Monday, February 10, 2014

Dis-Organisation part 2

In the previous episode our hero found himself without a job, with the end of the year fast approaching...

Whereupon he got an unsolicited email revealing that he had inherited millions of dollars from a previously unheard-of distant relative in Nigeria - no wait - different story. 

Whereupon he got an unsolicited email from the administrator of a training program for junior doctors asking him if he would like to take part. (Ok I'm not going to write this whole damn thing in the 3rd person - get ready for an illeism purge - yoink!)

So I got an email from the people running this training program asking if I'd like a job. As with my experience at the end of 2012, I have no idea how they got hold of my details or why they chose me, but when someone offers to give you money to buy candy, you say YES!

I was told that they would be having interviews in a couple of weeks, but a couple of weeks later I hadn't heard anything, so I shot an email off to the person who had contacted me, asking wassappnin? And I got back an autoreply saying she didn't do that job anymore.  Uh oh.  I contacted the person who had taken over from her, and he had never heard of me.  Furthermore, they were interviewing candidates in a few days.

Somehow I cajoled him into adding me to the interview list, rocked up to the interview, told a bunch of outrageous lies and half-truths, wept shamelessly while pleading for mercy, and got the job!

I had a friend a while back who was doing some recruitment for the public service for a largish group of people to get involved in a special project. She had had to take over the job from someone else halfway through, who had already sorted the applicants into PROBABLEs and OVER-MY-DEAD-BODYs.  So she took the PROBABLEs and proceeded to offer them jobs and train them and send them off to do their work, all the while thinking to herself, "Boy these people are idiots.  I'd hate to see the ones who were rejected."  At some point she began to get the same feeling of dawning realisation that you may be experiencing even now, and pulled the rejected candidates' paperwork from archives, only to find that they were highly qualified, motivated and intelligent people who would have been great for the job, and she realized that she had gotten the two piles of applications mixed up and had given jobs to the OVER-MY-DEAD-BODYs.

So it goes to show - never give up. No matter how shambolic the recruitment process, no matter how unqualified you are, you can always shoulder your way onto the payroll if you have persistence.

Unless you actually are qualified and good at the job with plenty of relevant experience.  Then you're fucked.

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