Bitter But Over It

Let’s talk a little bit about university supported onlineemployee recruitment systems – more specifically systems that allow employers to screen for specific applicants based on degree. First, the run down. Basically the way this thing works is an employer posts a job and then they have the option to only accept online applications from students with a certain degree in their profile. On the applicant side, we have two degree sections in our profile, “Prior Education” and “Current Education” or something like that. Naturally, I have B.S. Industrial Engineering as my prior education and that I’m currently on schedule for an M.S. in IE in December 2004.

Simple enough. Or not. I tried applying for a job where the degree requirement listed was B.S. in IE and just like you’d expect, it wouldn’t let me. I emailed the support team and they came back with some goofy “modify your profile to apply for the job and then switch it back once you’re done. The system doesn’t look at prior education” response. Then why have it? Maybe it helps when recruiters are just looking at account profiles, but would it really be that hard to implement a check of prior education? And why doesn’t an M.S. in IE qualify you for B.S. IE jobs anyway? Come on, we can do better than that.

Talk about doing better. You may have heard Nelly’s collab with “Xtina” (Aguilera for those not in the know) on the radio already, but have you heard “Over and Over” featuring … TIM MCGRAW!?! (Cue Beki and her, “I’m a huge Tim fan and I knew about that months ago” comments). It’s a pretty cool song. I think what I like most is that the use of Tim is subtle … and he doesn’t rap.

And while we’re on the pop-culture kick, how about the new star of tonight’s episode of The Apprentice. That’s right, red velvet gelato ice cream! That little plug at the end to “go on Yahoo! to catch tonight’s flavors” was definitely aimed at people like me, and judging from the little bit of downtime for Ciao Bella’s website, I wasn’t the only one.

Oh, and a bit of warning. GM R&D apparently won’t touch Master’s graduates with a ten-foot pole. I won’t say I was qualified, I mean she made it very obvious they were looking for PhD’s, but based on her reasoning, I’d say I was really only a couple of hard-core probabilty courses and maybe some name-in-print papers away from being qualified. Lucky for me I only heard about this yesterday, and therefore wasn’t expecting too much from it. Oh and I didn’t really want to move to Michigan anyway.