What do you do?

So did I. There's an EEOC requirement that jobs have to be posted for X days before filling them, at least for public sector stuff. In this case, I'm really leaning towards it being a computer thing. I feel like my guy on the inside would have told me if there was someone ready to step right into the job.

The lesson here is to make sure that your internal referral is ready to jump and go talk to the recruiter on your behalf the moment you submit. I didn't realize he wasn't in the office that day, and I should have coordinated.

At my work, if I'm going to refer someone I submit their resume myself. I assume that our internal resume system takes employee referrals over outside applicants as they've always gotten interviews when I've done this (plus I get paid).

Yeah this was new to me. I was just told to apply, put his name down, and he'd walk over to speak with someone. It seemed strange but it was his idea that I apply so I don't have any reason to assume it was a brush off.

I really think it just didn't get seen.

Update, because the thread has become my own personal jobs blog: Heard via a mutual contact (not my referrer) that my resume looked great but was too academic and they want someone with industry experience. This is the second time I've gotten that response.

Welcome to job hunting in the 21st century: structuring your resume to hit all major keywords.

BrutulTM_sl said:

When they offered me my job as a Telemetry Engineer my soon to be boss called me and asked if I was interested in telemetry. I said that I was and then as soon as I got off the phone with him I rushed to the internet to find out WTF telemetry was.

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My first real job here was solutions engineer. They offered me the job before I even knew what it was

PS it sucked

We really didn't have a long conversation. He did email me a copy of his hotel and flight receipt. Last night all I said was umm no. He said it just wasn't for him apparently. Maybe too many Mexicans lol I dunno. Probably not it's like 98% white here and the shop has about 5 out of 100.

No clue. He called on my work cell phone and I was at the house so I really didn't want to get into it.

BrutulTM_sl said:

When they offered me my job as a Telemetry Engineer my soon to be boss called me and asked if I was interested in telemetry. I said that I was and then as soon as I got off the phone with him I rushed to the internet to find out WTF telemetry was.

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I did pick up a new interview technique from the president of the company here. When he interviewed me we took a tour of the shop and the yard. It took about an hour and he threw in a couple of things that obviously weren't true. Stuff like "We have always used D size plots" when they were C size. "Almost all of our welding is Mig", we toured their submerged arc deal they made to piece large panels together automatically.

He threw in a couple of more and when we got into the office and sat down I brought them up and he said he wanted to see if I knew what I was talking out.

Put it in my back pocket for later use. A couple of others in the office asked me what crazy stuff he told me during my interview because he had done the same to them.

But I have googled a few things that people bring up because it's all made the same but every customer calls it something else. I had no clue what a herseg was. I had to google to find out it was a Heat Recovery Steam Generator was. Looks like a lot of other shit I've done it's just got different stuff inside that we don't screw with any way.

Gotta say, as an ex-IT person and currently as an entry lawyer, Pivot Tables are great for trending or parsing large excel data dumps. But on the same note I've noticed most people look at me blankly when I mention them. Definitely worth playing with assuming you have a large enough feed to make them worthwhile.

I can see that for people just out of college. The stuff he mentioned weren't really questions but comments about what they did. It was really really really easy stuff to notice it was completely wrong.

The QC guy said he thought he did it to see if you would correct the boss when he was obviously wrong.

It would like me asking an IT person a question and he didn't know the difference between a tablet and a server.

A bit late to the party.

In Accounting we use Excel. A lot! Pivot Tables, Vlookups, graphs, charts. All of it. I actually learned how to make a Pivot Table way back in Excel 97 when I was putting together production reports for management. I took over the position as an intern and had to learn Excel really quick. Once I got the hang of them it wasn't too bad. Today you just select a bunch of data, select Pivot Table and drag and drop things around until you get what you want.

My resume hit two pages a few years back. In college they really stress only doing one page until you have enough experience to justify a two page resume. For years I jumped through hoops to keep it to a single page but now I lose too much relevant information by condensing it down to a single page. Once you have certifications, education, experience, computer skills and so on you really need a second page. But for a recent grad or someone without too much experience (only a single job for example) you want to keep it to a single page. In that case if you stretch it out to two pages it actually doesn't look good for you. I still have a single page "summary" version but my two page version is much stronger.

When I interviewed for an entry level Accounting position at a Financial Institute the hiring manager made me take a quiz. If you knew basic accounting it was really easy. It was just a test to see if you had a basic understanding of journal entries and how interest revenue was recorded. I nailed the quiz and got the job. A few years later when our team was hiring she continued to give that quiz and it was amazing to see how poorly some people did. It was definitely a good way to weed out people who had no business in Accounting.

Mist_sl said:

Yeah, my new job is 'convergence engineer' which apparently means 'stare at alarm screens and write tickets until your will to live expires.'

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I actually got hired on as a software engineer because the company didn't have the solutions engineer role defined well enough, but I did no software engineering. It was really a systems engineer type job where I did what I could equate to as pcpartpicker.com stuff for our large business units. The difference was these groups were paying millions of dollars for us to design their systems.

Question for folks about internal referrals. Should I expect some sort of confirmation that my info was received? I've had three separate acquaintances ask me to send them a resume to pass on, but I haven't seen any feedback yet. With normal online apps, I at least get an email that they have my info in the system. I'm not sure how to follow up.

Heylel_sl said:

Question for folks about internal referrals. Should I expect some sort of confirmation that my info was received? I've had three separate acquaintances ask me to send them a resume to pass on, but I haven't seen any feedback yet. With normal online apps, I at least get an email that they have my info in the system. I'm not sure how to follow up.

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Never got a confirmation. Usually just get a call from HR/Internal Recruiter.

One suggestion is to ask the person who forwarded your resume to ask?