[Baypiggies] Question about employment application forms

[Brian Harring]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 12:46:20AM -0700, Shannon -jj Behrens wrote:
> I've never had success with the sort of computer forms you're talking
> about.  I'm not sure those ever work.

Honestly at this point I tend to think it's resume harvesting, and 
this goes without naming names company wise.  When I've gotten 
callbacks from forms of that sort, it's been well outside the window 
of when I applied via their little web forms- seemed more like they 
had some room in the headcount and did a scan of a resume database 
then them just being incredibly slow in responding to job 
applications.

That said, most companies that have forms of that sort, the ratio of 
callback (even a simple phone screen for a sanity check) is *way* 
below what your average craigslist posting gets- mind you, that's my 
own data, although I strongly suspect it's probably the norm.


> I've interviewed at several
> places that I had no real relation to, but almost invariably, the best
> companies come to me through my network.  Best of all, since they
> already know all about me, I don't have to bother with a technical
> interview ;)

Seconding that, the most interesting gigs I've had came about 
from personal contacts of some sort.  Realistically, the gigs I've 
truly enjoyed (and gained serious skill from) have been gigs that 
came about via my FOSS work- I can't stress that one enough, I'd 
probably not have a career without the FOSS work opening up new 
opportunities (typically folk come looking when you scratch an itch 
that they're currently suffering from- optimization in particular has 
worked well for me).

Just throwing in my 2 cents in, in a slightly offtopic fashion ;)
~harring