Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Childers.Paula AT epamail.epa.gov]

 The job was advertised
> with a salary of $40-$50K, which seemed good for someone right out of

> school, and I did get about 50 resumes, but most of them have no
> computer, technical, engineering, or science training, even outside
> of work.  Its a motley crew of day-care workers, high school gym
> teachers, Wallmart employees, etc.

Probably a good hunk of those people are folks who are actually
unemployed and need to file X number of applications per week or lose
their unemployment benefits. "Entry-level" is assumed by that particular
part of "the system" to be just that - open to anyone, regardless of
experience. An entry-level warehouse job is quite different from an
entry-level tech job, but nobody at the Employment Commission probably
cares.

> I picked through the resumes with terrible grammar and mispellings
> and selected the top four candidates. Two of them never responded to
> email or phone messages, a third had just found another job, and
> another declined to interview after actually reading the job
> description.

Where did you advertise? Was it somewhere that people will just randomly
throw resumes to anyone, lottery-style, or somewhere you would actually
get personal responses from people who genuinely wanted a new job? And
many just-out-of-school techies already have arranged a position, either
where they co-opped or via the school's career center. You would
probably have done better to call it a "junior ____ " and thereby avoid
the entry-level trap.

I'm amazed by the, uh, *inflation* I see on resumes AND in job ads. It's
like bluffing, to see who will blink first. One personal experience from
some time ago just further illustrates the poker-game nature of it all.
I submitted a resume to a job, lured by the potential for (way) more $$
and more potential to make process changes and move to the "next level"
career-wise. The job seemed a perfect fit for my skillset, and the
initial phone conversations made the position sound quite inviting.
However, when I went to the onsite interview, I discovered the work
environment was ten times worse than where I was currently. If I had
written a description of everything I could hope for in a tech job, and
then took exactly the opposite of each one, that was this job. None of
this was revealed in the early negotiations. I could have saved them a
lot of time if they'd said all that up front.

That said, just what the heck *did* happen to all the mid-level jobs?

Paula
who would still like more $$, but is content to wait for it