Let's talk about Title Inflation as a means of keeping salaries down.. I got hit by several recruiters in the last week, looking for "senior" engineers.
One offered slightly over half my usual rate. And when I look at the requirements: a Bachelor's and 3-5 years total experience. Senior, my pink white butt !!
Another offered me a slot at about 70% of my usual rate. Experience level listed as "Senior", and they wanted 10 years total experience.
Come on, people, can't we standardize on a few things ? Like:
Entry: 0-2 years experience
Junior: 3-5 years experience
Journeyman: 6-9 years experience
Mid-grade: 10-15 years experience
Senior: 15 + years
Instead, to "compensate" for lower pay, they're throwing titles at people. Utterly worthless ones. . .
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And hey, how about keeping records ? An outfit pinged me today, after pinging me last month. Still not interested in relocation. Resume hasn't changed, nor has the questionaire they sent for me to fill out. Is 28 days too long to keep a paper trail ???
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And we're back to I2s: companies are now putting out blind emails, and when you call them to ask whether it's I2s. . . .they reluctantly say, yes. Because most of us wouldn't bother responding if we knew for certain. . . You'd THINK the powers-that-be would take note, but this is DC. . . where new suckers arrive by the truckload every week. . . .
Monday, February 17, 2014
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Here I am, a veteran, of a thousand job-hunt wars. . . .
(cue Blue Oyster Cult.. . . .)
Several months ago, I got notice that the Contract I was working on was under re-compete. . . and we lost the re-compete. And the NEW Prime wanted to interview us all. . . and said they would hire everyone acceptable to the customer (the contract has had people on it 15+ years from three different companies, most people were long-timers. . . ).
Luckily, I knew better: I had dealt with these farging bastiches before. They shall remain nameless, but the first two letters are "S" and "A", and the last two are "I" and "C".
Immediately, they came in, to start "knowledge transfer". And for approximately two weeks, it was constant meetings, while they attempted to suck our skulls dry. And realized we had a TON of institutional knowledge which wouldn't come cheap. Originally, they promised interviews in late September and early October, followed shortly by Offers. I knew better: they were going to drag out announcing the hiring decisions until after Thanksgiving, when everyone KNOWS the job market is dead, and they could offer employment with a wage cut, and people would take it. I'd seen it before, and they didn't disappoint.
First Friday of December, I get a call from my program manager: they'd released a list of hires, and a list of those NOT hired. And, class act that they were, they left it to my current employer to break the news. . .without even the common faux courtesy letter saying "while your experience is impressive. . .). And there were 38 of us. 20 days to Christmas, and facing a job loss a bit over a month after that.
Merry Frigging Christmas. . . .
I had already started looking, but a few jobs had fallen through. And all of this is prelude, to my experience of this year. So. . . . . welcome to the Job-Hunt Wars. I'll be your intrepid War Correspondent. . . .
*****************************************
Of course, the market was dead until late January: here in The Land that Reality Forgot (better known as the DC Metropolitan Area).
Not sure how it is elsewhere, but every month there are several "Job Fairs" all over the DC Region. All are the same. You provide a resume to get in. . . you provide a resume to each company you talk to. . . and then, a week later, they contact you and ask for a soft copy of the resume. In the meantime, you wait in long lines, have nearly meaningless mini-interviews, and attempt to scarf all the swag you can (Mints, anti-bacterial spray-pens, and corporate logo pens predominate. .. )
And the cherry on the top of it all is, most weren't hiring. They were gathering resumes for "proposal efforts", and, that most dreaded of all Federal Contracts: I2s.
This takes a bit of explaining. I2s is the "Ideas 2 Solutions" contract that covers a substantial part of the Cleared jobs in DC Metro, it's the ultimate flexible personnel system for the Feds: hire people one at a time, and when you don't need them anymore, end the task. Put new tasks out to 11 Prime Contractors, and several hundred sub-contractors, and the resume that hits all the required tasks for the lowest price wins. They put out a job, and you have 7 days to respond with a custom resume addressing each of the mandatory and optional requirements, and they're SUPPOSED to respond to it in 10 working days. RIGHT.
These are the Feds we're talking about. Not only do they not want to bother with reading your carefully-constructed regular resume, they want you to sink several man-hours into each new position you apply for. And then you wait. I know one lady who submitted on an I2s job in AUGUST. She started in FEBRUARY. . .
**********************************************
And then there are the job boards. That now don't want resumes (OK, they want THOSE too . . . ), but they want you to apply on their hinky web-based HR systems, duplicating all the information in your resume. And more: they want all KINDS of detail you don't have . Like the phone number of every supervisor, or where every certification you have came from. Like **I** know, it's a frigging WEBSITE, why do I care where the actual offices are in meatspace ????
Even worse, they won't even CONSIDER you until you get bent. folded, spindled, and mutilated in their particular variant of an HR system: is it TOO MUCH TO ASK for a standard format, so we could upload an applicant file AND a resume and be done with it ??
*****************************************************
Another pet peeve: Indian VOIP Boiler-room "recruiters". You get an email, and SECONDS later, you get a call from a heavily-accented Indian recruiter (and from the background noise, one of several in the room), reading off a script to try to sell you on a contract position. They have keyed off of one or another keywords in your resume, and want you for a short contract halfway across the country, doing something you've never done (and usually isn't your specialty) and for an insanely low rate.
After getting three calls for the SAME job over the period of an hour. . . I decided to look up these firms I've never heard of. All had fairly simple websites, an office in the States, and several in India. So, I took a look at them on Google Street View. One was a UPS Store, one was an Apartment Building, and the third was an unmarked suburban home. Every so often, I get one of them that calls that ACTUALLY has a clue to what I do. . . and those are the ones with multiple US offices, with real office addresses. But still, a bunch of Indian offices as well. . .
*******************************************************
Well, enough for today, stay tuned for another exciting. . . .
. . . .Dispatch from the Job Wars. . . .
Several months ago, I got notice that the Contract I was working on was under re-compete. . . and we lost the re-compete. And the NEW Prime wanted to interview us all. . . and said they would hire everyone acceptable to the customer (the contract has had people on it 15+ years from three different companies, most people were long-timers. . . ).
Luckily, I knew better: I had dealt with these farging bastiches before. They shall remain nameless, but the first two letters are "S" and "A", and the last two are "I" and "C".
Immediately, they came in, to start "knowledge transfer". And for approximately two weeks, it was constant meetings, while they attempted to suck our skulls dry. And realized we had a TON of institutional knowledge which wouldn't come cheap. Originally, they promised interviews in late September and early October, followed shortly by Offers. I knew better: they were going to drag out announcing the hiring decisions until after Thanksgiving, when everyone KNOWS the job market is dead, and they could offer employment with a wage cut, and people would take it. I'd seen it before, and they didn't disappoint.
First Friday of December, I get a call from my program manager: they'd released a list of hires, and a list of those NOT hired. And, class act that they were, they left it to my current employer to break the news. . .without even the common faux courtesy letter saying "while your experience is impressive. . .). And there were 38 of us. 20 days to Christmas, and facing a job loss a bit over a month after that.
Merry Frigging Christmas. . . .
I had already started looking, but a few jobs had fallen through. And all of this is prelude, to my experience of this year. So. . . . . welcome to the Job-Hunt Wars. I'll be your intrepid War Correspondent. . . .
*****************************************
Of course, the market was dead until late January: here in The Land that Reality Forgot (better known as the DC Metropolitan Area).
Not sure how it is elsewhere, but every month there are several "Job Fairs" all over the DC Region. All are the same. You provide a resume to get in. . . you provide a resume to each company you talk to. . . and then, a week later, they contact you and ask for a soft copy of the resume. In the meantime, you wait in long lines, have nearly meaningless mini-interviews, and attempt to scarf all the swag you can (Mints, anti-bacterial spray-pens, and corporate logo pens predominate. .. )
And the cherry on the top of it all is, most weren't hiring. They were gathering resumes for "proposal efforts", and, that most dreaded of all Federal Contracts: I2s.
This takes a bit of explaining. I2s is the "Ideas 2 Solutions" contract that covers a substantial part of the Cleared jobs in DC Metro, it's the ultimate flexible personnel system for the Feds: hire people one at a time, and when you don't need them anymore, end the task. Put new tasks out to 11 Prime Contractors, and several hundred sub-contractors, and the resume that hits all the required tasks for the lowest price wins. They put out a job, and you have 7 days to respond with a custom resume addressing each of the mandatory and optional requirements, and they're SUPPOSED to respond to it in 10 working days. RIGHT.
These are the Feds we're talking about. Not only do they not want to bother with reading your carefully-constructed regular resume, they want you to sink several man-hours into each new position you apply for. And then you wait. I know one lady who submitted on an I2s job in AUGUST. She started in FEBRUARY. . .
**********************************************
And then there are the job boards. That now don't want resumes (OK, they want THOSE too . . . ), but they want you to apply on their hinky web-based HR systems, duplicating all the information in your resume. And more: they want all KINDS of detail you don't have . Like the phone number of every supervisor, or where every certification you have came from. Like **I** know, it's a frigging WEBSITE, why do I care where the actual offices are in meatspace ????
Even worse, they won't even CONSIDER you until you get bent. folded, spindled, and mutilated in their particular variant of an HR system: is it TOO MUCH TO ASK for a standard format, so we could upload an applicant file AND a resume and be done with it ??
*****************************************************
Another pet peeve: Indian VOIP Boiler-room "recruiters". You get an email, and SECONDS later, you get a call from a heavily-accented Indian recruiter (and from the background noise, one of several in the room), reading off a script to try to sell you on a contract position. They have keyed off of one or another keywords in your resume, and want you for a short contract halfway across the country, doing something you've never done (and usually isn't your specialty) and for an insanely low rate.
After getting three calls for the SAME job over the period of an hour. . . I decided to look up these firms I've never heard of. All had fairly simple websites, an office in the States, and several in India. So, I took a look at them on Google Street View. One was a UPS Store, one was an Apartment Building, and the third was an unmarked suburban home. Every so often, I get one of them that calls that ACTUALLY has a clue to what I do. . . and those are the ones with multiple US offices, with real office addresses. But still, a bunch of Indian offices as well. . .
*******************************************************
Well, enough for today, stay tuned for another exciting. . . .
. . . .Dispatch from the Job Wars. . . .
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