The Perfect Storm

I was worried about last night. In the only major local paper we had an announcement of the event going out every week (at least once) for the last several weeks and every week it had either the wrong date, the wrong day or both. As hard as I worked at trying to get this corrected each week brought another posting with the same error. The paper decided Wednesday was the day and we meet the third Tuesday of each month. The paper had June 17 and we were meeting June 16. Today, the paper ran a “Meeting Tonight!” notice—we met last night, like we do every month, on the third Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. at WorkForce Center (1218 14th Street). Wow!

Each week WorkForce has a class for folks who are receiving unemployment benefits. Each week I go down to this class and invite everyone to attend Lubbock Phoenix Employment Project. In a month I get face-to-face with about 60 or 70 folks. Of these, we can count on around 10 people, very dedicated to finding work, showing up at LPEP. Due to my schedule I couldn't make one class and then a computer glitch at WorkForce failed to send out notices of the class so another of these weekly opportunities was canceled. I was hopeful we’d have three or four people show up.

There seemed to be a perfect storm brewing.

Again, we had three amazing and excellent panelist with decades of Human Resources experience, Debra from Lubbock Regional MHMR (http://www.lubbockmhmr.org/employment/); Cathie from Sun-Star Electric (http://www.sunstarusa.com/about.html); and Rodney from Covenant Health System (http://www.covenanthealth.org/view/Careers/default). Counting myself we represented over a half century of Human Resource experience and almost 7,000 employees with Rodney having easily the lion’s share at around 6,000.

Edwards Place of Employment, a private employment agency, was also in the audience and invited folks to come check out their offerings.

There were 21 in the audience. Even with all the aforementioned missteps we had a decent sized crowd. And, even though smaller, they asked good questions and the discussion was lively. And, as with the first session, there were folks there from every walk of life, every neighborhood and every age group. And, as with the first group, the information exchange was invaluable.


Felonies, Getting Fired, Other Not So Great Stuff

I had a friend about ten years ago who was working for an EMS service in Texas. He was planning on going to medical school. Sharp, bright, exceptional kid. He then went to apply for some student loans. A felony conviction he received when he was 17, he said, for intent to deliver, and he said for marijuana, precluded him from getting a student loan in Texas (he said). In Texas, if you have a felony conviction…what's the best way to put this…you may be pretty much screwed. We, in some respects, are not real forgiving and the road you've laid—and, yes, the person with the felony, pretty much built this road from the first brick up—is one with a major obstacle sitting in the way right at its beginning.

Sex crimes, even those that are so innocuous as to be silly, are like that as well. Companies cringe when they’re new employee's picture shows up in the break room because one of those nifty coworkers went out to the web and found the "sexual predator" area of a county's website and guess whose picture popped up? And maybe it was some real, real simple, simple deal and "we were in love," but it was a bad choice that may haunt a person for a lifetime—some junk is like that.

And getting fired (laid off is NOT the same thing) isn't as bad as being a sexual predator by a long shot, but all this stuff presents enormous challenges for applicants. I'll get 25 or 30 applications for any position I post. Of those maybe 10 will be qualified. If I’m looking at 10 applications and two of those ten already have felony convictions and/or “I hit my boss, so they terminated me” on the application, who am I going to pursue? At the same time we all advocate people being deathly honest with us. For folks with the preceding history, they may need to rely more heavily on their contacts and they need to read the following and insure their applications and resumes are way, way beyond perfection.


Quick Pointers for Those Out There Looking

Make sure, absolutely sure, your application is pristine—no errors: no spelling mistakes, neat and legible if not typed, no glaring grammar errors, properly formatted, phone numbers right, contact information correct—pristine.

I'm not sure why some choose not to listen to this fruit that is so low hanging you'd need a shovel to get to it, but they don't. About half of the applications we’re receiving go to the "maybe next time" pile because of these sorts of simple errors. That's one in two.

With major employers if the qualifications are "1 year of college accounting" and no where on the application do you list "1 year of college accounting" the computer evaluating the application will throw it into the "maybe next time" pile. Smaller employers who may or may not use a computer to evaluate the application might give folks a little more leeway. Rodney has 6,000 employees and receives 1,600 applications a month. There are approximately 22 eight-hour work days in a month. Rodney receives 9 applications an hour or about 70 a day. Spend about 5 minutes with each one and that’s over 6 hours.

No wonder the average amount of time a hiring entity spends reviewing an application is 7 seconds.

You might want to reread that last sentence as it’s real big in this whole "how do I get a job" question.

There's no way, too, of knowing how regimented an employer is in terms of qualifications. Most of us in human resources tend to follow what’s in the postings pretty closely. Or, at least we attempt to. Larger employers tend to be more regimented as the volume and their sheer size and bureaucracy demand it.

The process of application for an employer is often an exercise in exclusion. With that first 7 second pass we’re not looking for reasons to keep an application; we’re scanning for reasons not to.

"Their our know miss steaks inn this cent ants." The preceding "sentence" one of the best examples I’ve seen of what a computer can and cannot catch. Type that cent ants into MS Word and there’ll be no red underlines for misspellings and only “Their our” will be underlined in green suggesting there might be a problem. A computer generally cannot tell the difference between "their," "there," "their our," or "they’re." It can catch misspellings like "alot" (for all the West Texans out there, "a lot" is two words—sorry—"allot," however is one, but it means something completely different; and while I’m here “fixin to” is “getting ready to”). Some will say "you don’t no what your talking about." I say "Oh, but I do and in that last sentence 'no' should be 'know' [MS Word caught this one for me] and 'your' should be 'you're'" [Word missed that one].

How important is this sort of low hanging fruit that is so low you need a shovel to access it? One in two. Fifty percent. Half. Some of us eliminate, or our computers do, one in two, fifty percent, half because they use "alot." An oversimplification. Probably. Maybe not. We know when our application goes in the wrong stack, but then it’s sort of too late.

Beyond the preceding the next big "into the wrong pile" centered on qualifications.

Again, Cathie at Sun-Star Electric, and similar employers, may have some flexibility. Her employees are many times dealing with "things" and not with "at risk populations," so the pressure to hire people with more angelic backgrounds and more stringent qualifications is greatly reduced.

However, if Debra has a job that requires a certification to work at Lubbock Regional MHMR, she’s not going to entertain someone without the certification. If she needs an RN, I hazard to guess she’s not going to be able to hire a first year nursing student. If the job has a requirement that a person cannot have a felony conviction for an assault with bodily injury, as much as the person may have changed, as dated as the conviction may be, she’s not going to be able to hire a felon with an assault with bodily injury. But she may be able to look at someone with a felony for a substance abuse conviction.

So applying for these jobs without the basic qualifications is a waste of everyone’s time. There’s not a more honest way to write that last sentence, although I probably could have said it nicer.


So Low You Need A Shovel

I tell folks junk like the following all the time:

If you can't spell, find someone who knows how (like a word processor on a computer and even if you're handwriting an application, you can write it first on a computer).

If you can't write, find someone who can.

If you don't know the difference between a comma and a catapult, find someone who does.

The preceding is the fruit that is so low that we need a shovel to dig it up. And, yet, this morning I've received four applications. I forwarded one on to the hiring manager. Two were disqualified because they couldn’t follow the instructions in the application (at First Bank & Trust, as with most employers, we like folks who can follow instructions). The other one was sloppy and I couldn’t read some of the words, but they appeared to be misspelled. Hint, we all used the "scribble the word and hope the teacher can't read it and he or she will thinks it's spelled right" trick in Jr. High. Hint, the sequel, this trick is still not working.