Big day

Big mistake

Today I applied for three jobs. I also had a couple of phone calls (and therefore bites).

Skimming through the adverts on www.jobserve.co.uk I saw one which included the following details: "Location: Cork, Southern Ireland, Country: United Kingdom."

Pass the Semtex, Gerry.

When I've accidentally thought that Finland was, until recently, a near-part of the Soviet sphere of influence, I've been put right with a few strong words and a "I'm not going to have sex with you now" glare.

Easily made mistake, actually.

But mistaking part of the Republic of Ireland as being in the United Kingdom is an entirely different level of mistake. It's the sort of mistake that results in your car exploding when you start it one morning.

Nevertheless I applied for the job. One of the readers of this site has suggested that pointing out these errors shows a good attention to detail. On this occassion, I thought I'd better not mention it to the agent.

Half-an-hour later the recruitment agent phoned. His voice didn't sound like he'd been kneecapped. We had a good chat and he's put my c.v. forward to the company.

Although I'm very English my ancestry is anything but English. In fact, genetically I'm 50% Irish, i.e. Republic of Ireland Irish. However the whole ancestry thing means nothing to me and I like being English (although I do know that some other nationalities find us exasperating). So, I didn't mention this ancestry. Makes no difference, I could do the job - a freelance team management role - and if they agree then I'll do it.

Big improvement

According to an article in this week's Computing journal there's been a major improvement in the UK IT job market. Budgets have increased for the first time in three years. But it's not going to necessarily translate into bigger salaries.

Another daft advert

This one, describing a role for a project manager, contained the following sentence: "The company does not use Prince 2 therefore it is not required." Even if you don't know anything about the PRINCE project management methodology this is a mad statement. And if you do know the methodology (I'm a practitioner by the way) it's even worse.

I didn't apply to this job for other reasons (as in they had a few requirements which I didn't match).

Leave it to me - itis

Recruitment consultants have told me, at seminars about job hunting, to always phone. There's so many IT people looking for work that it marks you out and may give you an advantage.

In the last few days quite a few agencies, when I've phoned them, have said "yes, we have your c.v., leave it to us and we'll call you back". And that's that. No chat about the job or my details.

Some agencies send an auto-reply email. I received one today which said they'd received 50 (that's fifty) applications for this job. My only response can be "is that all?". Following by "you lightweight wuss". 50? These days? Come on.

One agency who did this to me today phoned me back half an hour later. I was quite shocked. We went through the role and it sounded quite appropriate. He suggested I looked at the company's web site but said I should ensure that I use the .co.uk suffix rather than .com. He didn't say why but there was a little bit of an edge in his voice. He also said that the company hadn't realised the issue when they set up the web site.

What do you think I did?

I had to check the .com prefix. Well, it might have been from their American sister company or something.

Nope. It was a site about the hardest pornography I've ever seen (I used to be involved in policing a bank's network so I've seen some quite dubious porn in my time). The titles to the links were bad enough. I don't think it was illegal porn but it was very hardcore. Ridiculous in fact. But very funny that a serious consultancy firm could easily be confused with them.

Worst still, this company's own website (ending in .co.uk) wasn't working at all today. I'll check them out tomorrow.