Thursday, September 26, 2013

Progress and Frustration

After a relative dearth of relevant job listings, today I found several that were...well, if not promising exactly, not ridiculously inappropriate and with a halfway reasonable chance of me seeing a response.  I applied to five jobs, which felt pretty good.

It would have been six jobs, but the best one was very annoying in the manner that Debbie recently described on her blog -- I went from the job listing site to the company site to the specific job posting page to the page where you can start your application.  And when I tried to do the application, it took me to a new screen stating that the job is no longer open.  When I had seen that the job posting was active (i.e., when I went to the company site and the specific job posting, it opened up the page to start the application), I had customized my resume, so even though I did not have the full time-waster experience it sounded like Debbie did (where it let her input all her information, then informed her that the job was closed), it was definitely a time waster nonetheless.  How fucking hard is it for the company's HR department / IT department / whoever to make sure that when the job is closed that the web site does not allow you to click into the opening and start your application?  Of course, this is the same employer that a couple weeks ago let me apply for a job and then almost immediately sent me an automated email that the job was filled.  Note that this did not stop the job from being open on their site for days afterward.  (I'm not willing to check, but my guess is that it's still up on their site.)

UPDATE:  I just got an another job alert email with that open-but-closed job listed and clicked through; yep, it's still active on the company web site.  Nice.

2 comments:

Debbie said...

Ugh, mine wasn't that bad. It closed between the time I started working on it and the time I finished working on it.

(It re-opened about a week later with no changes at all that I could see. I could have just re-submitted my same stuff, but then I decided to re-do it to take advantage of some of the ideas I'd gotten in the resume-tweaking workshop.)

I wonder if this is an opportunity. Should you try calling them and letting them know? Or saying you want to confirm that it really is closed, because if not you'd like to apply? And then you'd be on their radar as a helpful person? Since this was the best one on that list, it might be worth some trouble.

Sally said...

I hadn't thought of contacting them -- good idea.