Technically Employed: the Survivor’s Tale

I’m going to take a break from the Nokia ecosystem analyses tonight and return to the topic that launched this blog early last year: employment.  Particularly, in engineering, information management and related technical fields.  My career comfort zones.

Some personal bits: I freely admit to being a geek.  I actually love electronics.  And hardware.  And databases.  And designing.  And programming.  And process stuff.  Stitch them together and you’ve created my dream job.   Amazingly enough, I’ve come really close at a few employers.  At The Stanleyworks (now Stanley Black and Decker) I was a drafter who ultimately worked his way up the technical ladder to manage product data and requirements for the Mechanics Tools division.  I was in geek heaven.  Did I mention I love tools, too? 

The Job Search: when HR fails itself

I’m very busily employed now, four weeks into an IT change management role, but still receiving occasional thanks-but-no-thanks emails from former prospects.

For the most part I’ve let the 100-or-so job application dismissals I’ve received go without comment, but feeling frisky with two shiny paychecks under my belt I felt compelled to respond to one today.  I was polite, but wondered: where was my phone screen?

The job search: Hiring the unemployed

I’m going to make another quick request of hiring managers:

If you have a choice of 2 equally-qualified people to hire, and one is unemployed while the other is looking to change companies, please make every effort to hire the unemployed person.  On one hand I’m saying that as someone out of work going on five months who lost out on at least one opportunity to someone who was already employed at another company.  On the other, there is a net benefit to society by pulling from the ranks of the unemployed but not so much by accepting someone who is already working somewhere else.

Thanks.

The job search: Titles and riddles

A while back I implored the warm bodies involved in job posting and hiring to improve upon a few aspects of the process.  After an attractive hyperlink led me down the wrong rabbit’s hole this morning I decided to expound further on one in particular: job descriptions.

The offender today was a listing for an Operations Coordinator.  As a current job seeker who has frequently found himself in such facilitating roles, even without the title, I eagerly clicked the link to view the description.  But they weren’t really looking for an Operations Coordinator at all– they wanted an administrative assistant for human resources.

Okay, by some stretch one could get there… using the same logic that promotes plumbers to Sanitation Engineers.  But wouldn’t HR Administrative Assistant be more accurate for the job seeker?

It reminds me of an anecdote recently related to me by the recruiter who helped get me into my original job with Nokia a few years ago.  He was supporting a client in finding a Packaging Engineer and was passed a resumé that just flat confounded him.  The goal was to find someone with broad experience ranging from product conceptualizing to marketing.  Instead he received an application from a big-thinking grocery sacker.

Anyway, this isn’t supposed to be an Easter egg hunt.  Once again on behalf of job hunters everywhere I am beseeching those responsible: for our sake and yours, please think these job titles through carefully.  The time you save may be your own.  😉

130 down… how many to go?

After a dry spell of job postings from late March to mid April I was able to kick up quite a flurry this past weekend.  I’m assuming the end of March saw many employers freezing recruitment activities until stock was taken of first quarter financials.  At a former employer when things got tough they would release temporary workers for a couple of weeks and then bring some back.   I’ll let readers form their own conclusions on how well that yo-yo show affected the bottom line.

Of course I took advantage of the increase in listings I found, and noticed afterward how thick my stack of application printouts had grown.  I had stopped counting after about 80 so I was curious to see where I was now.

130.

The Unselected’s Tale

I thought I was going to have a happy story to relate Monday morning.  The exciting tale of a humble blogger who, having recently lost one of the best jobs he’s had, found something very similar and wound up being hired.  A Cinderella ending if there ever was one.

But something went awry in the story’s unfolding.  The main character, yours truly, somehow blew a second interview and lost the shot to another candidate.

An open letter to headhunters

No, this isn’t an appeal to remote islanders looking for cranial trophies.  Instead, I’d like to make some requests of those actively seeking prospective employees in the United States.

The current economic implosion has poured hundreds of thousands of hardworking professionals onto a market unable to place them all.  There are certainly jobs avaialble, but many of us are being told we are overqualified for them and summarily dismissed.  Laws of supply and demand are hard at work, allowing recruiters the luxury of being highly selective and weeding out many candidates who could perform the role but may have some deficit on their resumé.

To help both job seekers and people placers, I’d like to ask the following of those on the demand side of this equation:

Will work for kudos

Those who follow my nonsense on jaiku and Internet Tablet Talk are aware that my global role with Nokia was… well… deglobalized.  I’m still scratching my head over this supposed non-headcount-reduction (and can’t reveal much in the way of details) that in my case did amount to one less head in the halls of Nokia.

I’ve definitely applied for other internal positions (I have a month left at this writing) in the faint hope that I still have a shot of staying with a great company.  But I’m also preparing for other possibilities and probabilities, ranging from taking the first paying opportunity that falls in my lap to bracing myself for another long stretch of unemployment in a rank economy (the last such stretch lasted 9 months!).