Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Rejection Letter

This was sent to me when I asked the question on Linkedin regarding rejection letters to send out to candidates that we will not be considering. In the recent weeks there as been some conversation on ERE groups regarding sending rejection letters and closing the gaps with applicants. I agree that applicants that fit the job description should be contacted to close the loop but when people reply to your posting that can not in anyway be considered a candidate they need to get something like this.

This letter is only reserved for those folks at there who don’t take the time to read the job description. Please feel free to make any additions or submit your own letters.

*Note - this letter was sent to me from a Linkedin question regarding rejection letters. I laughed to I feel the need to share


Dear Candidate

Thank you for submitting your resume. Unfortunately, we are unable to consider you for this position.

While not expressly stated in the position description, one of the primary required skills is "reading comprehension". Based on the submission of your resume for this position, we are confident that you may be lacking in this regard. There was no match whatsoever between our requirements and your resume.

We understand that sometimes there are other factors that result in a mismatch between an applicant's skills and a position description. Perhaps your resume was submitted by vandals, or maybe applying for our opening was the only way to extricate yourself from being eaten by wolves. If this is the case, we here at [company] understand.

But we still won't consider you for this position.

We hope you understand, but given your history with us and all the reading involved here, we're pretty sure you won't.

Warm regards,
Director of Unqualified Candidate Rejection

Monday, September 15, 2008

QUOIN Educators Conference

Last Thursday & Friday the Quoin Foundation hosted the Educators Conference for Region 5 which includes schools in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, & Louisiana. We had two presentations and some healthy round table discussions.

On Thursday Nancy Barry spoke to us from her book When Reality Hits: What Employer Want Recent College Graduates to Know. It was a great presentation and fit the audience of industry members and educators. Our round table discussion brought up some great ideas on what universities can do to teach their students about what to expect when you come into the workforce and what we as the industry can to do train and develop those graduates.

Friday morning Joe Powell of Rice University Building Institute spoke about performance characteristics of the world's most competitive A/E/C firms as well as what will be needed to join the next generation of global market leaders. Joe Powell is the author of The New Competitiveness in Design Construction. I was not able to attend but the feedback I got about the presentation was that it was very beneficial.

I plan on writing more about Nancy's presentation since it deals strictly with college graduates and that is currently what is taking up all my time right now. Stay tuned

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

September HR Carnival

The new HR Carnival is up at Guerilla HR. Have a look and see what all the blog is about.

Thursday, September 04, 2008

Things Learned in Construction Internship 2008

This was given to me from one of our interns this summer. It is very interesting to see what they actually "learned"



1. Most important piece of equipment on the job site: copy machine.

2. When you totally screw up in class everyone laughs at you and you fail the test. When
you totally screw up on the job, no one laughs and people die.

3. If there is a clean spot anywhere on or around your desk, you need to be assigned more work.

4. The smallest shower can turn the site into a mud hole faster than you can blink.

5. Coffee level = Productivity level

6. Desk quality is determined by distance to the copy machine.

7. It's polite to warn everyone before you send massive emails that clog the network.

8. If the architect ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.

9. Never sign something unless you're damn sure it's right.

10. If you say you'll have something done by the end of the week, come hell or high water, you get it done by the end of the week.

11. The network is always clogged just after the first crack of thunder; as everyone in the office goes to weather.com at the exact same time.

13. Most everyone in construction and architecture writes in all caps, and no one really knows why.

14. Building towers before the time of computers must have really sucked.

15. Pedestrians may have the right-of-way over cars, but bulldozers have the right-of-way over everything.

16. Gasoline : Cars :: Coffee : Contractors

17. If your crane gets stuck in a muddy pit, just use your other crane to pick it up.

18. Spanglish.

19. You'd trade most of what you learned in college to know how to read a set of blue prints.

20. Anti-rain dances don't work.

21. Mixed up submittal numbers? Bad concrete pour? Rain? Just blame the intern!

22. Construction fatalities are horrifyingly common.

23. At any point in time, there are about 100 different ways to get killed on the jobsite.

24. The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

25. Never promise anything about the future until it's the past.

26. Do not, under any circumstance, let one of your sub-contractors push you around.

27. In everything you do, do it as if your going to either sue, or be sued about it.

28. Neither the Constitution or the Bill of Rights applies to interns.

29. The mere presence of a person wearing slacks and a college ring will dramatically increase productivity and safety in his immediate area.

30. If you really want to, you can keep concrete alive for 3-4 days, even in the Texas summer.

31. Rarely do accidents kill the person at fault. Instead, they normally kill someone who was doing nothing wrong.

32. Double punch Tuesdays.

33. Never delete emails; create a filing system instead.

34. Office mistakes are fixed with the "undo" button. Field mistakes are fixed with concrete chippers.

35. Lunch meetings = free food.

36. The time between 4PM and 5PM is the longest hour of the day.

37. Nothing of any substance or consequence is accomplished after lunch on Friday.

38. For the love of God, don't forget to attach the file to the email.

39. If you see someone running on a job site, follow him; He's either running to someone who needs medical attention, or away from something that's about to go catastrophically wrong.

40. Some of the scariest words a mechanical contractor can say are: "I don't think it's supposed to make that sound..."