If anyone is following along at home, tonight’s update is just a brief note to say that this morning’s interview went well. That is to say as well as an interview can go when the prospect of the interviewer being able to make an offer anytime in the near future is completely unknown. Like all my other sit downs with selecting officials from across the Mid-Atlantic, this office is also subject to my nemesis the hiring freeze. That unfortunate circumstance notwithstanding, I’m comfortable that I delivered the best pitch possible… and now we’re back to the waiting game. That’s progress.
Tag Archives: hiring freeze
#3…
And so we’re moving along tomorrow to interview #3, which is a good thing. Of course it’s also an Army job, which means it’s probably subject to the hiring freeze just like the others. That’s the part that’s less than good. In keeping with my casting of the wide net, I can only speculate that the more interviews I have between the now and when our dear friends lift the freeze, the better the opportunity that one or more of them will come in with an actual offer in the fabled land beyond the human resource permafrost. If not, getting the occasional interview gives me the illusion of actually making progress. In the absence of actual progress, I’m good with the illusion… for now.
P.S. Selecting officials, if you’re poking around the internet doing an informal review of names on your referral lists, please take note of the single minded determination I’m showing at achieving this objective. It’s this kind of fortitude and commitment to mission that I can bring to your office and put to work for you.
Anatomy of a day off…
Anatomy of a day off…
I took the day off yesterday. Not so much because I really needed to, but a three day weekend now andthen is much appreciated. I realized that my days off aren’t exactly what most people would think of as relaxing. I was up at 5:30, which I suppose is technically sleeping in. Dropped the truck at the Toyota dealer at 7:00 for an oil change and an hour of shooting the shit with the service manager. Then it was grocery shopping and driving halfway across the county to pick up meds for the dogs. After that, it was off to my own doctor for what has become a never ending routine of follow up inspections and random pokings and proddings. An hour of that and a clean bill of health, or as clean a bill of health as I’m ever likely to get, it was back to a house in serious need of cleaning and dinner that apparently didn’t magically make itself in my absence. Follow that up with a bowl of orange sugar free jello and periodic napping and you’ve got the anatomy of pretty much any weekday when I’m not at work. I’d tell you what one of those days looks like, but that would be too depressing to contemplate on a Saturday afternoon.
As it is now, the hiring freeze is still on and I’m no closer to hitting eject on this place than I was eight months ago… But I’m still swinging for the fences. The house is a little cleaner than I was yesterday. And today’s dinner, I’m assuming, isn’t any closer to magically making itself while I’m out. The beer’s cold, the scenery is excellent, and there’s still another day between me and Monday. All things considered, I’d say I’m still doing better than average.
Sometimes…
The worst part about blogging, aside from the unforgiving bouts of writers block, is the inevitable moments when there are a lot of things banging around between the ears, but not one that’s quite ready to be rereleased out into the blogosphere on it’s own. Nothing earth shattering – no news on the hiring freeze, no real leads yet outside DoD, but the faintest flicker of hope that after there’s an actual budget things might start moving again – though there will be no breath holding on that coming true.
Outside of that, it’s spring in West Tennessee. I’m ignoring house cleaning in favor of yard work, and that’s generally a good thing except for the coating of dust, dog hair, and pollen that seems to be collecting on everything inside. Maybe I’ll get around to dealing with that at some point. Or better yet, maybe I’ll get around to hiring a cleaning to come in and give the place a once over from time to time.
Not much of a post, right? Stream of consciousness is fun. Maybe next time I’ll be back to ranting and raving
It’s still friggin’ freezing in here…
The thirty-day hiring freeze and 30-day extension are now something on the order of 65 days old. Now of course there’s some logic to waiting to see if the jackrabbits in Congress can actually manage to pass a budget before sending us all home on Friday, but maybe a word of “hey, standby. We’ll let you know after Friday” would be better than the overpowering silence coming from the civilian personnel office. It’s the 10-ton elephant in the room that they refuse to address other than referring back to a memo put out over two months ago.
If you’re going to extend it, just announce that already so we can get busy retooling our resumes for jobs outside DOD. If it’s going to be dropped, how about a scientific guesstimate of when they machinery of civilian hiring might start moving again. Even with the cynicism that I usually bring to the table when discussing issues of competent leadership at pay grades above reality, I can’t believe that the decision hasn’t already been made somewhere about whether it’s time to fish or cut bait. Of course I could be completely wrong about that and the denizens of that five-sided concrete cobweb could be even more jacked up than I thought possible.
The total tonnage of backlog that’s going to exist after continuing to make announcements and conduct interviews, but not make selections is certainly going to be enough to stun a mule team in its tracks… Especially considering that mules are a damned sight easier to work with than the personnel office. Let it run another month or two and I’ll be dropping retirement papers before they manage to get it cleared up. Pay freeze, hiring freeze, and no budget in sight… It’s getting very hard to love working for Uncle.
Still haven’t found what I’m looking for…
If you would have told me back in August when I decided it was time to pull the plug on my Memphis experience, that I’d still be firing off resumes on the first day of spring in the following year, I simply would never have believed you. The irony of coming here in the first place was that I’d alwayherdsrd that getting back to the DC area was easy because no one from outside the area had any interest in going there. That may or may not be the case, but I’ve found that in most cases for jobs inside the beltway the typical number of resumes submitted for consideration is somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 with some running north of 500. I’ve got a healthy level of professional self confidence, but the odds get pretty long when you start talking about numbers like that.
There are still a couple of “maybies” out there that I haven’t written off yet, but it’s definitely slot slower going than I remember the last job search being. The department’s hiring freeze extending over the last two months, of course, hasn’t helped. The personnel office points only to the most recent memo that calls for the freeze to be reevaluated by April 1st to decide if it will be extended or to announce how hiring might be handled moving forward. It’s not reassuring that the hiring system will get back to something approaching situation normal any time soon, even if it starts up again in April. With a two month backlog and a notoriously slow process to begin with, things could be ugly for the forseeable future.
There doesn’t seem to be much to do now other than to continue piling my name onto as many heaps as possible and hope it turns up at the top of one of them. The federal government’s a big place and something will come along eventually, but this exercise in patience is wearing very thin. In hindsight, I’m sure this experience will be character building or something, but in the moment it’s enough to drive a man around the bend.
Waiting game…
It seems that my fears weren’t completely unfounded. The fine folks at the Civilian Personnel office quietly posted a memo on their website yesterday afternoon giving notice that the current hiring freeze is extended through at least April 1st. So it seems Pennsylvania is at least another 30 days out of reach, if reachable at all.
On a positive note, I had an interview for a different job this morning. I thought it went reasonably well. It seems shameless self-promotion isn’t one of the things I have trouble with. Thank God for small mercies.
The waiting game begins again. First offer that at least meets my current salary and picks up the tab to move my stuff back to the east coast wins!
It keeps me up at night…
I’m not generally given to bouts of fear, but sometimes, lying in bed, late at night, I think some moments of trepidation are unavoidable – a product of a brain churning through a 100 different scenarios each more unpleasant than the last. Perhaps that’s the curse of the educated class; that we know the things we know and are thereby unable to live lives of oblivious happiness.
There are hundreds of possible “bad things” that one can reasonably fear. There are the perennial favorites: war, famine, plague, pestilence, dogs and cats living together. Then there are the more personal fears. Is tonight the night the “big one” is going to hit the New Madrid Fault? Is Uncle Sam going to open his doors on March 5th? And what could I have done to be better prepared? While those are quite real possibilities, that’s not the one that wakes me up at night.
The one that gets me every time is the fleeting notion that this 30-day hiring freeze could easily be extended through the end of the fiscal year – or beyond. Even more vexing is the thought that I’d then be sidelined here in Memphis indefinitely. It’s not an unreasonable thought. Should Congress pass a Continuing Resolution at or less than the funding level during FY10, I fear it’s altogether possible that the human resource managers at echelons above reality could decide that hiring and transfers are not currently in the best interest of the government due to the costs involved and in an effort to attrit the workforce into its desired size and composition. That would mean another six months marking time awash in a rising tide of disinterest and discontent.
To have gotten so close only to be turned away now would be a hammer fall. Even my self-confidence has its limits.
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