Saturday, February 20, 2010

Last night I saw that NBC was gracious enough to show an award ceremony of somebody who was not in fact American. He was, in fact, Norwegian. Lest think NBC would show this due to some sense that we're all part of a larger world, one that does not revolve around the USA, the silver & bronze medal winners were American so I guess if you have to Americans on the podium, than Americans are able to stand watching some foreign person feeling patriotic over their foreign country.

I actually always liked seeing the award ceremonies centered around people from who aren't American because I like to hear other foreign countries national anthems and because I'm an American, still amazed that other people actually love a country that is not us.

So because I was so curious about the Norwegian national anthem, I dug around (meaning went to Wikipedia), and found the lyrics to their anthem:

We are Norway
Our country is so boring
And full of snow and fjords
We like to eat herring and pine for the fjords
Really, nothing happens here
Or ever happened here.
We are Norway, Our country is so dull

We are Norway
And we have free health care
We also have no poverty and there are no drive-bys
And nobody drives planes into government buildings
We are Norway
Suck it USA

Monday, February 08, 2010

For those wondering what the latest trends in job hunting are, this is what I've been seing:

-Email screenings to determine if there's going to be a phone screening to determine if an actual in-person interview will happen. Sadly, none of the "How to Get a Job" books detail what you are and are not supposed to do on an email prescreen.

-Outsourced recruiters. Yep, that's right. I think some of the recruiters with whom I've talked to are in Bombay not in San Francisco. I could be wrong but I've gotten way too many calls from recruiters with thick Indian accents coming from all sorts of weird area codes. There is a certain irony, however, to the fact that people who help people who've been outsourced look for new work are getting outsourced themselves.

-Long, drawn out processes. Usually, if a company needs to hire somebody, they like to do it ASAP. This doesn't stop them from taking several weeks in between going from one part of the interview process (the prescreening) to the second part of the process. Of course, this could be because they didn't really like you that much and are just telling you that or it could mean that they're just so busy they don't even have time to hire somebody to help them be less busy but it could also mean that they've received so many resumes over the past few weeks that they're going to be really, really, really choosy. Why just talk to several people when you talk to 30 of them?