The Good & Bad Of The Jobhunt

I consider it amusing to see various law firm networks hit This Old Blog. I wonder if they are old friends checking up on me. Hey send me an email if you hear of some job opening please.

THE GOOD:

5:30 pm, the Friday after Thanksgiving, I'm downtown mailing an application packet. The mail clerk asks me if I want to overnight it. Given the packet only needed to travel about 6 to 8 blocks I replied if it couldn't get there by the Monday deadline something was wrong with the system.

I retrieve my mail today and see a letter from potential job. It simply acknowledged they received my application and forwarded it to counsel. Now THAT is fast turnaround for both them and the postal service! It wasn't a ding letter either :-)

THE BAD:

I took today off for various reasons. Since I had the free time I hunted for job leads. I'm at a large jobbank that could provide leads. I can upload my resume and potentially have employers contact me. Excellent, time for this database to work for me! Sadly you don't simply upload the resume into the database. As a user I must fill out all their forms. My email address is my User ID and I create a password. It doesn't confirm or reject me, but goes directly into the first of twelve screens. Oh great a 12 step program.

Step 2 is Employment History. I start to fill that out, but the form wants exact dates. I don't have exact dates so I'm randomly selecting a day to go with the months and years I do have. Also I'm manually entering job duties, filling out salary histories, job titles and what not. I've filled in two of my seven prior jobs, but I need to meet friends for lunch. There is NO SAVE BUTTON! Did it ever occur to this database developer that someone might have to fill out the 12 steps over a few sessions? I just leave the computer on as I'm at lunch.

It get back from lunch and click "Add Job" and get a timed out message. I wasn't that far along anyway so I start over. I try to log in, but it doesn't recognize the User ID or password I gave it a few hours earlier. I reenter them and go directly to the first step screen again. After about 45 minutes of filling in my job history I wonder who designed such an unfriendly interface. I get to Step 5: Education. The Education screen has no problem with high school, but had no clue what a J.D. was. "Entry not found. Please enter correct value." Okay, this is a free form where I type something in. This form doesn't have preselected options so what does it consider to be correct values? A search screen comes up and after 2 attempts of serving J.D. the database replies with a Peoplesoft session timed out screen.

I guess being a lawyer does make things worse.

Oh, the database still doesn't recognize my User ID and password and I went in a third time to discover NONE of the work had been saved. I decided to not go any farther.

Dear Database Designer and Web Master your system sucks! I have never seen such a horrendous kludge of an interface. That job bank has to be the most user unfriendly site I've ever seen. I can search for jobs easily enough, but did you design the system so clunky to keep people from posting their resumes on there on purpose? Is this a way for evil pointy haired bosses to prevent their cube dwellers from transferring?

I have friends who do database design. I think I'll ask them to put in a bid to redesign that site.