It is very hard to go from an AA working at a McJob to a required PhD working in research which is usually the kind of job I am trying to fill, and my average job candidate resume is the McJob. Usually that means they are just filling out the paper work and spamming the job systems with garbage resumes on some forlorn hope that they will get a job they are totally unprepared for.

The interesting flip side to this is that I recently posted my resume on one of the major job boards because that was the price of looking for jobs at their site. The resume I posted was my teaching resume; I am only looking for teaching gigs, preferably online so that I can go pursue the other things I think are worthwhile, like my startup. What has been flabbergasting to me are the responses I am getting back from recruiters.

I am dead clear what I want to do, the opening preamble of the resume is:

“The idea job will focus on teaching the next generation of technology and business leaders the skills, creativity, thinking, and business/technology acumen to succeed in business and technology. As well, the job will have significant Social Networking, virtual meeting, and online interaction that lead to better comprehensive learning on the part of students.”

Fairly clear cut and dry, I just want to teach, been teaching now for seven years and I really love it a lot as a job.

What has been coming my way though has been a mishmash of job “opportunities” that have no relationship to what I posted online as a desired job description. I have gotten offers to be a program manager for an environmental company selling their environmental products. I have had three opportunities to become an insurance salesperson (and a direct sales job is something I am not suited for in terms of personality or temperament). I have had multiple franchise opportunities so I can go open some form of restaurant which is also something that shows nowhere in my background. The last restaurant job I had was in high school asking “do you want fries with that?” And the military would like to have me back, which is cool I loved the time I served in the navy, but not sure if I am really cut out to be a navy band member at this time. I play a pretty good bass guitar but that is about it, and the navy does not do punk rock.

What this tells me is that not only is there a major disconnect between the people who are applying for jobs that they are not suited for, but to add insult to injury there is also a major disconnect between people who have jobs to fill and do not really look at the resumes that are on the job sites.

With all this not looking, the real talent is getting buried in a morass of people working on divergent ends, where no one gets hired because in the impersonal way we look for jobs, there is no way to rise above the noise. The most frustrating part of my job is going through resumes that do not match the job description, and that is looking like it will be quickly followed by fending off recruiters who didn’t really read my resume.

We often laugh about how finding a job is broken, and now I know it is broken from both sides of the process. Sadly this means that the only real way to find a job is to do this by personal connections. This makes LinkedIn and other sites like that more important than the general job boards that have millions of members. Of all the people I have hired lately, none came from a job board; all came from personal inside recommendations. It is time to seriously make some friends because the public systems are seriously broken from both sides of the process.

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This morning there was a message on Facebook that made me stop and think for a moment, should we delete our Facebook accounts when we are looking for a job?

There are a lot of reasons for doing this, and while your data is still going to be in Google Cache for a very long time (unless you ask for it to be removed) this might end up being the next “big thing” as people start trying to return to work.

Our study found 70% of surveyed HR professionals in U.S. (41% in the UK) have rejected a candidate based on online reputation information. Reputation can also have a positive effect as in the United States, 86% of HR professionals (and at least two thirds of those in the U.K. and Germany) stated that a positive online reputation influences the candidate’s application to some extent; almost half stated that it does so to a great extent. Source: Microsoft Research

While we do want to be social, there are a ton of reasons not to friend your boss, or in some cases post stuff online that reflect negatively upon you, that does not mean that people still do not pay attention to what they are posting online at all. They do, but the connection between public and private is so blurred by social networking that people are failing to make the connection that what they do privately reflects upon the ethics and morals of the HR person who is trolling Facebook (or any other service for that matter) looking at potential hires. If the HR person does not mind drunken partying – then you might be ok to that HR person.

What we have entered is the reputation economy we are who we are online, because that is what people see. For some who are job seeking that might mean pulling your Facebook profile for a while as they are going about job searching. For others it might mean that they polish up their professional contacts, recommendations on LinkedIn, and otherwise change their image to the simple portrayal of the perfect vision of the “company person”.

This is where this all gets interesting, but even more interesting when people believe that they have to dump their Facebook profile when they start the job search. If anyone else has done this, let’s talk about this here, or on your blog, ping back so I know you are discussing it. This could be an interesting discussion.

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If you have ever been fired, then you know that that the first instinct is to pick up that computer and blog about every single misdeed that your former employer ever did. When you are fired you are not thinking rationally, and the desire for revenge for this is going to be running around in your mind. Social networking brings a lot more power to this concept, where a firing can become a public messy process. Flameouts are not new; we have seen them before once with Zed and once with Blognation. Social networking however, and the prevalence that we use those social tools to help ourselves underscores why the right way to deal with being fired is to be the adult in the room.

Yes, you want to flame your company, yes you want to talk about your pointy haired boss, how the company will never go anywhere, but think through the anger and work on what you want to do for your next job. Take a couple of days off, no not touch the keyboard, and watch Jerry Springer, Steve Wilkos, and Maury, back away from the keyboard. You might want to work on your resume, that is a good thing, but do not post it for a couple of days. Read it after a quick two-day break, and make sure that it says what you want it to say first.

The reason for backing away from the keyboard is to make sure you do not axe your next career move. Employers will go out and look at your blog; they will Google your name and your email address. They will find everything you write, and they will use that to determine if you should be hired. If you go on a tirade on your blog, even if you pull it down, Google will keep a copy of it for you, and your next employer to find.

While it seems that no one should have to say this, when you get the layoff notice, it is very difficult to keep your sense of balance. But there is also the ex employer part of the deal as well. Ex employers are going to go troll blogs as well looking to see what is being said about them. Michael Specht brings up about 20 excellent points on the social aspect of being fired, that employers will want to read. From the employer viewpoint, you really want to pay attention to number 7.

Don’t get into a online publishing war over the smallest of things published, sometimes ignoring it is the best option. The more times search engines find a topic the higher they rank it in the results. Also bloggers tend to react quickly and harshly don’t give them additional fuel to write about. Source: Michael Specht

Yes, your ex employees are going to blog about the job, their old co-workers, but if they are smart they will not. Given the flame out scorched earth approach to getting fired is going to happen amongst some, you have to absolutely make sure you do not get into a flame war with the ex employee. You do not even want to do a DMCA take down unless it really is sensitive confidential information. You really, as the employer just want to leave this one alone.

This is going to be interesting because there was not the prevalence or the acceptance of social networking tools the last time the technology industry had a big layoff. The tools are going to be used, and from both viewpoints, everyone has the right to their opinion, but as a blogger, you want to make sure you do not mess up your next opportunity by blogging when you are still mad. For an employer, expect your ex employees not to like you very much, and they will be talking about it.

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It is commonly known that the best people, the ones that that the company cannot afford to lose are the first ones who flee a company that is having problems. What is generally left behind are folks who feel like they must stay for whatever reason, economic, positional, fear, or comfort. That means the boss who is already on edge is busy trying to get more out of people, and even good bosses might be tempted to revert to power and control tactics trying to keep the department afloat that has lost the ones who used to carry the department.

It is also interesting to note that when it comes to layoff’s, it is also those that are often ignore the shadow organization or informal organization that are also the first ones to be fired. Those that cause problems, cause issues, or otherwise have failed to integrate into the companies’ culture over time.

The truth of the matter is that bosses who are mean are the most likely to fail, and most likely to regardless of economic conditions lead to a mass exodus of everyone who makes the department successful.

“When (bosses) are mean their teams do not deliver great results, so they become more fearful,” says Sandy Gluckman, author of “Who’s in the Driver’s Seat: Using Spirit to Lead Successfully.” “The more fearful they get, the more their ego takes control and the meaner they get. The meaner they get, the more the team shuts down and the less they are able to perform.” Source: MSNBC

You can also tell newly minted bosses from old hand bosses, new bosses are more likely to cut the free coffee, perks, benefits, and the occasional gift of a starbucks card because while they have profited from the behavior in the past with other managers, they are looking at numbers, and are more inclined to make their superiors or supervisors happy. An older more seasoned boss will make every argument in the book to keep small perks like that, or go out and purchase starbucks cards for their crew just because they can. Seasoned happy concerned bosses will go out of their way to make sure that the stress is low, the work output is steady or increasing, and doing what they need to do to assuage the fears of their employees. Power crazed bosses will not, and everyone suffers up and down the organization.

It is tempting to try to get more out of a person, but actual productivity has stagnated or fallen in recent years, making it much harder to get more out of people when they are already on the edge. If someone is worried about their job, they are more likely to underperform than they are to try to reach stellar heights of productivity. A Machiavellian boss, an angry boss, or one who is manipulating fear is going to cause a major disruption of an already stressed department or organization.

Your angry boss is going to cost the company more in the longer run than your boss who cares and is trying everything to keep it together. In the longer run, the happy boss is more important to your organization than the unhappy angry boss. You can also guarantee (much like what happened after the technology industry started picking up in 2002) that the minute this crisis is over and history, that people will be shopping for new jobs just as soon as they can. A mass firing followed by a mass exodus a few years later will have serious repercussions for a company.

Add to that the proliferation of blogs, social media, social networks, your company and your bosses are being talked about. People check these kinds of things out, and there are companies that have a very hard time hiring people because of past managers, and past issues with management. Always things to look out for, and the safest thing to do right now is reel in your angry Machiavellian bosses now.

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Frankly as a person who is hiring people all the time, it is more about skills than having enough candidates. Even with the hot and tight market for SDE’s and SDET’s here in Seattle, I have open jobs, I have people to match to them, it is getting the client to settle down and actually hire them.

Depending on which side of the debate you are on, that there is a worker shortage and we need H1B visas to smooth out the shortage, or there is not worker shortage what are you talking about, the view from this hiring manager is that it is really more about the quality of the worker rather than the availability of the worker.

The news is filled with dire predictions that we will lose our innovative headway if we don’t do something, but that is more about the quality of workers. There is so much demand for the top 10% of workers, those that are truly creative and truly innovative that it almost seems like 90% of the market is being under served in the desire to find that top 10%.

Wages are not stagnant for that top 10%, the competition for that top 10% is ruthless, but people are forgetting about the other 90% of the work force that while they may not be solving world problems, are excellent programmers, project managers, technical support personnel, and many other positions that are in a company. It is generally given that the top 10% carries most of the organization, but the odds of getting a true A level player is getting more and more difficult.

That is unless you open up the H1B visa program just for A level employees, which most of us are comfortable enough saying “this is not happening”. From the perspective of the H1B visa worker, we often do not consider, but we should, because they might be getting “bilked” according to Business Week.

Realistically though, there are plenty of workers out there in IT, it is just the level of skills, requirements, and willingness to give up everything for the company that is lacking. This might be the fallout from the dot com bust, or it might also be the aging of the working population where family, friends, and life become more important. Working in a sweat shop is just not as popular as it used to be.

There will be no end to the debate, from my perspective though, I have workers, I know of open jobs, pay rates are established, I would be happy getting people through the interview process and going to work. I see this as more of a skills shortage rather than an actual worker shortage. It is complicated by stagnating wages, high cost of living, and desire for a family life, but it is still all about skills not about “enough people”.

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Nevertheless, one of the community credit bloggers who works as a coder at Starbucks makes a good case for not posting interview questions on line for anyone to get at.

When I posted the interview questions for web developers, security engineers, general questions, and one of the other writers posted interview questions on oracle, I usually find these helpful for me when I am interviewing based on position. Since I have an idea of what I want when hiring, it is usually good for me to have a master list of questions, but it does not mean I will ask them as I have written them.

But the person from Starbucks brings up a good point and their take on it is:

I can think of one occasion where the person being interviewed asked the difference between a dataset and a data reader. He gave one of the most perfect answers I have ever heard, much better than I could have ever given. Right after his answer, though, he was asked to write the code on the whiteboard to load a grid view control and had no idea. If he had gotten the job, i suspect that he would have been googleing really hard to find out how to code any task assigned to him and would have had no chance at solving anything even mildly complex. Source: Community Credit

Note: Cleaned up spelling on this quote.

There are really two points here.

1. Any list of on line interview questions should never be asked directly exactly as is on the internet. Some people are very good at memorizing things, the question should be asked in just enough of a different way that the answer is not immediately obvious.

2. Do not ever rely on random interview questions you find on line, as they might not work for you. While the interview questions posted here are generally good, they like anything generic will never be perfect in total for the company or the person doing the interview. If anything people need to resort back to point number one if they are thinking of using the plain vanilla interview questions, because people will memorize or otherwise do what they think they need to do to get around any process.

If you are in the interview and someone is asking you questions from prep questions that they might have found on the internet, that says a lot about the company you are interviewing for as well. That they are unable to articulate their own internal processes, needs and wants and are relying on vanilla interview questions that they found on the internet. That should be a warning sign for any person thinking of getting a job at that company.

There are issues for both sides of the interview table if the interview has devolved into an interview session that is based solely on interview questions that are available on the internet. That would be a truly disturbing interview to be a part of, anywhere, for any job.

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