July 6, 2012

Application Issues When Looking for Work

Looking for work
I've been spending the day applying for all the jobs I missed out on during a recent trip.

Applying takes anywhere from 10 minutes to 2 1/2 hours......and involves everything from simply emailing a resume off to essentially typing it out by hand into the company's HRIS.  If you happen to be applying for a Federal Job, the difficulty kicks up a few notches.

The only real issue I've been having today is that it is obvious to me that in general the folks who design these Human Resources Information Systems don't seem to do a good job of working with the folks who use them....probably on either side of the equation.


I spent over a half hour trying to get through the final portion of an application.  My materials were in, everything was signed, checked-off, or filled-out.  All I needed to do was get moved over to another system to provide some basic demographics that were largely entered into the first system.

....and this second system kept crashing.  Nothing seemed to work, starting over, clicking back through, resubmitting.  There were four small bits of info that "had" to be separated over four pages and the interface was randomly crashing on different pages.

Once my frustration was vented a bit I tried to handle this problem systematically and I couldn't find the underlying issue....until I simply switched web browsers.  Evidently the Bureau of Land Managements' servers don't like Google Chrome.  You would think that....I don't know....maybe someone would test their system to see if it worked on the most popular web browser currently in use?

I don't have any problem with a site not working well with one web browser.  It happens.  The courteous thing to do though is post a warning that the site is optimized for a particular browser or that there are known issues with a specific browser.

At least I was able to get that figured out.....of course if I manage to get the job, just about any hassle would be worth it.

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