Stuff and nonsense

[jethrien]

Spent all day Thursday at an on-site interview with the people who make Lysol. Interesting, but definitely exhausting. By the end of the day, I was pretty much hoarse. I'm starting to get really sick of my own stories - I keep telling the same ones over and over again. But they're the ones that are most applicable to most questions, so I can't really stop telling them. Ah well.

Anyway, they put me up in a hotel the night before and everything. It still seems foreign to me to spend so much money on people when you know there's a good chance you won't hire them. I mean, Turner gave me a ton of free stuff - everything from a fleece to a really nice duffel bag to a finals care package - before deciding that they didn't currently have a place for me on their team. And these guys now are interviewing all month for one position, but seem delighted to pay for hotel rooms and tolls and mileage for everyone. It's very generous, but frankly a little confusing. (And I now have a bunch of stuff emblazoned with the company logo of a company that rejected me. What am I supposed to do with this stuff?)

I visited with my mom on Wednesday (which was quite lovely) and I've spent a lot of the rest of the time doing independent work type stuff. The clock works - kinda. It stops at random intervals and I can't figure out why...

And spring break's already over. Went surprisingly fast.

There are flowers in Prospect Gardens. Not many, and they're very small, but they make me happy. Spring! Yay!

Comments

[dushai.livejournal.com]

I don't claim to know everything, but I've spent a lot of time on the other side of recruiting, and I do know a bit about the mentality. Companies are REALLY desperate to hire the right people. There is a very large cost to hiring someone and finding out over the next year or three that he or she is a moron. So doing the groundwork in advance is a win, and "groundwork" includes convincing lots of candidates to apply so that they have proportionately more good candidates, and taking time to do the interview right (which includes having you there for a while, so they have to pay for your hotel and meals and stuff, because if they didn't then many students couldn't interview).

Let's say you're interviewing for a position with a starting salary of $50K. A good rule of thumb is that it costs a company 3x your salary (or your salary + 2x more) to keep you employed -- this accounts for non-salary benefits, support staff like IT people and security and admins for a larger work force, leasing a larger building and heating/cooling it, etc. So if they realize in one year that they've hired a moron, they've wasted $150K plus the cost of training a new hire, and lost a year's worth of work. Compared to that, sending $100 worth of gifts to each of 10 candidates, followed by flying 3 of them out to interview, is clearly a huge win. (This is also why a good company will have an interview process that favors false negatives (rejecting qualified applicants) over false positives.) If you want me to babble more on this topic, let me know, but I'll shut up for now. :)

As for what to do with schwag from companies that hose you, well, if the schwag is still useful then use it! "These companies were too dumb to realize they should hire me, but hey, I got this cool left-handed corkscrew out of it!" If it's schwag you'll never use, then I'm sure you could come up with creative ways to destroy it spectacularly, if you found it therapeutic. :)

[katertoticus.livejournal.com]

I always used to walk through the Garden looking for snowdrops in the early spring. You're making me nostalgic...how have I been out in the wide world for almost a year?!

Looking forward to goin' back...