I’m sure I can speak for many people when I say job hunting can be stressful, frustrating and down right nightmare at times.  During the past 4 months I’ve had a lot of experience of recruiters, websites, and dealing directly with companies.  It still  boils down to this. Lack of feedback, job descriptions not actually matching what they eventually do employ, lack of updates and well frankly sometimes it’s clearly evident the person at the other end of the mail or phone does not want to be dealing with another application.

I did try on day 1 to use a recruiter, I tried a few in fact. Mother of sweet jebus mary and holy saint jack daniels, would they make you want to throw heavy objects at them. I am not a developer, no where on my cv says I’m a developer, clearly my skills are not developer skills yet at least three times a week I’d get developer roles. After a month of this you just want to scream! Clearly they see IT and sure it must all be the same right! Then if they see Tester, you get sent for dev and test roles, more annoyance! I did try to give them feedback, but at the end of the day they weren’t listening, and they clearly just had a number they needed to fill of  cvs to send to perspective employers!

So then I looked at job sites, now this was a little more useful, monster, totaljobs and more were all handy, upload a cv, a cover letter click search for stuff and bulk apply. Some I’d tailor cover letter for if I really was interested.  More often than not you get a reply saying you cv has been added to a queue you’ll hear back at some point, in fact today I heard back from a job I’d applied back in July! *sigh* really not good enough to be honest.

So then what next, I looked at companies I would consider working for or like the look of or were working on interesting projects. AS I said during these 4 months I’ve view a lot of websites, someone of them could do with a work over for usability never mind functionality! One horrible one to navigate is Rackspace, and I did apply once I finally worked it out, never heard back from them, not even a PFO.

Next up was searching companies out I’d like to work with, looking directly at their career pages, interesting enough to be honest, they changed on a daily basis. I did apply for a few, but when you actually get talking to a manager, what irritated the flipping life out of me was how their idea of the job differed from what the job spec said, so it wasted both of our time. If you want to hire someone to do X don’t advertise A, B or C and if they tick those boxes interview them and then change half way through the process, that’s just damn rude! Think about what you actually want to hire before you put the spec up.

I also tried poking people on irc or people I knew to see if there were jobs going, that was also a good way, and handy to chase up on things to get to know what was happening as feedback was often slow if not present at all. One role took over 2 months to get back to me after the interview to tell me I didn’t get the job, kinda gathered that after 3 weeks of hearing nothing, but it was frustrating.

Feedback, here’s a bone of contention, applying for jobs and not getting any word back, getting to an interview stage and not hearing anything back for weeks is frustrating, nail biting and results in hair pulling!  You can’t afford to lose the plot, you can’t say what the hell are you doing over there make a decision, you have to remain calm and professional, but dear gods tis hard!

Best way I found to find jobs was via twitter and linkedin, I found my current role via someone on G+ who then tweeted me the role. I went for an interview over the phone as I was in Ireland, got back to the UK, went for a face to face and started the week after so about 2.5 weeks from start to finish.  That’s professional and it leaves a good feeling for all involved.

I do appreciate it’s not easy processing applications, but dear companies, you could well do with improving your ways of dealing with applicants, especially if it’s a FOSS company and you’re dealing with communities, you’re going to nark people off and make them not want to consider working for you. Is that what you want? If not, work at better communication, work at better job descriptions and finally look outside the box, people may not meet all your criteria, bug given their enthusiastic for FOSS and their dedication to the community chances are they’re going to kick ass at a role if given the opportunity!

Moral of todays rant, recruiters are horrible to deal with, chase up on applications either directly or giving someone a gentle poking on email or pick up the phone, you can’t afford to just sit by and wait. Finally, look at other sources of job adverts, don’t be put off by twitter and linkedin, lots of roles on there nowadays.