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job fair people
Wednesday, November 3 1999
An icecream scoop of three hours was removed from my afternoon at work. Somehow I got roped into attending a technical job fair at the San Diego Convention Center with Paul, our company's new technical recruiter. Since I don't have a car, I rode downtown with Paul in his open convertible BMW. I hadn't really talked with Paul much before, but during this experience I found him to be an affable, interesting guy. We talked about such things as the deal he got on the (used) car he was driving, bicycle commuting, and other subjects uncommonly discussed around my workplace, where, in dramatic caricature of American orthodoxy, showy expenditure is the final metric of personal success.
We drove down near the harbour nearest Downtown and entered the vast San Diego Convention Center, which is currently undergoing massive construction in an effort to double its size. The new half is a massive abstraction of massive rusty I-beams looking something like a knocked-over Eiffle Tower.
Our booth was in a small room upstairs with a number of other "high tech" companies such as Sun Microsystems. Sun came well prepared; at their booth a woman was giving away such trinkets as rubber balls, bubble-blower pens and pocket-sized frisbees suitable for office play. Unlike Sun, we had no toys to give away, just a few tee shirts, but we hid those away to save for impressing the extremely rare "must hire" candidates.
Paul told me he's been working as a technical recruiter for the past four years. It came as no surprise, then, that he had a bunch of "systems" set up for screening applicants and dealing with their resumés. I wondered how he could tell just from a little banter whether or not a candidate was a dud (Paul wrote "norm" at the top of the resumé) or whether he was the sort that warranted a phone call that very night (marked with a star on the resumé). Obviously Paul was picking up on a lot of subtle non-verbal clues that I didn't have the experience to detect. I was intrigued. I wanted to see what the magic was.
Paul explained that the really good candidates are usually new to the area and haven't yet heard any of the bad stories passing word-of-mouth through San Diego from the old employees who were laid off, summarily fired, made to endure cult-like brain washing sessions, and all the other sorts of things I've complained about for the past year. But there was more to an ideal candidate; there was a fire in their eyes, a desire to find challenge and escape boredom. Paul handled each of the candidates on a case by case basis with a deft subtlety dictated by the nuances of the conversation. For example, when a young Russian software engineer expressed the desire to escape his present boring job, Paul sensed he might just be feeling out the job market and playing hard to get, so Paul pushed his resumé back at him and told him to check out our website tonight and email us his resumé if he was still interested after that. "If he emails me his resumé after that, I know he's serious!" Paul explained.
There was an interesting breakdown in the kinds of people showing up for this particular job fair. During some periods of the day, for example, the quality of the job applicants is particularly poor, bordering on indigent. It's not so bad during lunch, when people can sneak off from their regular job to check out the job fair. But from about 2:00 to 4:00, about the only people with time to kill are the seriously unemployed/unemployable.
The most outstanding group was the dark-suited middle aged guys who had just "graduated" from one of those programs you see so heavily advertised on daytime television. You know the sell, "Join the technology revolution with an exciting new high tech career!" They were mostly looking for networking and PC repair jobs. There's a need for such people in my company but it's fairly limited. I could tell that Paul had little patience for these people. He was obviously only interested in those who looked youthful, hungry and brilliant. Indeed, he seemed to be more interested in those who were dressed fairly casually; I suppose he could more easily picture them in our workplace.
My shift was supposed to last until 2:00, but my replacement (Mary, the QA girl) didn't show up until 2:15. I grabbed a quick free lunch of tasteless meat sandwich and then went outside to catch the Trolley back home.
I just missed the Orange Line Trolley outside the Convention Center, so I walked into the big building heart of Downtown to catch the Blue Line Trolley for a straight shot into Mission Valley. Unfortunately, there were many more Trolleys coming from Mission Valley than those going to it, and when I did finally catch a Trolley going to Mission Valley, things turned into a Kafakesque nightmare.
I was on the Blue Line Trolley, heading through Downtown towards Mission Valley when the guy making an announcement on the intercom said something that led me to believe that I was on the Orange line and that I should get off and catch the next Trolley. But when I did, I realized I'd been on the right Trolley after all. 15 minutes wasted. It wouldn't have been such a big deal, but I was expected at a meeting back at the office plus I was supposed to help deliver a new content section of the site onto the live system. Even without going to the job fair, time was a tight commodity today. Sitting around for 15 minutes with nothing to do felt like a holocaust of murdered time. (I fear this job is turning me into a Type A personality. My heart has been palpitating again.)
Somehow I made it back to work. A bunch a people were looking for me, but there was no crisis. The meeting had been canceled for other reasons and the new content section was moving flawlessly through Quality Assurance, aided by a new QA guy who's not nearly the tightass that Mary can be.
Kim picked me up from work. The original plan was to go out to eat, but we ended up picking up a Greek pizza and eating it at home instead. The neighbor girl Lisa showed up and we teased her relentlessly about the gadget equipment and massive size of the truck driven by a guy she's been seeing of late.
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