Tag Archives: job

Friendly advice for the young and ambitious…

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I was once like you. I was young and ambitious. I wanted to streak up the career ladder further and faster than anyone. For those out there who want to climb, you’re eventually going to reach the point where you’ll be required to make a life-altering decision. You’re going to have to reconcile a nominal pay increase with the enormous pain in the ass that is becoming a first line supervisor.

If you’re even hesitating for a second in deciding whether that’s something interesting to you, let me key you into a secret – It’s not worth it. It’s not worth it at twice the pay. Sure, if you’re lucky there are going to be one or two hard chargers in your group, but most of the rest are going to be average at best and you’ll land an unholy sprinkling of dregs, sociopaths, malcontents, and those whose best service would have been to retire a decade or two ago.

Take a bit of advice from someone who was ambitious before you came along. Find yourself a nice mid-level position, gather the reins of a couple of projects, and enjoy a fruitful career concerned with meeting your own deadlines and being limited mostly by only your own capacity to work. Don’t, under any circumstances, allow them to make you a supervisor, team leader, or any other euphemistic term for becoming part of the problem rather than its solution. You’ll end up looking back at what started out as a promising career and wondering when it became a low-budget shitshow.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of previously de-published blogs appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

The rate of return…

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It seems that federal civilian agencies like my resume alot more than my brethren in DoD. Not surprising, I suppose, since we’re arguably the most un-military organization in the Army. As of this morning, that means 19 active referrals out of 365 total resumes sent out… giving me a return rate of 5.2%. I’d rather be at something like 10%, but it’s good to know that at least one in twenty actually ends up sitting on someone’s desk. Apparently opting for the even-wider-net approach has met with some limited success. Now if I can just get a few of them to call me for interviews and bump up the odds a few more points. One agonizingly slow step at a time, I suppose.

Testing… Testing…

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Given the volume of jobs I’ve applied for in the last eight months, I was under the impression that I’d come across very little that would surprise me. That was until the fine people at TSA invited me to schedule an appointment this weekend at a third party computer center to come in and take their skills assessment. Seriously, TSA? You want me to take a two-hour test just to get through to the part where an actual person reads my resume? Yeah, as interesting as that sounds, I think I’ll be taking my chances that one of my other 360 resumes out there is going to find its way onto the right desk. I wouldn’t object to the process if I were, you know, applying for an entry level job somewhere in a field office, but since I’m angling for a senior analyst slot at your headquarters, I would think that you’d be able to sus out the key information you need from the dozen or so pages of resume, undergrad and graduate transcripts, and personnel records that I sent you. So, yeah, TSA… I appreciate you getting back to me, but I don’t think your agency is the right fit for my skill sets. Thanks now.

Progress…

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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.

#3…

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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.

Day 75…

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We are now at day 75 of the thirty-day hiring freeze. Surely we’ve attritted off some of those overhires by now, right? Seriously, we even have a budget for the rest of the fiscal year now. So, come on already Overlord of Personnel. Let’s get the hiring process thawed out.

I haven’t racked and stacked my list lately, but the total number of resumes released into the wild stands at 335. I’d estimate that about a third of those are still in the “open” category. Probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 are sitting on the desk of a real human being. I’ve had two interviews for positions that are “frozen” and have another one coming up later this week. I didn’t particularly want to go outside of DoD, but they’re making it very hard to show the love right about now… so Treasury, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Coast Guard, FEMA, and a host of others are being fed into the mix as of about two weeks ago.

My search grid now extends from Philadelphia down to Richmond and from the Shenandoah Valley east to Norfolk. Like Grant contemplating a similar piece of real estate, “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”

Such is the ferocity of my desire to catch the last train out of Crazyville.

Incubation period…

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As of a couple of days ago I’ve been running my Hail Mary play to get out of Memphis for seven months. I dropped my first resume in the files on August 22nd, so you can check my math and make sure I’m doing it right. Seven months is what I’ve come up with… and in that time I’ve drilled exactly 276 dry wells. I’ll drill 5 more tomorrow and five the day after that.

This great escape can be left to incubate for another seven months, but know this – You can cut me off from the civilized world. You can torture me with powerpoint until I’m tapping out briefings with bloody stumps of fingers, but you cannot break my spirit. My voice shall be heard from this wilderness. I shall be delivered.

Still haven’t found what I’m looking for…

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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.

200 and climbing…

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For those playing along with the fun filled and exciting game of How Many Resumes can Jeff Send Out Before Losing His Bloody Mind, the total now stands just north of the 200 mark. This is perhaps more impressive in the fact that it was at the 199 point that I ran out of available positions to apply for with the Army. So from here on out, we’re broadening the scope to include Army and every other government agency in the MD-DC-VA-PA area. Thank God for http://www.usajobs.com. I don’t know how anyone ever did this back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and resumes were delivered on paper.

If you’re curious about what lucky #200 was, that would be a Strategic Analyst on the Joint Staff. It’s a little vague on the duties, but it’s a pretty sweet title. Nothing appeals the heart stings of a career bureaucrat like a title bump… well, a title bump and a kickin’ retirement system. In the also-ran category for the #200 place of honor was Senior Advisor to the Treasurer of the United States. If you think the Joint Staff is vague, try figuring out what a “Senior Advisor” is supposed to spend their day doing. I read the job announcement twice and still didn’t really figure it out… but apparently the Treasurer needs two of them.

Winning the creepiest job announcement of the day is Army Intelligence, with a position that called for, among other things, background checks, urinalysis, polygraphs, credit checks, and psych evaluations. Those things aren’t really a problem, but when I came across a “condition of employment” that read: 7.) Must be willing to work unusual extended hours and forego conveniences normally afforded to civilian employees in CONUS/OCONUS, I decided that foregoing normal conveniences probably wasn’t something I was going to be interested in. That ones’s a rare pass.

Waiting game…

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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!