Interview standard or bad methods
A few years ago I went to one of those college career fairs and did little mini-interviews. There was one organization that didn't seem all that interested in me, but I went through the standard interview procedure, got a feel of the place and of the people, etc. I had a feeling it wasn't going to turn out well, so I checked it off, sent off a thank you note to the person I spoke to and moved on. I never received a reply from the interviewer and I was in the midst of pursuing other avenues when I recieved an email from the organization, but from a different person. I was a little confused because I didn't recognize the name and went through my cards that I collected in order to figure out if I was just having a memory block. I did a little research and found it was the other person at the career fair--also interviewing people but I didn't speak to her at all. The person wanted a follow-up and even wrote about how it was a pleasure to meet me (just her, not the other person) at the fair, even though we never even made eye contact! Recently I went through something similar--had an initial contact and interview with one person--then received a rejection from someone I've never heard of and have had no prior contact with. They said they couldn't offer me a certain position at this time, but encouraged me to look at other opportunities with the organization. I understand that it can be hard to keep track of applicants coming at you at a career fair or hiring staff at a large organization and that different employees do different tasks. But it just seems bad practice to not even give the potential employee a rejection from the person who actually did the interview. Is this becoming a standard hiring/interview/rejection procedure? This has only happened to me twice and usually I get some sort of response from the person I actual interview with. I thought the first time was a fluke and perhaps the interviewers got their papers mixed up or something, but now I wonder. Thoughts? Whether or not career or jb fairs actually work is something that I really have no experience with. I have been to two of these events in my entire life. One that my office was taking part in on behalf of the government agency that I worked for and one that I went to this past November. The first one, I went with a bunch of others from my office because we were acting as shills for our human resource department. This, I have been told, is common pracitice. The more people who act interested in a particular job opportunity, the better the response from people who are actually job seeking. The second was because I saw the advertisement that several companies I was interested in and had already sent resumes to, were going to be there. While I was wondering the booths I would stop to listen to what the conversations around me were about. I noticed that after one of the company recruiters would finish talking with someone, they would put the paperwork on the table and, if more than one job was being advertised, in the appropriate pile. The result was that everyone who was talked with was jumbled up in one big group. Unless the recruiter put his/her initials on the papers, there was no way to tell who realy talked to who. So, my guess is that, while it may not be absolute industry standard or totally due to bad methods, it may be a combination of both. | |
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