Looking for work?

[delle]

Heh.

Not so much lost it as gained a much better one.


I kept the bad one for special occasions!!!!

[Nipple]

There are a couple jobs open at the wireless company I work for.

Anyone want to relocate to Salem, OR and have worked on a wireless telephone switch?

[Sham]

There are some things that you should avoid doing on your application/job interview process. I will list only the ones that I have experienced directly.


Do NOT bring your cell phone into an interview and interrupt by taking an "important call that you've been waiting for".

Do NOT respond to a text message--even if you think no one is looking.

Do NOT stick up your middle finger at a security camera.

Do NOT bring your parents, wife or friends with you for moral support and ask if they can sit in.

Do NOT bring your preschool children with you to run around the office area, because you couldn't get a baby sitter.

Do NOT wear flip-flops on very dirty feet.

Do NOT wear paint spattered overalls with no shirt underneath.

Do NOT put your foot up on the interviewer's desk and rock back on the two rear legs of the chair.

Do NOT wear low cut tops ladies, that make your boobies practically fall out.

Do NOT ask "how many sick, vacation and personal days do I get".

Do NOT show up 15 minutes late.

The dirty feet and the overalls guys were both qualified, but I was so afraid of their lack of common sense and judgement, that they didn't get hired. Boobie lady had a better chance, but she didn't get the job either!

[Bob]

There are some things that you should avoid doing on your application/job interview process. I will list only the ones that I have experienced directly.
Do NOT bring your cell phone into an interview and interrupt by taking an "important call that you've been waiting for".
Do NOT respond to a text message--even if you think no one is looking.
Do NOT stick up your middle finger up at a security camera.
Do NOT bring your parents, wife or friends with you for moral support and ask if they can sit in.
Do NOT bring your preschool children with you to run around the office area, because you couldn't get a baby sitter.
Do NOT wear flip-flops on very dirty feet.
Do NOT wear paint spattered overalls with no shirt underneath.
Do NOT put your foot up on the interviewer's desk and rock back on the two rear legs of the chair.
Do NOT wear low cut tops ladies, that make your boobies practically fall out.
Do NOT ask "how many sick, vacation and personal days do I get".
Do NOT show up 15 minutes late.
The dirty feet and the overalls guys were both qualified, but I was so afraid of their lack of common sense and judgement, that they didn't get hired. Boobie lady had a better chance, but she didn't get the job either!

Unless the job description has "Jersey shore" or "survivor" in the title.

[theCryptofishist]

Do NOT put your foot up on the interviewer's desk and rock back on the two rear legs of the chair.

Not an issue here.

[Elliot]

There are some things that you should avoid doing on your application/job interview process. I will list only the ones that I have experienced directly.

Do NOT....

And that's with a fairly sophisticated business. You all should have seen some of the characters I had to deal with when I was hiring drivers for a 200-truck transportation company! Like the guy who admitted to crashing a truck on purpose in a previous job. And the guy who showed up for his first day of work stoned-out-of-his-skull. Or the guy who told me straight out he did not want a job -- he just needed to document that he was job-hunting. Or the woman who became belligerent when I showed her the scathing report from her previous employer. Or the guy who applied because his wife wanted him out of the house. And the guy who was on probation and not allowed to leave his home county -- applying for a cross-country trucking job. And....

We were able to hire about one applicant in ten -- despite being chronically short handed. After a year, my blood pressure was so high I went back "in the field".

And the winner is....: When repossessing trucks, I sometimes flew out on the company plane, or a commercial flight, but more often I rode with one of our own rigs, sharing the driving to make time. So here was a driver smoking pot in the truck while I was driving, KNOWING that I was affiliated with management.

[AntiM]

Larry had to hire drivers for the railcrew shuttle. One applied with a suspended license. One dodged the drug test as long as possible, then claimed she was taking cold meds. That was for a job which did not require a CDL, so he got all sorts of random applicants. He was management AND a driver, technically kept in his DOT hours, but in reality, he worked 24/7 for pennies. Crappy company, I was sort of glad to see it get bought up by another service.

Truck recovery is how we got our GPS, it was left in a tractor.

[Bob]

DPW put this grizzled older dude on my crew one year, who had a slight resemblance to the old western actor Richard Farnsworth. Showed up with a box truck, an electric freezer full of meat, a few hundred dollars in brand new tools, and a huge bag of weed. Guess they decided to keep him around for atmosphere. Took him two or three days to build a small wooden gate, which was fine with me because it mostly kept him out of trouble. Turned out he had five DUIs, which we discovered when he got popped for another one. And he'd forgotten to plug in the freezer.

[Elliot]

By request, more truck driver stories:

Long gaps in your job history are red flags, so if you take a few months or years off between jobs, document what you do.

Wrong: “I stole a bunch of money and spent those seven months zonked out in an opium den.”

Right: “I tried to earn a living as an artist. Here are copies of the business license, the tax documents, the advertising, the bankruptcy filing, and photos of some of my work.”

Many of the job gaps were drug related.

I had an older fellow who showed no record of working the last three years. Said he had sort’a retired and just helped his wife with her work-at-home scheme. But now he wanted to drive truck a few more years before retiring for good.
For several days I was unable to reach his most recent listed employer. But the man seemed competent, so I told him he was hired and sat him down to watch the required safety videos. While he was watching the videos, I hit the telephone again, and finally got hold of that last employer from three years ago. He told me where my man had gone to work next. So I called there. My man had recently been in a collision and flunked the post-accident drug screen for pot. All I could do, of course, was turn the video off and annul his hiring.

Very similar case with a younger man. He had helped his mother in her mom-n-pop store, he said. Again, I liked him otherwise, and this guy immediately became one of our best employees. That lasted a couple of years – a long time in our line of work. Then suddenly his performance fell off dramatically. He had fallen off the wagon. It wasn’t alcohol or pot, but something else. He volunteered to resign. What a tragedy. I wish we had had a way to rehabilitate him!

More drugs: A fellow was hired with flying colors, including the pre-employment drug test. The next day he telephoned and asked to postpone his first day of work because his father had died. I told him to take all the time he needed. But eventually I telephoned him – and his father answered. The father suggested we re-test his son.

At one point, we were so desperate for help that we sent a rookie out on the road as a trainee with an experienced driver before we received the results from the drug lab. The deal was that the new man would sit in the passenger seat and watch-and-listen until we had his drug clearance in hand. A week later, the truck returned with the rookie still stuck in the passenger seat. His urine analysis result said “Sample not of human origin.”


Now a couple of stories about guys who were already hired, at a different firm:

Longer ago, I spent eight years driving “local” 18-wheelers. That meant I started at 5 a.m. and returned to base ten or 12 hours later. I drove the same truck every day. But we had a night shift, and those guys just grabbed whichever truck they wanted. One morning my cab interior was badly littered with food scraps, spilled coffee, etc. When I caught up with the fella, he chewed me out for complaining about something that was none of my business.
A few weeks later I was doing my usual (as needed) cleaning of the interior, out in the company yard, with my vacuum cleaner, compressed air hose, bucket and rag, old toothbrush and whatnot – when the same fella happened by. His eyes went wide as dinner plates. He must have assumed the company cleaned up after us. He was a lot more polite after that, but he did not last long with the firm.

Stewart The Truck Killer: An other night-shift driver was Stewart The One Man Demolition Derby. Hardly a week went by that he did not bring back a truck with “a fender in the trunk”. He put the frosting on the cake by running over a man at a receiving dock in Fort Bragg. The first report was that Stewart had killed a homeless man sleeping under some cardboard. Luckily, the investigation showed that the bum was already dead when Steward backed the 18-wheeler full of groceries right over the top of him.


Back at the over-the-road (cross-country) firm….

We sometimes hired people with inadequate experience but strong potential. As mentioned above, we sent them out with a senior hand for a week or two.
I trained some of these rookies myself. One young chap was an absolutely exemplary driver -- Mr. Safety First. But when we turned him lose on his own, he started racking up speeding tickets like they were candy wrappers. When I talked with him, he admitted he was a con artist at heart. He soon went away -- when his Driver License was suspended.

On an other rookie-run, a middle-aged gentleman and I were in a hurry to get from Sacramento to Spokane on time for our delivery appointment. So we took turns driving and snoozing, stopping as little as possible. In Spokane, the gent crawled in the bunk and cried like a child. Turned out he was diabetic and needed to eat proper foods at regular intervals. But he had been too proud, or scared, or something, to tell me. Lacking the ability to “handle himself” when the going got rough, we could not use him.

Now the “medicinal cannabis “ case. The applicant informed me right up front that he had been booted out of his previous job for flunking a drug screen. Then he told the story: He had been victim of a violent crime, for which he had extensive documentation. As a result, he had suffered debilitating nightmares. His doctor had condoned cannabis, and this had helped. Now he felt ready to return to gainful employment. He volunteered to take frequent drug tests at his own expense.
To this day I believe him, and I would have hired him. But company policy prohibited it, and my efforts to obtain an exception failed.

I cannot emphasize enough that any job that involves drug testing requires absolute abstinence. It’s just how it works.


Some perfectly good hires disappeared for no apparent reason after a few weeks or months. They would be doing good work, appear happy to be on our team, yet suddenly vanish. The answer came from the payroll desk. Those guys were running from child support or other bills that would be deducted from their pay by court order. We learned to expect this of applicants who had just moved in from another state.


In the original post, Shambala pointed out the importance of making yourself familiar with the prospective employer and the nature of its business.
A personable young man applied at the over-the-road company – where the drivers are out of town for a week or three at the time. He made the grade as a trainee, and we sent him eastward with a seasoned driver. They made it as far as Salt Lake City when the new kid started screaming bloody murder to get back home to Sacramento mucho pronto. Turned out, he had just gotten married!

[AntiM]

There's a reason Central loves MyLarry. Central has four flatbeds in a fleet of 1800 trucks (used to be eight). Guys think they want on the flatbeds because they are kinda local, and are home frequently (2~3 times a week). The they discover that unlike reefers, flatbeds mean a lot of very physical work.

One of the flatbedders was hauled off to jail right by the side of the road. I think he had been pulled over and warned about something minor, turns out he'd gotten his license suspended, and was told to park it and wait until the company could get another driver out to where he was. He pulled away, right in front of the troopers. He was the one who wouldn't keep his logs straight, ruined loads of wall board by not tarping, and was generally a filthy person who never showered, so everyone was glad to see him go; he'd been skating thin ice for months. The guys had to use a gallon of Febreeze just to get the truck back to West Valley.

No speeders in Central trucks, they're governed quite low. My SIL's sister drove for Central briefly, she had three accidents in one day and they booted her.

[Sham]

[quote="Elliot"]We were able to hire about one applicant in ten -- despite being chronically short handed.[/quote]

Allow me to build on Elliot's statement above. (he is 100% right, by the way)

What I am suggesting in this thread is that you simply play directly toward what the employer is looking for. Dress, appearance, demenor, attitude, enthusiasm etc. PERIOD! Nine out of ten people will be asking about vacation time, and YOU my dear burner friends will be snagging the job, because you are giving, saying and doing everything the perspective employer wants to hear and see. DIT, DAT, DIPPITY!

This is nothing more than salesmanship. Figure out exactly the right hot buttons to push, and push those fucking buttons.



.

[Elliot]

My job hiring drivers was essentially to NOT hire this guy. Alas, someone else did.

Old Bill himself, the company founder, had the sign made.

[gyre]

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ap-impact ... 35059.html

I've never had an accurate credit or background check run.

Not once.

[Ugly Dougly]

Remember you are evaluating your employer as much as he is evaluating you.

[gyre]

Very good advice.

[knowmad]

Apparently I'm doing it wrong. Whew! Thought I'd get stuck with a Boss or something...

[Sic Pup]

I have found http://www.glassdoor.com to be a valuable resource. It's a free service (once you participate with a review/interview) that provides company reviews, salary ranges, employee opinions and their experiences interviewing. I recently interviewed with a national firm and it was really helpful to have sample interview questions and chronologies of experiences to help me prepare. I've found the signal to noise ratio pretty good for a user sourced site, but it's only as good as firms are consistent across locations. In another instance, either my location was very lax or others are more by the book. I came a little too prepared so it's obviously only as good as management and policies are consistent across locations (provided you can't find detail on your specific location). It's also quite useful in terms of ascertaining drug screening policies so as not to waste everyone's time.

Also I love the glass ceiling /glass door correlation.

Good luck!