Almostgotit.com

Today is Bill Cosby’s Birthday.

A new father quickly learns that his child invariably comes to the bathroom at precisely the times when he’s in there, as if he needed company. The only way for this father to be certain of bathroom privacy is to shave at the gas station.

I wasn’t always black… there was this freckle, and it got bigger and bigger.

You know the only people who are always sure about the proper way to raise children? Those who’ve never had any.

If you are reading this before July 12, 2008 (Happy Birthday, Bill!) something has gone terribly wrong.

The Almostgotits are currently on vacation and this blog is set on “auto-post.”  This blog is also set to automatically accept comments from anyone who has previously commented, so this is your chance to really cut loose…

More articles from the ongoing “First 90 Days” series on CareerJournal.com, and how I do love them!

90 Days: Successful Summer Internships
How timely!  Internships are more popular than ever among college students.  And landing the perfect one is just the beginning.  Here’s how to make the most of your summer internship.

90 Days: Mixing Work and School Requires Planning
I’ve been thinking of this one: whether returning to school to move up at work or to make a career change, being a working student can be intense. Here are some ways to smooth the transition.

90 Days: After a Problem at Work
No matter how careful you are, at some point in your career, you or your subordinates are likely to mess up.  Except for me, of course.  In any case, what can prove more important than the actual mistake is how you and your staff react. Here are some tips for recovering after a misstep at work.

Other articles in the “First 90 Days Series”:

The First 90 Days: Strategic Career Planning  7 terrific “First 90 Days” topics
The First 90 Days:  More on Career (or Life) Planning   And here are 7 more!

I wanted to particularly thank Karen over at Working Girl, who wrote a wonderful post about rejection yesterday. It felt like a warm, friendly letter addressed just to me.  Which — ahem — it (almost) sort of was.    My friend Kathy snuck in and left a comment for the first time yesterday, too. 

I’ll get back to all that self-reassessment crap soon enough.  Meanwhile, am taking a breather and doing something else for the next couple of weeks.

Many thanks to ALL the folks who responded to my post yesterday!  I appreciated every comment you posted.  Additionally, Deb replied to me on her blog, 8 hours & a lunch, as did Ann over at Compensation Force, .  Ann made the good point that it’s a buyer’s market out there, so (of course) job seekers like me have to hustle. 

I agree: yes we do.  But.

Recruiters may feel justified in abusing potential employees, given the current job market.  If they do, they are making a mistake, and their organizations will suffer for it as much as any individual employee ever will.   Which is my whole point.

Also,  I am not making this up:  employers really are employing more bad hiring tricks  than I’ve ever seen before.  At the very least, they give me pause, and in some cases have kept me from applying altogether.  Nor am I the only one.

And who knows?  One of us might have been the player who turned your company into Microsoft.

“Employee needed.  No Calls Please!  Send application to P.O. Box ###.”

One last gripe: blind box ads like these that proliferate in the paper.  No employer or company name is listed, no contact information (other than a post office box) is provided.  And I’m supposed to respond with full personal detail in return?  No f-ing way.

Now I have to confess something.  I interviewed last week with an organization that had posted a blind box advertisement.  I’d seen the ad and had already ruled it out, when a person in my network  called me about the same job.  I submitted my resume and got an interview, but it wasn’t a good fit, and I think both sides figured this out in short order.

But I still have no idea why this particular organization, looking for a PR person no less, was afraid to list its own name in public. Two reasons employers may choose blind ads are (a) to covertly oust a current employee or (b) to hide their hiring activities from competing employers.  Do you want to work for a company that may fire and hire this way?  Do you want to work for an organization that may be trying to underbid its competitor for your paycheck? The listed job may even be your own!

I still have no intention of responding blindly to blind box ads in future.  There remain some intriguing work-arounds, however, which I may try next time a blind box ad catches my eye.  I do like learning how to play a player!  And if this is a new game, I am going to have to learn how to play it, albeit on terms I can also live with. 

I’ll keep trying to be fabulous.  

It’s just that I haven’t seen a whole lot of “fabulous” coming from employers these days, and damitol, can’t it be someone else’s turn to be fabulous for a change?

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Related Posts:
Employers: it’s Your Turn to be Fabulous (part 1 of this series)
Un-Fabulour Employers Asking for Too Much Upfront (part 2 of this series)

Is this guy you?

~The first part of this post can be found here.~

Everywhere I turn, I find advice for the job-seeker. Revamp the resume. Write a killer cover letter. Hire an interviewing coach. In short, it’s all about how fabulous every job applicant must be.

Why isn’t anyone telling employers that they need to be fabulous, too?

If there is a recession going on, and so long as we insist upon using dire, Darwinian terms with job applicants, we ought to be giving the same talk to businesses, as well. 

HR writers, though, seem only to take two approaches.  If not cajoling employees (and potential employees) to behave themselves, they are chuckling with their fellows about how dumb employees are, particularly when the latter expect that “good enough” ever really is.

Meanwhile, I am reviewing potential employers who address me like this:

“Applications submitted without salary history will not be considered.”

Oh, don’t worry, is my knee-jerk reaction. Applications allowing you to decide in advance how cheap you can be will not be submitted, either!

Nevertheless, this also translates into another lost job opportunity, and I’m not sure how many more of those I can afford.

“Submit application along with contact information for three references.”

References up front? No sir. My references are an extremely valuable commodity. As a courtesy to them, and for my own sake as well, I need to prep my references every time I invoke their names, and I’d rather not spend that vocational capital unless I know there’s at least some chance of a return on my investment. I should not be asked for them until I am interviewed, and that used to be the rule. References, once given, can be “spent” by a potential employer at any time, and some lazy employers routinely plow through any number of contact calls quite early on, before they’ve even decided on their pool of finalists.

What if I’m forced to prep my contacts so many times that they themselves begin to doubt my employability? What if a contact is also a current employer, who didn’t know I was applying for a job? This topic of references, alone, is worth several more posts on its own.  I’ve been burned, and I have issues.

In any case, an intelligent employer should do his or her own evaluation before trusting an applicant’s obviously- biased list of references. It’s okay to sniff around. I don’t mind. I’d be honored to work for a smart employer who cares that much about doing a good job search. It’s right there on my resume, so how about contacting my *previous* employer on your own? How about talking to someone you trust who might know me? How about (here’s an idea) actually reviewing my online portfolio and making your own decision about whether my work is good or not? Everyone uses web analytics now, so I can tell when you haven’t!

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Related Posts:
Employers: It’s Your Turn to be Fabulous  (part 1 of this series)
Blind Box Ads: Bad-Ass, or Just Bad? (part 3 of this series)

Creative Commons image by Luna Park

Except for a few very good friends, I am currently ignoring online career advice columnists.  It’s not that their advice is bad.  The real problem with such advice, or any advice for that matter, is that it so often fails in the particulars. 

If I had parented my children strictly according to other people’s advice,  they would be sociopaths and I would be institutionalized by now.  Human relationships just don’t work that way. 

It’s not that I don’t seek advice. I have read lots of parenting books, and with one child entering her teens and another becoming a young adult, I’ve just gone out and bought several more; nevertheless, I don’t ever assume there is anyone out there with more expertise about my particular child than I have myself.  And the same goes with my current job search.

Bloggers, and advice-giving bloggers, walk an especially dangerous road.  We can pontificate for as long as we like without interuption, without editors, and more often than not without even getting much feedback. 

We can get a little weird. 

And every so often, I also get a tiny bit cranky, and find myself reminding HR bloggers, much to their great misfortune, that the employer is only one half of the job search equation, even though the employer’s perspective is virtually always presented as if it were the only one with any legitimacy.  Though employers are, of course, the people with the power to hire,  I submit that the actual power ratio of the employer/employee equation is considerably more complicated than that.  Employment is, by definition, a two-party system.  While it’s fine to keep harping on the one hundred and forty seven rules employees must follow in order to be fabulous, the quality of a company depends just as much on the fabulousness of the employERS.  

Management guru Peter Drucker insists that personnel decisions are the most important ones a company can make.  A clumsy recruiter’s own failure to be fabulous will be reflected in the quality of candidate he hires, either because he may not make the best choices, or because he may not attract the best candidates in the first place.  And that sort of failure is far from minor.  It is, instead, a systemic failure that shall effect (or infect) the quality of the entire company.

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Related posts:
Un-Fabulous Employers: Asking for Too Much Upfront (Next post in this series)
Blind Box Ads: Bad-Ass, or just Bad? (final post in this series)

Last year, it was a terrific party.  The fireflies came out after we’d done picking berries, and we ate and talked and sat around until we filled the country farm house and sun porch and spilled out into the yard where we sat on creaking lawn chairs.  Kids shot off fireworks while the adults sampled jars of genuine Southern moonshine, the origins of which our host couldn’t actually reveal, for legal reasons…

We missed it last night.

It’s complicated.   The Husband got stuck at a long meeting – yes, on Sunday.  The Son needed to have some staples taken out of his head, also on a Sunday, and subsequently discovered that the Minute Clinic model is, perhaps, misnamed.  The Daughter was very mad to miss the blackberry-picking part, even though last year she got two ticks in the process. 

The Mother just pulled out some pork chops, warmed up the grill, and sighed.

Even though her mother is very maddening, I’m very glad that my daughter is willing to load the dishwasher anyway.

I have received three job rejection letters in two weeks.  However,  I met an author at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival who has already received thirty-six rejection letters for one of his manuscripts, and he cheerfully plans to go for an even one hundred. 

I have some catching up to do.

My amazing brother faithfully reads this blog, and has been very helpful with some of the technical problems I run into from time to time. 

He also periodically sends this English major a quick note when I’ve misspelled something.  Thank you, *dearest* brother. ;0)  

Since I also now have completed my most recent set of interviews, and was not offered that particular job, I can now go ahead and post a response to this post about handling rejection by friend Peggy of the Career Encouragement Blog.  

Stay tuned.. 

When Mr. Almostgotit and I were married, way back in the stone age, we bought a Nanci Griffith cassette and played it until it wore out. Many years later, we went to see her in concert, one of the only live concerts I’ve ever been to.

Today is Nanci’s birthday, and since it’s still the holiday weekend and since I’m still playing with Polyvore.com, see, I made her a birthday card.

Q. So, what do Nanci Griffith and the Dalai Lama have in common?

A. Today is the Dalai Lama’s birthday, too, so I didn’t want him to feel left out.

The Holiday Weekend Fun Continues!

I’ve only been to the circus once, when I was five or six.  We got free tickets because my dad was a doctor, and every now and then a trapeze artist misses, or a lion bites someone, so they pay local doctors’ admission, apparently, just in case.  My dad did go to medical school, but he is a psychiatrist, so I think they must have been particularly concerned about the clowns. 

As was I, at the time.