Drawing out the process

[gosplcovrsinger]

Slightly more information about my job progress today . . . I got the call from the HR lady, Kelly, today and set a meeting with her for when I got off work this evening. Went and met with her expecting to leave with some sort of feeling of certainty, if not an offer. No dice. It was yet another interview. It seems that Kelly decided that since

Comments

[belgand]

God, I hate HR people, especially when looking for a job. They rarely know anything about the actual business and aren't going to have anything to do with your actual job, but they've been thrown in as another layer of pointless bureaucracy. I've heard far too often of people going in for 3 or 4 sets of interviews and still not having an offer yet simply because they had to run through X number of interviews with HR and various other departments.

One of my worst fears is that in science dealing with HR people is especially problematic since they're making decisions based on a sheet of specifications. I had this with the job I'm interviewing for now (though, admittedly, the HR guy I'm speaking to seems really nice and well, I do have an interview with them). At one point during the short, initial phone interview portion he went down a big list of various skills and equipment asking me about each of them. The problem is that the gaps in my experience that don't show up in context. Take HPLC for example, I'm vaguely familiar with the concept and the process, but I've never dealt with it personally because I've always worked exclusively in the realm of DNA and HPLC is mainly used to seperate proteins. In my previous work if the gene expressed that's all we ever cared about. A trained observer would note this and realize that HPLC is going to be pretty trivial to bring me up to speed on. With most biology job postings there's a list of various basic procedures that they want you to know because pretty much every biology grad does know them (e.g. Southern blot, PCR, gel electrophoresis) or know of them, but many of them might be something you've never really worked with because it was never relevant and takes very little time to teach someone(e.g. I never had any need to do polyacrylamide gels, I did everything in agarose, and while they're not terribly different I was asked about each seperately). The thing is, the HR people don't necessarily know this.

When dealing with HR though it's an empty checkbox that'll likely be used against me in a quantitative comparison to see who has the most filled. It's all about hitting the buzzwords they've been trained to expect.