I was chatting with one of the admin folks today, one who has spent some time lately making happy phone calls inviting search candidates to interviews. And here's hir advice:
1) If you don't already have a professional email address, set one up. Don't use hotsexnowATproviderDOTcom.
2) If you've been applying for jobs, and you're hoping for phone calls, answer your phone like a professional. Say, something along the line of "Hello, Mary Smith speaking." Yes, it feels awkward at first, but it's way better than "Yo yo yo!" or something, at least according to this admin person.
And that's it from the happy admin side.
Other thoughts?
If you have kids and you're on the job market, always have a video ready to go in case you get a phone call you need to take. One time, I got a call to set up an interview and eldest took that opportunity to start clinging to me and whining. It took 20 seconds to get a video going so he could be satisfied enough to let me talk. Those 20 seconds were awful.
ReplyDeleteI don't know why anyone would apply for a job with an unprofessional email address. That seems so obvious! Yet, I'm sure that happens all the time.
Not exactly an admin thing, but I'll chip in since I've been looking over piles of applications for the past couple of weeks.
ReplyDeleteI don't think there is *anything* to be said for turning in your app at the last possible minute. I was almost caught up with reading them and hoped to spend the weekend going back over the most promising ones, when we got about twenty on Friday afternoon. We're meeting on Monday, so I'm thinking those last 20 are not going to get as much attention as the ones that came in earlier. They did meet the deadline (Friday 5 pm), so I'll try to give them equal attention, but it's not going to be easy.
Also, several of the ones that came in at the last minute sent their recommendations in some way through our human resource person instead of having recommenders upload them directly to the online system. Guess what? Zie didn't have time to scan all of them on Friday afternoon to get them in the system, so we won't be able to see them before our Monday morning meeting. (This may well be a recommender's fault more than an applicant's, but when an application and all three recs come in on the last day, I tend to suspect the applicant.)
I do believe in giving all candidates a fair shake, and we'll try hard to do that. But since this position has been advertised widely since August, I'm likely to think more favorably of a candidate who has hir act together at least a week or two before the deadline.