In the wake of prepping another wave of applications to send out by the end of today, along with insomnia and shitty weather scuttling all my plans for today, I grumpily browsed the annals of the web to find information that validated my preconceived notion that HR departments are useless polyps. Of course, I had to sift through volumes of pointless drivel to find my desired echo chamber, because, despite all the technological advancements made, the Internet is still a giant shit-heap of information, and the best way to find what you need is to get yourself a shovel and a hazmat suit like it’s 1996 and Ask Jeeves is still relevant.

All the combing didn’t come without benefits, though. I managed to find a site by the name of Resume Target, that is apparently the brainchild of some dude who was once developing ‘talent-acquisition strategies for numerous Fortune 500 companies, including GE, IBM, Google, Microsoft, Siemens, and Toshiba’ (a quote verbatim from his author bio). Why he quit doing that and moved on to spear-heading a blog made up of nobodies is anyone’s guess; my personal speculation is that every mini-bio appended to the author of each article is a load of hype bullshittery, because if these people were so well connected and important, they would’ve been talked about more often in mainstream press, and wouldn’t be running yet another fucking ad-space page.

Anyways, I went to pull the page up on my desktop, since writing articles on one’s smartphone is like trying to pick up butter with chopsticks, only infinitely less satisfying because the tactile response feedback is worse on a smartphone, and butter tastes awesome, but I was greeted with this when I tried to load up the direct URL:

What a cocktease.

I’m always blown away when websites that are centered around written content do shit like this, until I remember that the content never actually matters, and the sites are simply ad-space repositories. Then the whole ‘excuse me, but you have script blockers on, please prove you’re not an automaton via CAPTCHA, or turn off your blockers so our automatons can flood your browser with information that can be easily altered to become highly malicious’ makes sense because money, even if it doesn’t make logical sense seven ways to Sunday. To anyone still wondering if they should use Resume Target’s advice, the answer is a resounding ‘no’.

Ugh.

Spoiler alert: absolutely nothing.  The conceit of job interviews being the best way to assess candidates has long been thrown out the window, what with the numerous companies and organizations that call potential candidates in only to slam a Myers-Briggs, proficiency, or multiple choice test in their faces while the interviewing team frantically reads the candidate’s resume that they should’ve read the night before instead of sessioning all the Breaking Bad seasons; side note: if you ever get hit with a Myers-Briggs of proficiency on your first face-to-face interview, or any sort of test that was not mentioned in the job posting/phone interview, walk. Tests are only useful to determine retained information and knowledge comprehension/application, i.e. objective information. The whole point of a face-to-face is to assess subjective areas, like composure, confidence, and behavior; you don’t use an objective testing means to test subjective material.

People do this?

I don’t ever recall anyone doing this, myself included. Sure, we talked about the tests, but the kids who failed knew it, and those who passed knew it. Maybe it was also because I never had a test that involved material ripped straight from a textbook, which I guess means it paid off to not pick a major and minor that required memorizing highly specific definitions. There really isn’t any meat to pick at here, other than the implied notion that job searching is now being treated like test-taking, which is stupid because, again, using objective analysis doesn’t make any damn sense for subjective things. I guess that explains my great distaste for modern interviewing practices and tactics that don’t seem to properly assess candidates, or anything, for that matter.

Two links to the same article?

My detestation for websites who use circular linking while attempting to hide it like they’re sending you somewhere useful rather than right back to them will continue until I die. It’s a shitty maneuver to keep you trapped and drive their clicks up, and only truly awful pages do this and not directly advertise they do it; if they did, people would wise up and stop fucking clicking, and there would go all those sweet ad-bucks.

The correct answer to the question is ‘I don’t know’, because interviewing is a black hole. It’s not a test, and I don’t get why the author keeps treating it as such, because a test is finite and is eventually graded and returned. An interview is like trying to ping something on a satellite connection: you know the other end is there, but the responses take for-fucking ever, and then sometimes you get bombarded, only for the well to dry up as fast as it poured out. It sucks, and will unfortunately continue to, because the resource for interviewing is people, and the vast majority of people suck. Time doesn’t factor in, outside of the common thread that if something takes eons to get handled, it’s not going to get done.

What poll, where?

Would you think that if there was a poll regarding job interview length and its correlation to successful offers, a place like Resume Target would want to have that information as a feather in its cap? The people running the site would then be able to say, ‘We can set you up so you always hit that golden window!’, and yet I see no links or graphs or data of any kind. It almost sounds like it’s completely bullshit that Nikki Gill made up to sell their services to poor suckers who think you should pay to have someone review your resume. Oh, duh, that’s exactly it.

Also, if thirty-eight percent said a good interview was forty-five minutes, you do realize that puts them in the minority, right? This is why people data-dropping and not providing charts is always grounds for complete dismissal of their claims, and potential dismissal of the website in its entirety. People who actually collect data for use to prove their points would, without question, link the fuck out of it because it’s one more nail in the coffin of the naysayers. What if sixty-two percent said ‘ten minute interviews are best’? What if it’s thirty-eight percent of Walmart hiring managers, or thirty-eight percent of professional glass makers? When you don’t qualify, we, the audience, get to speculate because you didn’t fill in the gaps, and by not doing this, you torpedo your own argument. Most importantly, how in the fuck can you say that three-fourths of an hour is the benchmark when your last paragraph says not to use this information to determine your outcome because it’s not completely accurate, Nikki? Jesus fuckin’ Christmas Christ over here, how stupid can you be?

This is another professional writer’s penmanship.

Don’t hyphen when you need to comma. Comma properly, such as between conjunctions and adverbs, such as ‘and, therefore, ‘ and similar things. Don’t start with conjunctions when other words are better.

How can an interviewer tell you don’t meet the minimum qualifications based on what you look like? Oh, that’s right: they can’t. If any interviewer ever pulls this on you, take this as a blessing in disguise, because what this really is is an out interviewers peddle all the time so that they don’t have to do their one job and read the fucking resumes. My boss used to pull this garbage all the time when I still did technical support work, and he would get pissed whenever I told him to hold up while I actually read the resumes of the candidates to refresh myself before an interview.

Also, ‘they were not interested in wasting their time’? Are you for real? A hiring manager has one job: to find new hires. It is their literal job description and duty to have interviews. If they don’t like it, then they should stop doing it, find other work, and let someone else take care of it. They shouldn’t keep doing it and do it poorly because ‘it’s too hard’ or ‘candidates waste their time’. I fully agree that some candidates aren’t good fits, or don’t dress appropriately, or act like buffoons during the interview, but there is zero chance you can properly assess someone just by their appearance. Unfortunately, the amount of dipshit managers who do this is staggering, which is why Nikki even includes this bullshittery; it’s so shit-house hiring teams can continue to be shit-house and gate-keep people out based on no real criteria.

Do they, though?

If you can’t give an answer, why even include this? How can we know if we ‘wow’ an interviewer? They’re our answers, so we’re naturally going to be biased, and each person is different. What is this horse-dump I’m reading?

Show the deets.

What if there were a lot of questions to be asked? What if the manager was late? What if the manager had to be pulled aside to handle a crisis of some sort? What if you went on a tangent for half of the interview talking about things like music preferences, or similar hobbies? What if the hiring manager is purposefully dragging the time out simply to eat more clock in the day? You see how pointless it is to advertise a benchmark, and then not provide all the information showing where you got that answer from? I can only surmise that those tests you used to stress over, Nikki, were math and science tests that involved numbers, and you were really bad at those subjects either due to lack of comprehension, or lack of studying, since someone competent at those subjects wouldn’t keep trying to tie back to a baseless figure.

But why?

Why conduct a more in-depth interview at the executive level? Granted, executives are the ones that make the decisions that are most likely to be earth shattering, but when you’re at that level, shouldn’t you be an expert of some sort on sifting through candidates, and shouldn’t you be dealing with people who actually know what they’re getting into and know how to interview? Why is the focus on time spent and not quality of time spent?

Who hires executives like htis?

Since I had no idea what the hell a proficiency test for an executive could possibly be, and I didn’t really have any idea what in the hell a proficiency test was to begin with (despite slamming them earlier), I went to look up examples. What came up was stuff relating to laboratory work and laboratory proficiency, which makes sense because you want to test the accuracy of your equipment and how good people are at running tests. Nothing came up for executive proficiency stuff or even basic employment proficiency, so the only thing I can conclude is that Nikki Gill is a total moron that decides outcomes in her life via multiple choice tests. I said it before and I’ll say it again: if you are handed a test, which is an objective metric measurement, during an interview, which is a subjective performance analysis, leave. That organization doesn’t know how to interview properly, and if they have a poor standard for finding their employees, then they likely have more poor practices, not including the fact they have likely hired people not fit for the positions they are placed in.

Was there a point to any of this?

If this nonsense changes at every interview, then why bother trying to establish baselines? I’m not saying don’t try to find patterns, because such a notion flies in the face of what I bitch about on here. I’m simply saying that it’s fucking retarded to try and apply hard & fast rules while hypocritically acknowledging that they’re probably pointless. Having zero confidence in your advice defeats the whole purpose of their existence; it’d be like a Prima strategy guide saying, ‘So when you get to Brock, just do stuff that kills his Onix, or whatever. I don’t really know, lol’ after you dropped twenty bucks on it. Also, your personal confidence doesn’t matter when it comes to interviews, outside that confidence is a selling point, and it helps you control the room and tempo of the interview. Not that all of that isn’t great stuff, it’s just that your chances of success have less to do with your preparedness, and more to do with inter-office politics and chance events.

Side tangent, but that link goes to handling ‘trick questions’, which is not helpful from any regard. Trick questions are bullshit and horrible interviewing practices, because they aren’t focused around obtaining any real information, they’re just employed as a power move by shitty people who need their ego stroked, and like seeing people get tripped up so that they can later use the snag as a reason not to hire a perfectly good candidate.

As someone who has a few years of hiring experience, I’ll drop a few nuggets that’ll hopefully be useful gold and, if not, tasty chicken.

1. If someone wants you, they will get you an offer as fast as possible. With all the red tape regarding hiring of any kind, a week is usually as fast as it can go, unless the person doing the hiring spear-heads the organization, or you have a determined hiring manager that does his/her job properly and pushes the paperwork through as quickly as possible. You’ll usually hear back really quickly, too.
2. Interview time doesn’t mean shit to a good interviewer. When I interviewed, I was able to get through the basics, necessities, and important resume points in about ten minutes on average. I would then intersperse the objective information I needed with random chatter and off-topic conversation. I would never set a time because hitting some dumb benchmark is asinine when it comes to getting a grasp on someone. Some interviews were done in fifteen and I put in a recommendation for hire, others took an hour and were binned. Being a good interviewer requires being able to make a decision quickly, and then re-temper that decision based on how the candidate behaves in a comfortable setting. Quality of time spent trumps time spent.
3. Any interview that delves into sensitive personal information is a bad interview, and you should torpedo it regardless if you are offered a position or not. The only reason hiring managers would ever ask really personal things is because they’ve hired people flippantly and have been burned by shitty humans, so their ‘fix’ is to try and find workers who have their ‘shit together’. It makes perfect sense when you think about it, but it’s accusatory and effectively crossing personal boundary lines at a point when neither party should be comfortable being that interrogative. It also showcases that the company is bad at hiring and poor at fixing their process, and thus likely has faults elsewhere that are more detrimental.
4. For the umpteenth time, tests are bullshit. If a hiring manager or lead of the department looking for the employee really wanted to test you, they’d bring you in for a probationary period to see how you handle the spotlights. Good organizations don’t put you through high school shit just to get you in the cubicle. I used to develop those kinds of tests, and they assess fuck all.
5. If you don’t hear back after one week, follow up. If you don’t hear back after two weeks, move on. Always assume you didn’t get the job, and never stop putting in applications until you’ve gotten your first paycheck. Office politics, malaise, incompetency, red tape, vacations, and other trivial bullshit that stops the stupidly easy process that is hiring happen constantly, and HR departments do their damndest to not do their job by keeping candidates informed. Luckily for me, I never had to run through an HR department until hiring was done, and I made sure I kept in contact with potential candidates, and when I couldn’t, I made sure my peers/supervisors did, because I had been on the other side, and the other side of not hearing anything (and this was well before online job posting boards) was a pile of dook. I said it above, and I’ll say it again here: it is the literal job description of HR and a Hiring Manager do find people to hire, and communicate with candidates. If you can’t respond back to people in a timely manner, you should not be working in that department or sector. You have zero excuse with Wi-Fi, 4G/5G, ubiquitous connectivity, and email, and yet the average candidate will never hear anything back, ever. These organizations don’t give a shit about you as a potential employee, so don’t let them rent space in your head and don’t give a shit about them as an employer.
6. Keep your dignity when you interview. Go into every interview with confidence, and be prepared with questions and every intention to kill it, but if the people sitting across the desk/table from you look uninterested and keep looking uninterested for a good clip of time, cut it short, thank them for their time, and see yourself out. Passive aggressive behavior like this is rife in hiring/HR departments because the department exists solely to bring in new meat, but there’s no way they can extend offers to everyone. Plus, when you factor in that society has shifted towards handling everything in a passive aggressive, non-confrontational way as possible, and office politicking is as plentiful as it’s ever been, it makes perfect sense that a department specifically created by people who don’t have any real marketable skills and sell themselves by being subjective evaluators would easily fall prey to bitch-made behavior. All this is to say that you should never be made the doormat in a job interview, at the workplace, and in life in general. You are a commodity, and a job interview is you selling yourself. If the potential buyers aren’t interested in the product, fuck ’em. Someone out there will be, and that’s how you need to think when looking for work. Chances are high that the organization that’s giving you the cold shoulder is just doing this as a formality of some kind, so it’s perfectly fair for you to do the same.
7. Never quit your job before you get another one, even if it fucking sucks. You will absolutely blow through your savings and other rainy day funds faster than you think. It also looks bad because you have a gap on your CV/resume, and because hiring departments are filled with lazy, kind of stupid blockheads that don’t think that often, you’re going to explain the gap, even if the average person would totally grasp that you sometimes just want to take a break from staring at forms for a bit.
8. Get hobbies and use your free time, whether you’re employed or not during your search, to improve in those areas. This gives you reasons to not be a workaholic, even if you advertise yourself as one. Working a lot isn’t bad, but when it becomes all you do, you turn into the same kind of person that buys into dumb shit like cults or essential oils or multi-level marketing; it saps you of your logic, reason, and brainpower. Having other stuff to focus on that you enjoy helps keep your frame of reference steady, and your mind fresh so that you don’t become a total donk that only lives for the office. That shit’s lame, yo.

I’m sure I’ll think of more tidbits and then forget them later, but hopefully those were actually helpful. They probably weren’t. Whatever.