Are you a Hiring Manager? Are you as frustrated as I am?

So, I have two positions open in the datacenter. I need SysAdmins, and my Senior Developer needs a decent Java programmer. I have retained a good recruiter (not the smarmy kind that just show up with a van load of hopefuls). 90% of the "Active Job Seekers" the recruiter contacts, simply do not return calls. Of the 10% that do call back we've hit a variety of, well, interesting folks.

There was the guy who put on his application that he graduated from West Springfield High. Upon investigation, they had no record of his graduation, but a withdrawl after his Junior year. When questioned, he suddenly rememberd he got a GED in Florida. So, did he lie & hope I wouldn't catch it? Does he not know how to fill out a simple form? Or does Florida look that much like Virginia?

How about the guy that claimed 15 years as a Senior Sysadmin, and no less than FIVE advanced certifications that had no idea what protocol reported to ports 80 & 443 (hint: y'all are using one of those ports RIGHT NOW).

Then there was the kid that had a WHOLE year out of college, no certifications, and scored a solid "yeah, he's OK" on his interviews. Asking price? $80,000/year.

Wanna talk about the candidate that said he would not come to the interview if it was raining? :rolleyes3:

Or, let's chat about the candidate who "forgot" that he was a convicted sex offender . . . . . THREE TIMES :scaredeyes:

Anyone else seeing this when trying to hire folks?

 

hah!!! even i know what ports 80 and 443 are...now that's just funny.

 

We needed to hire a cleared systems engineer and got a great resume. The guy had a Ph.D, advanced certs, etc, etc. The interview went great. But then we got to thinking...this guy sounds too good to be true. Sure enough, he BOUGHT his degree online from a foreign university and had no clearances whatsoever. What a jacka$$.

 

I'm always honest and truthful when looking for a job. It means I will not get as many oppurtunities as people that lie, but I would never want to work for someone under false pretenses.

I am not a hiring manager but am a volunteer organizer so I can feel your pain. I find people that "want to help" but not do anything.

 

I recently was looking for a senior level programmer with the standard languages and web experience. C,C++,Java,Javascript,C#, etc. We had a guy come in that looked really good on the resume. He had "written" books on javascript and html and claimed to be good with C++ and Java.

In the interview I asked for some code examples and he showed me a very simple javascript piece of code that pulled a div tag out of the dom and changed the inner html and had a huge comment next to it that read. "This code is copyright blah blah and was not taken from any javascript code site". It was 2 lines of incredibly simple javascript code and this guy was saying these things. It was clear from that point in the interview that he had no clue what he was saying. A few days later I had to check out the book he "wrote" so found some reviews on amazon. Basically it was blasted for being incredibly incorrect by the few reviewers that actually read the book. It also turned out he was more of a footnote then the actual author of the book. He was a technical reference.

Stories like that one go one and on but that one was the worst I've had lately. We can't find any technical resources these days worth even having into the office. We've resorted to bringing in interns and attempting to train them to the level we need or feeding off our internal contacts. Every hire we've done outside the "chain" has been a disaster.

 

I've always like this as an interview question: "What do you run on your computers at home, and why did you choose that?" This is a good way to weed out people who got into computers because it was lucrative, versus people who are truly passionate about technology and want to understand it inside and out.

I had a taxi driver tell me once how he wouldn't be driving for much longer, because he had picked up a book on HTML and was going to use what he learned from than to get a six-figure job. I'm a big believer in self-teaching, but one book is not going to make you an expert!

Kaos, if I remember correctly, your jobs are 2nd and 3rd shift. I think that dramatically reduces the pool of candidates willing to apply, especially if you are looking for senior level.

 

Actually - it's 1st & 3rd and I don't need seniors, in fact - the younger the better - I can train them up the right way! We need a rather senior Java developer tho. That's normal, very flexible hours.

 

Did you hire him first and then discover the mistruths?

 

I once interviewed a candidate for a Sunnyvale, Ca based job whose resume had a Sunnyvale address, a Pittsburgh phone number, and a current job with Pittsburgh based company. I suspected something was up so I made a comment that it must be nice for his company to let him work remotely. He replied that he actually lived in Pittsburgh and used a friend's address for his resume. His reason for such is that he was willing to relocate on his own and didn't want his resume overlooked because he was not local. I then asked him if he felt it was alright to lie to get what he wanted. He said in this case he felt it was justified. Needless to say it was a short interview with a thumbs down. The funny thing is he asked me about potential relocation packages before he left.

Honestly the thing that I dislike the most about interviewing the typical technical candidate is how commonplace pathetically constructed resumes have become. Maybe it's just a Silicon Valley thing but I am often forced to overlook gross misspellings and horribly formatted/inconsistent text. If we threw out those resumes, there would usually be nobody left to interview.

 

No, we verify everything beforehand (like we had our security POC get his personal info first so that we could verify clearances).

 

Sounds like age discrimination (don't need seniors)!

 

Kaos,

I hear your pain. I was part of the interview process with our new hire and one of the requirements was ability to write and use a computer effieicntly. The lady we ended up hiring had no writing experience and used a computer very little. My manager actually passed up on someone who had an Associates in Communications. I'd love to get a job in the tech field, but I tried C++ in college and never got it. I did take a web design class in college in '96 and we used Microsoft Frontpage, but my buddy and I learned basic hardcoding so we did ours that way. Too bad I never stuck with that. Web design has always been an interest to me.

 

Senior SysAdmins (silly person!). I actually had a retired guy on my night crew for quite a while. But the commut got to be too much - from Boston. :scaredeyes:

 

I’ve been in your position in the past and have a couple recommendations for you.
1. Military Veterans. For the most part, these people may not come in with all the desired skills, but they are generally drug free, show up for work at the designated time, complete the work on time or ask for help when they can’t and have some level of discipline and leadership skills, but mostly they are motivated to learn new skills. Certainly not all are the ideal candidate, but I found they’ve had the training to know how to learn and are eager to do so. After going through numerous employees with similar stories as yours, spending a huge amount of time managing losers, I resorted to almost exclusively hiring vets in my previous position.

2. If you are interested, Walter Reed has a retraining program for Wounded Warriors. These are people who have received some type of disability while serving our country and are now being retrained in the IT profession. There is currently a Microsoft and maybe a Cisco academy on site where they are being trained. I’ve worked with these people and you will not find a group of more motivated people anywhere. Their skills are generally entry level but if you have a position open, you can pm me and I’ll put you in contact.

Dan

 

Dan - thanks this is PERFECT! I'd love to get a couple of those guys. There are two resumes that go right to the top of the stack - former Military & Eagle Scout/Gold Award/Poweder Horn earners.

 

I wish they had all that nice stuff at Walter Reed when I was there. Instead we had moldy barracks, rude people and no job training.

 

Yes this is a great program. It is too bad we didn't have it sooner, but at least it is here now. My company interviewed and hired multiple veterans through this program and found them very eager to start life anew and provide for their families. Many are still going to school at night, working through the day and managing their lives very well.
Any business would be proud to hire these troops! atriot:

 

I agree, very tough hiring now. GeauxTigers, I would easily thrugh resumes out that have misspellings. If they are detailed enough to write a resume, I don't want them working for me.

 

AMEN! You have a misspelling on the resume - does this mean you can't use Word? Or you think so litle of my time that you didn't even hit F7?

 

Unlike our HOA forums, where misspellings happen, oops...