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OT: need advice about difficult career choice
2) I get calls from recruiters all the time. Is this just a pharma thing? They are constantly poaching everyone all day. It's kind of a pain in the ass.
2) There's a lot of bullshit out there about age-related fertility. A lot of the data underpinning those findings originates in French birth records from 200 to 400 years ago. I am not kidding .
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- Black Barney
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- engineer Al
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And be careful about that purple squirrel analogy. A purple squirrel is somebody who has a very specialized skill set, somebody who has gone down the rabbit hole for one reason or another. The natural habitat of the purple squirrel is a big company, because they can afford such rare/specialized creatures. The jack-of-all-trades however has a natural habitat of the small company, because they can't afford to hire three specialists where one guy will do. If a jack-of-all-trades gets hired by a big company, there is a very real possibility that he will get fired in six months, and replaced with two kids from college. So are you the jack-of-all-trades, or the purple squirrel? It might make a difference.
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- Michael Barnes
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Not sure what the angle is here, but something is up with this. Remember "too good to be true" usually is.
When I had a profile/resume up at Monster and Careerbuilder I used to get these emails all the time- "found your resume online, contract position, a bunch of money, no need for an interview, need somebody right away, etc."
This is just not how businesses hire people. And OF COURSE you are the purple squirrel.
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Michael Barnes wrote: Total scam alert. "Found your resume online" is a HUGE tipoff here. As is the fact that they are offering you a job pretty much sight unseen. So is the huge pay increase And that they "don't want" the people that you would be directly working for to talk to you. WTF?
Not sure what the angle is here, but something is up with this. Remember "too good to be true" usually is.
When I had a profile/resume up at Monster and Careerbuilder I used to get these emails all the time- "found your resume online, contract position, a bunch of money, no need for an interview, need somebody right away, etc."
This is just not how businesses hire people. And OF COURSE you are the purple squirrel.
I'm guessing that the angle is that they are either a temp agency or an employment agency. That high paying job will never materialize, but they will find you work, although the work will probably be shit jobs, and in return they get a % of your pay. When I graduated from college I applied for one of these too good to be true jobs, and that's what it turned out to be. It worked out fine for me since I wasn't looking for a career, just a job to earn some bucks for the 6 months between graduating and starting grad school.
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- Michael Barnes
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It could be a company that actually does want you to come to work for what they say...but then there could be shadiness with the contract or getting paid ("we'll wire you your paycheck"/"we'll pay via cashier's check"). Or you could be hired for a position that does not actually exist ("Oops! That contract isn't being funded, sorry, no job!")
The main thing here to remember is that you're vulnerable. You're in a job that you want out of. So you see what could be a way out. But don't let your guard down.
I'm certainly not an HR expert, but from what I know about HR departments (and small businesses) work is that they generally NEVER just randomly reach out to resumes found online. I would say to exercise extreme caution in ANY communication with these people moving forward, and go out with the assumption from square one that this is a scam. It may (miraculously) not be...but just remember that random emails from strangers offering you ANYTHING are generally ones you ought to toss.
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At one point last spring, I stumbled across an interesting stat: while the unemployment rate in Minnesota had fallen to less than 6%, the unemployment rate for accountants was at 2%. It blew me away that the unemployment rate was so low and yet I couldn't get a job. By July, I had discovered the reason: 90% of my competition was coming from accountants that already had a job but wanted a better one.
Anyway, based on my discussions with all these recruiters, I think that the angle is this: recruiters are getting desperate. Employers are less interested in training employees, and more interested in just hiring exactly what they want. They blame the schools for not producing quality candidates, but colleges are not supposed to be teaching crap like one company's overly customized Enterprise Resource Planning software. And then these job openings stay open because they can't find purple squirrels that fit all the requirements. They think they are saving money, but the work isn't getting done either.
So companies try and fail to locate purple squirrels. Then they hire agencies to locate purple squirrels, and the agencies can't find them either. Or even when an agency somehow manages to locate a purple squirrel, they are required to submit at least three people for the job so that the company can feel like they are making a real choice.
I am not the purple squirrel for this job, and the agency knows it. So that leaves two likely possibilities: they already have one or two good candidates, but they need me to fill out the quota for potential candidates. Instead of a purple squirrel, I would be a dark horse candidate. Or maybe they have actually persuaded the company to take somebody with a broad background and turn him into a purple squirrel. But the part that just doesn't make sense is the underlying purple squirrel position. Why not hire two less experienced guys to cover the different responsibilities? An accounting guy to do regular accounting, and a financial analyst who can do analysis and more readily learn the investment stuff.
In the old days ('90s), a company would use a single agency and then let that agency just send somebody in to do the job. Or maybe it just seemed that way to me because the temp jobs that I worked back then were often lower level jobs or else with small companies. These days, it's more normal for a company to get multiple agencies searching and screening for candidates, and then sending them in to get interviewed by the company too. On two different occasions last summer, I had two different recruiters trying to send me in for the same temp job. This situation feels like an odd throwback to the '90s method of getting a temp.
As for the high pay, it might make sense if the agency is offering me up as a "Veblen good." A Veblen good gets increased demand as the price goes up, because it is perceived as being worth the money. Think luxury car or fancy wine. The agency is going to tell this company that I have over 25 years of experience and a CPA license, but I won't leave my current job for anything less than six figures. A sane employer might say no, but a big, successful company with money to spend might see this as a special opportunity to acquire some talent.
Why six months? Or a year, or whatever? Why do they need a purple squirrel so badly and yet for just six months? The only clue might be the nature of the derivatives that this job will focus on: energy. They want somebody who can help them manage their risk with respect to investments in natural gas and/or oil, at time when those prices are sharply down. So what happens if Saudi Arabia stops fucking over the rest of OPEC and cuts production, sending prices back to normal? Does the job abruptly end? If they offer this contract job to me, I will push for a termination clause that guarantees that I will get at least 3 months worth of pay or something like that. That way, I could at least get paid what I would have earned at my current job over the next six months.
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