employment enticement on LinkedIn.
She apparently ignored spellcheck (which we all know can still produce some howlers) to get the “colllege”. But what made me snort my Panera coffee was the “costumer service environment”.
Costumer service must be a new, up & coming field. I do have concerns about whether it’s a seasonal type of thing—heavy around now, but what do you do November through September? What skills are needed for this career? Sewing? Sequins? Being able to find the gear for a Village People revival in under 10 minutes?
& I’m also curious about the location—costumes are huge in Anchorage? Must be, if there’s “exponencial [sic] growth potential”. , But they must have firm foundations in the form of BVDs, or maybe electric socks.
Finally, I wonder about the final sentence that literally drifts off… Usually you see the “…” when there’s a link to a full listing. Sadly, in this case, what you see is all you get.
I looked up the poster, a “national recruiter” for an agency in San Diego. Here’s the corker: she has a degree (May 2010) in “Integrated Marketing Communications”.
I rest my case.
But although I have to question an academic institution that gives a degree in any form of communications to someone who has such a loose grip on the fundamentals, I still thank Nadine for making me smile.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Friday, October 22, 2010
The French are revolting
I’ve been following (from a safe distance) these strikes and protests in France over the issue of raising the retirement age.
I say, “from a safe distance”, because if things hadn’t disintegrated in the precise pattern they did a few months ago, my plan had been to be in country around this time, driving up the Rhône valley and exploring historical French violence from the Romans to the Nazis. (If you’re a New Military Historian, France is fab for zeroing in on the societal costs of war.)
But not so much fun if you’ve paid €450 per week for the smallest rental car available and then can’t find diesel to run it. Or have to step around piles of garbage in historic town centres because the trash workers have been on strike for two weeks.
(The idle inclination does arise to wonder what might have happened if the French had been as vigorous in defending their human rights in 1940 as in 2010; but of course, those were different times. And we’d have a lot fewer doctoral dissertations floating around than we do.)
The issues, of course, are complicated (not that you’d know that from US media coverage). Americans, who (except for those in senior management at large corporations—they’re guaranteed millions whether they’re productive or not) realistically know that they have no hope of retiring at the official age of 65 or 67, don’t get the uproar over having retirement being raised from 60 to 62. But the French can pay in the vicinity of 50% income tax, as well as other “social charges” to the state, which are their side of a contract with the government to guarantee such amenities as employment security, high quality affordable healthcare and recognition that they’re actually partners in this civil covenant.
This has been accompanied by some degree of stultification in the employment social structure: it’s freaking hard to find professional work if you haven’t had your ticket punched at the right universities, and damned near impossible for employers to fire staff for any cause short of mass murder, much less to lay them off. So that when the economy tanks, it’s usually corporations that take it in the shorts.
Which, although not an altogether bad thing, makes it really hard for business to turn on a franc to meet new challenges.
And even though the crisis facing the French pension system makes our Social Security look like a Baldridge award-winning organization (do they still even give out Baldridge awards, or is that just so 90s?), it’s a flat fact that humans do not like you taking away something they’ve become accustomed to having. And since the prerequisite to retiring at age 60 is having put in 40 years of labor, it’s not like the pension hasn’t been earned.
Frankly, although Americans tend to deride the sort of noisy, posturing, violent and yet fête-like demonstrations we’ve been seeing, I admire the French for refusing to go gentle into that good night. They’re showing much more intestinal fortitude in defending their right to be respected for their labor than the US workforce, which seems to have undergone a collective spinectomy. My personal opinion is that we should have had riots in the streets about the time of the WorldCom-Enron-Adelphia mess. If that had happened, the latest round of egregious corporate crimes against the economy might have been mitigated considerably.
I.e., if executive management had seen some negative consequences associated with their acts of greed, they might have considered different ways of turning a few billion bucks.
Instead, all we get are these Tea Party yahoos, whose primary goal is to move us into a state of Redneck Sharia law without any social supports for healthcare, employment security or basic civility. Their goal seems to be nothing so much as returning us to the 1950s, when women and minorities knew their place; Congress was white, male and Republican; and it was always morning in America.
Ironically, they owed a good chunk of the prosperity and security of that era to the gains made by union struggles during the early decades of the century. You know, like the French ones that are taking to the streets now…
I say, “from a safe distance”, because if things hadn’t disintegrated in the precise pattern they did a few months ago, my plan had been to be in country around this time, driving up the Rhône valley and exploring historical French violence from the Romans to the Nazis. (If you’re a New Military Historian, France is fab for zeroing in on the societal costs of war.)
But not so much fun if you’ve paid €450 per week for the smallest rental car available and then can’t find diesel to run it. Or have to step around piles of garbage in historic town centres because the trash workers have been on strike for two weeks.
(The idle inclination does arise to wonder what might have happened if the French had been as vigorous in defending their human rights in 1940 as in 2010; but of course, those were different times. And we’d have a lot fewer doctoral dissertations floating around than we do.)
The issues, of course, are complicated (not that you’d know that from US media coverage). Americans, who (except for those in senior management at large corporations—they’re guaranteed millions whether they’re productive or not) realistically know that they have no hope of retiring at the official age of 65 or 67, don’t get the uproar over having retirement being raised from 60 to 62. But the French can pay in the vicinity of 50% income tax, as well as other “social charges” to the state, which are their side of a contract with the government to guarantee such amenities as employment security, high quality affordable healthcare and recognition that they’re actually partners in this civil covenant.
This has been accompanied by some degree of stultification in the employment social structure: it’s freaking hard to find professional work if you haven’t had your ticket punched at the right universities, and damned near impossible for employers to fire staff for any cause short of mass murder, much less to lay them off. So that when the economy tanks, it’s usually corporations that take it in the shorts.
Which, although not an altogether bad thing, makes it really hard for business to turn on a franc to meet new challenges.
And even though the crisis facing the French pension system makes our Social Security look like a Baldridge award-winning organization (do they still even give out Baldridge awards, or is that just so 90s?), it’s a flat fact that humans do not like you taking away something they’ve become accustomed to having. And since the prerequisite to retiring at age 60 is having put in 40 years of labor, it’s not like the pension hasn’t been earned.
Frankly, although Americans tend to deride the sort of noisy, posturing, violent and yet fête-like demonstrations we’ve been seeing, I admire the French for refusing to go gentle into that good night. They’re showing much more intestinal fortitude in defending their right to be respected for their labor than the US workforce, which seems to have undergone a collective spinectomy. My personal opinion is that we should have had riots in the streets about the time of the WorldCom-Enron-Adelphia mess. If that had happened, the latest round of egregious corporate crimes against the economy might have been mitigated considerably.
I.e., if executive management had seen some negative consequences associated with their acts of greed, they might have considered different ways of turning a few billion bucks.
Instead, all we get are these Tea Party yahoos, whose primary goal is to move us into a state of Redneck Sharia law without any social supports for healthcare, employment security or basic civility. Their goal seems to be nothing so much as returning us to the 1950s, when women and minorities knew their place; Congress was white, male and Republican; and it was always morning in America.
Ironically, they owed a good chunk of the prosperity and security of that era to the gains made by union struggles during the early decades of the century. You know, like the French ones that are taking to the streets now…
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Just another day in paradise
File it under the heading of “never satisfied”: I’ve been in the Bay Area since mid-August & in two months there’s been one overcast day & one day when it actually rained. (My car happened to be parked in the underground garage instead of on the street, so I didn’t even benefit from a natural dust wash.) Otherwise it’s been relentlessly and unremittingly sunny.
I’m not asking for Seattle’s nothin’-but-grey skies. But a little variety would really be nice.
For one thing, I had to pay to get my car washed—I could no longer see out the rear window.
I’m not asking for Seattle’s nothin’-but-grey skies. But a little variety would really be nice.
For one thing, I had to pay to get my car washed—I could no longer see out the rear window.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Recruiters... Chapter 3
Another bizarre encounter of the weird kind with a recruiter (yes—redundant; trebly so, as any encounter with a recruiter is de facto bizarre and weird).
A couple of days ago I received an email from a recruiter for a large security software company. Pretty much out of the blue, saying he’d like to speak with me and what’s the best time to phone?
Before I could reply to give him a convenient time, I got an early morning call—evidently just to chat. He’d found my CV on Dice, but didn’t seem to have anything specific in my line. Wanted to know if I’m wedded to the West Coast (I’m not), reminisced about his time living in Northern Virginia/DC (good times, good times) and finally expressed interest in my qualifications and enjoined me to keep in touch.
Well, the next day it occurred to me to ask a question about entrées into security—you pretty much can’t get hired unless you already have experience and I was thinking that perhaps a somewhat oblique approach might be effective. So I emailed him in the spirit of his “don’t be a stranger” approach. I made my inquiry and asked his advice—usually that’s an invitation for someone to propound on his expertise at great length.
In this case, him being a recruiter, it resulted in resounding silence. Evidently his emailing fingers have been broken since our conversation.
So much for his attempt at bonhomie and sincerity.
On a related front, a job shop recruiter contacted me a couple of weeks ago about a product marketing contract job with an enterprise software company. She didn’t have a lot of information about it, but had found my CV on Dice and wanted to submit my details to the customer.
Well, to cut this one short, on Tuesday I had an initial phone screening with the hiring manager—no further details about the job, just to “get a feel for the cultural fit”.
Only it turns out that she doesn’t even have approval/funding for this contract, and won’t know until month’s end, best case. Only then could she actually start, you know, interviewing.
I suppose it’s a mark of how desperate job shops are to get bums in seats (as we used to say in the UK; and which, now that I think of it, is probably an accurate expression by at least two definitions) that the recruiter is already flinging candidates at the client before there’s even a budget.
The more I work at this the better a convent starts to look. One without any sort of electronic connectivity, much less recruiters.
A couple of days ago I received an email from a recruiter for a large security software company. Pretty much out of the blue, saying he’d like to speak with me and what’s the best time to phone?
Before I could reply to give him a convenient time, I got an early morning call—evidently just to chat. He’d found my CV on Dice, but didn’t seem to have anything specific in my line. Wanted to know if I’m wedded to the West Coast (I’m not), reminisced about his time living in Northern Virginia/DC (good times, good times) and finally expressed interest in my qualifications and enjoined me to keep in touch.
Well, the next day it occurred to me to ask a question about entrées into security—you pretty much can’t get hired unless you already have experience and I was thinking that perhaps a somewhat oblique approach might be effective. So I emailed him in the spirit of his “don’t be a stranger” approach. I made my inquiry and asked his advice—usually that’s an invitation for someone to propound on his expertise at great length.
In this case, him being a recruiter, it resulted in resounding silence. Evidently his emailing fingers have been broken since our conversation.
So much for his attempt at bonhomie and sincerity.
On a related front, a job shop recruiter contacted me a couple of weeks ago about a product marketing contract job with an enterprise software company. She didn’t have a lot of information about it, but had found my CV on Dice and wanted to submit my details to the customer.
Well, to cut this one short, on Tuesday I had an initial phone screening with the hiring manager—no further details about the job, just to “get a feel for the cultural fit”.
Only it turns out that she doesn’t even have approval/funding for this contract, and won’t know until month’s end, best case. Only then could she actually start, you know, interviewing.
I suppose it’s a mark of how desperate job shops are to get bums in seats (as we used to say in the UK; and which, now that I think of it, is probably an accurate expression by at least two definitions) that the recruiter is already flinging candidates at the client before there’s even a budget.
The more I work at this the better a convent starts to look. One without any sort of electronic connectivity, much less recruiters.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Bloody movers
So, I was in an Asian market today, thinking about buying a lobster. This is one of only two places in the Silicon Valley so far where I’ve found a lobster tank. (They also had a tank for blue crabs—live crabs $3.99/lb; dead crabs $2.99/lb, & I swear I’m not making that up.)
They looked a little weedy—a couple had only one claw, but I might still have sprung for one.
Then I remembered that the idiots who packed my house in Seattle ignored my clearly marked signs on which kitchen gear to store & which to move into the, you know, kitchen. So that right now the largest pot I have access to holds two quarts.
So much for a crustacean celebration.
They looked a little weedy—a couple had only one claw, but I might still have sprung for one.
Then I remembered that the idiots who packed my house in Seattle ignored my clearly marked signs on which kitchen gear to store & which to move into the, you know, kitchen. So that right now the largest pot I have access to holds two quarts.
So much for a crustacean celebration.
Saturday, October 9, 2010
500 pound gorilla off my back
As of yesterday, I no longer own real property in Seattle. The deal is closed & recorded with King County.
Thank God!
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Recruiters... (redux)
Okay, latest in the surrealistic world of recruiters:
Last week I was contacted (or “reached out to”) by an account manager for one of the job shops I’ve been speaking with. She had a requisition from PayPal, one of the large users of contract workers (although, as far as I can tell, they all pretty much use contractors as much as possible, as it saves them money & means it’s marginally easier to cut the payroll than to fire “full-time employees”). It’s not what I really want, & the money’s low, but it’s a three-month renewable, & I figure that 90 days would give me room to look around for something that really appeals.
So I reworked my CV to speak to the project management aspects, & then went back & gave her a bulleted list addressing their bulleted list, because God forbid they should have to actually look at my CV to find what I’ve done that would be useful to them.
Yesterday here’s what I got by way of update:
“Just wanted to follow-up with you on the Yahoo position and also give you a status update on the PayPal position. They are in the final stages with another candidate and said that they would circle back to me later this week.
“Please let me know if you have any questions.”
I consider myself a bit of a smart cookie, but I have no idea what that means. Am I out of the running for PayPal? If so, why would they “circle back” (again with the biz-speak)? Perhaps this is her way of telling me that if the other candidate turns out to be a raving lunatic with connections to Al Quaeda and the WTCU, the client might deign to reconsider my qualifications?
But what really threw me was the reference to Yahoo. As far as I know, I’ve not discussed any opening at Yahoo with her. Where did this come from, I wonder?
Which leads me to also wonder if she meant to send this “update” to someone else entirely, whom she’d proposed to both PayPal & Yahoo. Or if she actually had sent my CV in to Yahoo for a position, without telling me.
& lest you think this beyond the beyond, it’s happened before. Back in Virginia I’d been speaking with a recruiter for a position with Client X, tweaked my CV to address their job description, got the full pitch from him about what a perfect match I was, & then waited. When I finally contacted him, he informed me that Client A had concerns that I didn’t have a particular type of experience. When I told him that this experience wasn’t in the JD, there was a bit of a flutter & then it came out that he’d submitted my CV to the wrong client.
At least it was wrong as far as I was concerned.
After experiences like these it’s hard to take these people seriously. I wonder how it is their clients manage to keep using them?
BTW, I emailed this local Yahoo/PayPal chick to ask what, exactly, she was talking about. So far no reply. I guess “please let me know if you have any questions” didn’t mean she would actually provide answers to them.
Last week I was contacted (or “reached out to”) by an account manager for one of the job shops I’ve been speaking with. She had a requisition from PayPal, one of the large users of contract workers (although, as far as I can tell, they all pretty much use contractors as much as possible, as it saves them money & means it’s marginally easier to cut the payroll than to fire “full-time employees”). It’s not what I really want, & the money’s low, but it’s a three-month renewable, & I figure that 90 days would give me room to look around for something that really appeals.
So I reworked my CV to speak to the project management aspects, & then went back & gave her a bulleted list addressing their bulleted list, because God forbid they should have to actually look at my CV to find what I’ve done that would be useful to them.
Yesterday here’s what I got by way of update:
“Just wanted to follow-up with you on the Yahoo position and also give you a status update on the PayPal position. They are in the final stages with another candidate and said that they would circle back to me later this week.
“Please let me know if you have any questions.”
I consider myself a bit of a smart cookie, but I have no idea what that means. Am I out of the running for PayPal? If so, why would they “circle back” (again with the biz-speak)? Perhaps this is her way of telling me that if the other candidate turns out to be a raving lunatic with connections to Al Quaeda and the WTCU, the client might deign to reconsider my qualifications?
But what really threw me was the reference to Yahoo. As far as I know, I’ve not discussed any opening at Yahoo with her. Where did this come from, I wonder?
Which leads me to also wonder if she meant to send this “update” to someone else entirely, whom she’d proposed to both PayPal & Yahoo. Or if she actually had sent my CV in to Yahoo for a position, without telling me.
& lest you think this beyond the beyond, it’s happened before. Back in Virginia I’d been speaking with a recruiter for a position with Client X, tweaked my CV to address their job description, got the full pitch from him about what a perfect match I was, & then waited. When I finally contacted him, he informed me that Client A had concerns that I didn’t have a particular type of experience. When I told him that this experience wasn’t in the JD, there was a bit of a flutter & then it came out that he’d submitted my CV to the wrong client.
At least it was wrong as far as I was concerned.
After experiences like these it’s hard to take these people seriously. I wonder how it is their clients manage to keep using them?
BTW, I emailed this local Yahoo/PayPal chick to ask what, exactly, she was talking about. So far no reply. I guess “please let me know if you have any questions” didn’t mean she would actually provide answers to them.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Biz-speak 2.0 redux
Can it possibly be more than two years since I last took on the issue of the subset of business blather that we know as buzzword bingo?
Marlys Harris of Money Watch has stepped in to update us. (Came to me via the Soapbox maven.) A couple of thoughts on her list:
In addition to “human capital” I’ve also recently seen “talent management” to refer to HR. I suppose, like giving employees thank-you notes instead of pay raises, describing them as capital or talent is supposed to disguise the fact that they’re still treated like chattel.
Akin to “transparent” is “visibility”. You can’t be aware of something going on, you have to have visibility of it. Must be the noun—it can’t be visible to you, you must have visibility of it.
One monstrosity that pervaded the organization I recently fled was “learnings”. Evidently the legitimate “lessons” is insufficient, so they had to turn the gerund into a bastardized plural form to describe the aftermath of failed projects.
“Take-away” was big, too. I lost interest when I realized they weren’t talking about Chinese food.
And one of my bêtes-noires (mentioned in my earlier post) is still “socialize”, meaning to make others aware of something. There was a lot of that sort of socializing going on. And “circling back”; not to mention circling wagons.
What would you add to the list?
Marlys Harris of Money Watch has stepped in to update us. (Came to me via the Soapbox maven.) A couple of thoughts on her list:
In addition to “human capital” I’ve also recently seen “talent management” to refer to HR. I suppose, like giving employees thank-you notes instead of pay raises, describing them as capital or talent is supposed to disguise the fact that they’re still treated like chattel.
Akin to “transparent” is “visibility”. You can’t be aware of something going on, you have to have visibility of it. Must be the noun—it can’t be visible to you, you must have visibility of it.
One monstrosity that pervaded the organization I recently fled was “learnings”. Evidently the legitimate “lessons” is insufficient, so they had to turn the gerund into a bastardized plural form to describe the aftermath of failed projects.
“Take-away” was big, too. I lost interest when I realized they weren’t talking about Chinese food.
And one of my bêtes-noires (mentioned in my earlier post) is still “socialize”, meaning to make others aware of something. There was a lot of that sort of socializing going on. And “circling back”; not to mention circling wagons.
What would you add to the list?
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
The coffee house connection
Interesting (to me) story by Malcolm Gladwell in the WSJ about writing in public places.
I’ve done this for years in the old-style way: journal and fountain pen, in cafés and restaurants across several countries. There’s something about the nib of a good fountain pen scratching across a blank page of lined paper that’s incredibly satisfying. In a pinch, I’ll use a roller-ball, but heaven for me is an Italian pen, a journal and a café table.
Up until my move to the Valley they call Silicon, however, I didn’t get the attraction of people sitting in coffee shops frantically tap-tap-tapping on their laptops, trying to look extraordinarily important instead of like cheapos who won’t spring for high speed broadband at home. (Or like the out-of-work waiting for the employment commission office to open.)
Now that I am myself unemployed (or “between gigs”, as we used to say in Hollywood), I’ve found that I quite enjoy coming to the nearest Panera Bread (where I am at this moment) and haul out the Mini 10 for a quick trawl through Dice’s latest postings or to answer a couple of emails. I prefer Panera to coffee shops because I can get free refills here, and the staff are actually quite amiable.
Starbucks is out of the question because if their coffee were free it still wouldn’t be drinkable. I’ve never understood how they retained market share once other shops opened that actually serve potable beverages.
A coffee shop is a great place to eavesdrop—business meetings (I learned a lot about the current state of non-profits and social networking here a couple of weeks ago), family dynamics and just plain gossip (there’s quite a lively discussion going on in Spanish at the next booth as I write this; I can make out about 20% of it). If you’re stuck for story ideas, coffee houses and beauty salons are the place to go.
(Reminds me—I need to find someone to cut my hair locally.)
But what’s important to me right now is that being out in public, in one place for a length of time, gives me the chance to interact with people casually—a change from talking with recruiters and interviewing with hiring managers. It may be a sad state of affairs that right now being greeted as a regular at Panera is comforting, but these days, I’ll take what I can get.
I’ve done this for years in the old-style way: journal and fountain pen, in cafés and restaurants across several countries. There’s something about the nib of a good fountain pen scratching across a blank page of lined paper that’s incredibly satisfying. In a pinch, I’ll use a roller-ball, but heaven for me is an Italian pen, a journal and a café table.
Up until my move to the Valley they call Silicon, however, I didn’t get the attraction of people sitting in coffee shops frantically tap-tap-tapping on their laptops, trying to look extraordinarily important instead of like cheapos who won’t spring for high speed broadband at home. (Or like the out-of-work waiting for the employment commission office to open.)
Now that I am myself unemployed (or “between gigs”, as we used to say in Hollywood), I’ve found that I quite enjoy coming to the nearest Panera Bread (where I am at this moment) and haul out the Mini 10 for a quick trawl through Dice’s latest postings or to answer a couple of emails. I prefer Panera to coffee shops because I can get free refills here, and the staff are actually quite amiable.
Starbucks is out of the question because if their coffee were free it still wouldn’t be drinkable. I’ve never understood how they retained market share once other shops opened that actually serve potable beverages.
A coffee shop is a great place to eavesdrop—business meetings (I learned a lot about the current state of non-profits and social networking here a couple of weeks ago), family dynamics and just plain gossip (there’s quite a lively discussion going on in Spanish at the next booth as I write this; I can make out about 20% of it). If you’re stuck for story ideas, coffee houses and beauty salons are the place to go.
(Reminds me—I need to find someone to cut my hair locally.)
But what’s important to me right now is that being out in public, in one place for a length of time, gives me the chance to interact with people casually—a change from talking with recruiters and interviewing with hiring managers. It may be a sad state of affairs that right now being greeted as a regular at Panera is comforting, but these days, I’ll take what I can get.
The job hunt
Anent yesterday’s interviewing farce, let me say one thing for the benefit of prospective employers:
Thirty minutes of face time isn’t enough to give the candidate a sense of what it is you’re looking for, no matter how many of these slots you string together in an afternoon.
Especially when you don’t seem so certain yourself.
Unless you’re planning on yet another round of togetherness to really talk about the need & my skills, I do not see how you can make an intelligent decision.
(I also don’t get you asking so many blue-sky questions—what would I do to change the overall product that would increase market share, put smiles on shareholders’ faces & make the cover of Time?—for a six- to nine-month contract position.)
I know it would be a crap shoot from my end, & I’m quite glad that my commitment would only be for those six to nine months, if I’m made an offer.
Thirty minutes of face time isn’t enough to give the candidate a sense of what it is you’re looking for, no matter how many of these slots you string together in an afternoon.
Especially when you don’t seem so certain yourself.
Unless you’re planning on yet another round of togetherness to really talk about the need & my skills, I do not see how you can make an intelligent decision.
(I also don’t get you asking so many blue-sky questions—what would I do to change the overall product that would increase market share, put smiles on shareholders’ faces & make the cover of Time?—for a six- to nine-month contract position.)
I know it would be a crap shoot from my end, & I’m quite glad that my commitment would only be for those six to nine months, if I’m made an offer.
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