Friday, January 8, 2016

Job hunting gripes

I thought I'd talk about my pet peeves with job postings, on Craigslist specifically.

The most obvious one is of course there is never a job that wants to may me a lot of money to do almost nothing, the thing is though, at least with my qualifications, there are very few jobs who want to pay even a moderate amount of money for a ton of work, case in point is my current gig, I think I am pretty good at it and enjoy the work, but I, and everyone else who works there, busts their ass for barely above minimum wage, and yet to get hired as anything above a cashier position you need to have experience that should have paid you significantly more.
Many job postings don't try to deceive you, saying they want a high energy person who can be on their feet all day and blah blah blah, but they describe it as if the job is a wonderful thing because you will need to work yourself into exhaustion for ten bucks or less an hour.

There are a crapload of posts that don't include a description of the job at all, or even name the company, I guess they expect you to just throw your resume at their email link and hope for the best, usually they are written in such as way that I just assume it is some sort of sales job or MLM scam, but every once in a while I run across one that I am pretty sure the poster just forgot that section, either way I don't apply for those.

Finally there are the ones that try to hard, these frustrate me particularly because they otherwise seem like something I could do pretty well, but they are written in a style that reminds me of people screaming "WOOOOOOO!" in the aftermath of a concert during which they drank at least four beers. Killer Burger, Sizzle Pie, and a few other local Portland chains are the main culprits here, their posts strongly implying that you can totes get drunk on the job with us, work hard, party hard!
I don't want to party hard! I don't want to drink on the job! It isn't professional and is a good way to get your liquor license revoked! I can't be the only one, right? I mean, it can't be that unusual for someone to just want to get the job done efficiently and then go do something fun without having to wade through some forced hipster-bro party atmosphere, isn't it? I mean, it isn't like I am serious business all the time at work, I joke, I keep it light, my coworkers seem to like me.
I feel like you can enjoy your work without it being a party, and I feel like you can't have it both ways, you can't say "look how awesome our atmosphere is, party hard" and at the same time expect your employees to come in expecting to bust ass for a shift for minimum wage, at least, not for long.

Clearly I feel strongly and incoherently about these things, I am fortunate that I can be picky at least, the hunt goes on I guess.

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