Also: be allistic.
Any tips on looking for a job at a furry convention?
Consent should be involved
- S+: Luke Skywalker
- S: Ben Solo
- A: Anakin Skywalker
- B: Chewbacca
- C: Rey
- F: somehow also Rey
Chewbacca is A, come on.
Also how to get an employee that isn’t a risk for your business
Only for freshers. Experienced candidates hold all leverage today.
Just to be the contrarian: my first job in my current industry was through a recruiter on LinkedIn. It got me an instant 50% salary bump and after a few years and promotions I was making double the previous job.
My second job was… through a recruiter on LinkedIn. It got me an instant 30% salary bump and now after more years and promotions I’m over double the first job.
This in in a country where I had immigrated 10 years prior. For me linkedin is the best social network ever.
Not a contrarian take, happy that worked for and to hear your success story.
Who initiated the conversation with recruiter? you or them?
Linkedin never worked for me, not in the beginning in my career, not 10 years later but maybe I was using it wrong (first job was some random job board, 2nd was cold emailing a CTO, …)
Always the recruiter initiating. As anyone working in IT, I get multiple messages a week, one in ten are relevant and one in ten of those are interesting, but I’m not jumping jobs every year, so it works in the end.
Its really just have a complete profile, listing keyword technologies. In the meantime I have a few recommendations but I don’t think those make a difference.
How long has it been since you were recruited? I avoid LinkedIn, but I’ve never needed to look for work because my dad knew a guy and I proved competent when that got my foot in the door.
Still, from what I have heard in the last year or so it has become, at least in part, a cesspool of scams and disingenuous employers wasting your time in their search for cheaper labor… both often powered by LLMs.
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G: walk in and demand to speak to the manager
That’s K, for Karen Method
I never got anywhere with recruiters
There has to be a demand. If your industry is overpopulated or your skillset isn’t popular, recruiters can’t place you. They get paid when they fill a spot. The better the candidate matches the role, the easier it is to convince a hiring manager to take the interview. Good recruiters know enough people to place oddballs. Lazy recruiters are matching bullets on job requirents.
i reckon you could walk away from a con with a new job, living situation, and even a romantic partner if you wanted. furries are weirdly good at networking for how often they’re treated as weird pariahs by normies.
The absence of shame is almost a social superpower.
They are outcasts of society, so they stick together. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a network of furies all looking out for each other in every field. They probably have a secret handshake or wink or something.
I think the secret something is the most likely
As a furry that doesn’t attend conventions, this is having me reconsider it.
you should they’re super fun
I got contacted randomly on Linkedin by some recruiter. I needed a job right after college, and figured might aswell hear her out. Turned out my dream job just kinda fell into my lap that day.
The thing is I hate dealing with recruiters because they’ll never tell you anything unless you go behind their back, but the only reason I’d be incentivized to go behind their backs is because they are all universally useless, don’t answer emails, don’t negotiate a decent salary for you, and don’t listen to basic instructions like I’m not willing to move out of the local area (they define the local area to be the entiretive of planet Earth, but predominantly Dubai).
I hate you. I’ve been trying to get into my dream job for 21 years to no avail, and yours just falls into your lap right after school.
Life under captialism isn’t fair.
What is your dream job?
It’s absolutely awesome, not gonna lie.
Bro stop talking.
Knowing a guy is a goated strat tbh, hardest part is being competent enough that someone you know would vouch for you
I know my mother-in-law, and she knows everyone apparently. Excellent strategy on my part, having a sibling that got married. 40 years in the making that plan.
sounds like you’re not faking it enough
why fake it when you could be good at what you do?
Because by the time you got good at what a job expects you to be good at, they’re already forcing you to do something else
What if what you’re good at is “learning new skills?”
I feel like a lot of people involved in the hiring process are incompetent and shouldn’t be there. Like you have HR people who can barely use Word asking if you know Java or JavaScript
As someone who briefly worked in recruitment, the amount of people interviewed by people who have no frame of reference for anything about the job requirements is astonishing. Some people may say “but surely not for the high-level positions-” No. Especially for those positions. Because people like owners and c-suites want final say. And guess who knows nothing about these positions. Them. They literally hire presidents and vice-presidents based on vibe. Technical positions see a lot of this, primarily because even a bad interviewee is going to know more about their job than an executive whose primary job is the “idea and vision” guy. Just spit enough jargon, laugh at their jokes and you’re in.
For reference, that company had a head of maintenance who as a friend of a friend of the owners. He just delegated the whole time and hit on any woman he found half-attractive. Thought he was just an asshole until I heard that he had honestly asked a production manager which side of a tape measure was the inches and which was the centimeters. Guy gave a visual run-down on how to use a tape measure to him. The head of maintenance. And he said thanks, and that he’d post it in the tool shed for his staff to reference. It became clear that he delegated everything because he literally didn’t know about thing about his job. I would be surprised if he could point out a phillip’s-head. Apparently he had the same job at a nursing home before that. I shudder to think of why he may have lost that job.
A few months after he got inevitably let go, he delivered my dominoes pizza. I don’t look down on jobs like that, but that felt good.
Yup I had a HR personally message me saying the person I recommended doesn’t have a certification needed for the job. They have that in a different state, getting it in the state the job is in is as simple as saying “hey I passed the same exams you guys take (it’s national), I’m registered and practicing in that other state, can I get approved here?” And they say “sure”. It’s small documentation and a bit of waiting period, but that’s shorter than the training period of the job itself. I said a bit about that but they’re like they don’t have it in this state. Which I’d understand if it’s just a way to say no without saying that person is not qualified for other reasons. Because most other openings I see in our industry gives the candidates 6months to get the certificate because it’s easy
I need to find a better phrase than “cargo cult” but I see a lot of that at work. People who don’t understand why a system is the way it is become fanatical about doing it particular ways.
Like, you have to do “file -> save as” into the directory. If you save it somewhere else first and copy it that’s NO GOOD
Yeah. I think sometimes it comes from using a lot of shitty softwares that only work with “happy path” so they like to repeat what works and won’t experiment (because that means repeated work).
I have a lot of “we have to do it this way”, me: “this is better”, them: “we always do this way”.
As well as, me:“hey it’s easier this way, I think clients will like this way, even if we do the original they have to switch eventually”, them: “no, they asked for this, we NEED to do this”, me: “can we ask?”, them: “…”, i talked to the clients and they were already thinking about the new one and had no problem, saved us weeks of work trying to back port an already existing solution
I just had a flashback to one of my first office jobs.
They had weekly reporting that needed to be done, and someone non-technical had been assigned to do it. They had like gone into the database and copy-pasted records into excel, and the whole operation took a full day.
I was like, “Hold on. What? You know you can script all of this, right?”
Luckily my boss liked me, and let me go ahead. Changed the task into an hour, including making whatever charts and slide-deck management wanted that month.
Though I do wonder if sometimes doing things badly is a weird pro-labor move- They get paid the same if they take all day versus an hour, so why bother speeding it up?
I think that’s honestly how it goes. If you’re efficient and just get more tasks, or get called off for not working (if you’re done with work and doing something else), then you have to pace yourself. Lot if work I get is copy paste this from here to here that takes hours, I could have written an script to do all that in the time I spent cooy pasting, but then I’d be the only one who could do it again. Even though the next time it’d take 5-10 minutes
sounds more like state religion
At past employers it has seemed to me that most of what the internal recruiters do is look back and forth between resumes and job descriptions and throw away the resumes that don’t have enough bullet points matching.
And now we have AI that can do it even worse and even faster!
A month after I graduated college I got an interview for a springboot position and I was telling the guy about my springboot project and he was like “we don’t actually use springboot here, we use kafka instead” and I was just like wtf. Dude supposedly had 10 years experience as a dev and somehow my fresh out of college ass knew more than him. (Didn’t get the job, still unemployed and its been a bit over a year since)
See your problem was knowing how to do the job. You should have focused on knowing Dave. Dave would have got you in.
Shit maybe I should get a job as HR sounds easy as hell
Honestly though, I searched for at least 6 months before my brother in law was like “I might be able to recommend you to a guy I know at a company I used to work at” and within the month I was hired.
I hope I don’t need to go this route. I’m currently looking for a new job, and I barely know anyone who can give me the hook-up.
I’ll repeat this to everyone and it’s not because you’re looking for jobs incorrectly, it’s because you said you lack the “hook-ups”. Professional social sites like LinkedIn are critical for this very thing. So even if you absolutely HATE JOE, you connect because one day Joe will be employed and you might not be and have low enough standards to refer you for that $500 hiring bonus knowing full well you hate his guts.
So send connections to people in same and higher roles as you work with them like the professional corporate slut LinkedIn wants you to be so that one day that asshat joe willingly sells his soul for $500 and gets you past the first line of interviews and you get a job. But until then, attend local job field events and make new friends.
Good luck out there to every unemployed person.
P.s. Fucking joe is a fucking cunt.
A lot of it is cyclical, hit it at the right time and they’ll hire any resume that comes across their desk. The other 90% of the time, yeah, get in line behind the guy that knows a guy…
I had been applying for a year and a half until one day one of the companies was having an open house kinda recruiting event. I went in and the manager said that based on my resume and lack of relevant experience he wouldn’t interview me. He’s now my boss.
Local division of a big name company was always advertising in the paper, I applied but they never replied. Once every 6 months or so they’d do an “open interviews night,” so I signed up. Sat down with the floor manager, he took one look at my resume and told me: “you don’t want to work here. What’s your pay, like X?” he was guessing based on my title and experience, he was within 2% "Yeah, I only get 80% of that and I’m the highest paid guy here. We work long hours and the work is both boring and demanding, long hours, unexpected overtime. Your kind of jobs are at our main facility (up north), down here we’re basically a sweat shop.
I interviewed for 3 weeks in Manhattan 1988, whoever would talk to me. Dressed well, suit, nice tie, matching black belt and shoes. Every single interviewer dumped on me: “no real experience, nobody cares about your degree or what grades you got, you’ve got nothing to offer.” Finally, I bought a $2 bright red necktie from a street vendor, had my shoes shined and went and saw an agent who interviewed me at a glass table. She took a long look at my shoes through that table, then at me, and declared she absolutely could get me a job with (investment banking firm). One glance at my resume: “you do computer stuff, right? They always need computer guys, and you’ll fit right in! They’re going to love you.”
I have no real experience to back this up, but I feel like nowadays dressing up in a full suit and tie for a computer science job interview would be overdressing (if you are not going to work for a bank). I generally go with just suit pants and a button up shirt and that seems to have worked fine for me so far.
My last interview was in 2014, for a transfer within a big company from one metro area office to another. I had been on-site in my present office many times (still, mostly working from home), so I took the “dress like you would dress during a normal workday” advice - brand new sharp pair of dark blue jeans (solid - no holes or wear), long sleeve dress shirt, loafers. I already “had the job” within the company, everybody on the actual team I was to be transferring to loved me, but… the final interview was with my new Boss’ Boss, and my to-be-new boss told me, “yeah, you’re going to have to come back to see him, he’ll flat out refuse to hire anybody who wears blue jeans to an interview.”
