It's obviously not your cup of tea

It's obviously not your cup of tea

There are a fairly wide-ranging set of conclusions one can draw about a person based on work history alone. I'm not necessarily drawing snap conclusions about the person's character (although, in my experience, work history tends to reflect one's character fairly accurately most of the time), but I can fairly quickly glean the type of work a person is going to gravitate toward, regardless of the position he/she has applied for.

There have been many times when I look at a resume and think, "Why would you apply for this job?" Let me give you a few examples:

1. An applicant who has 10 years as a senior business analyst applying for an entry-level assembly job;

2. An applicant whose resume shows custodial-only experience applying for a production manager position;

3. An applicant with strictly customer service work applying for an assembly role.

Ok, yes, as long as the work history is stable, I have no issues giving that last person a call – and have, more times than I can count — but I will most definitely be asking why they are interested in the career change.

As much as the above are straightforward examples that should prompt any reasonably effective recruiter to question why the candidate would apply for the position, there are more nebulous examples that require a bit more cognizance of the industries we serve. One example we see on a semi-frequent basis is a work history along the lines of:

1. Customer Service - 9 months

2. Food service - 12 months

3. Production - 1 month

4. PCA/DSP - 18 months

5. Production - 2 months

6. Customer service - 10 months

7. Retail - 12 months

8. Production - 1 month

9. PCA/DSP - 11 months

10. Production - 1 month

Now, as a veteran recruiter who has waded through well over 10,000 resumes (that number is closer to 50,000, but I’m rounding down so that no one gets on my case and asks me to prove it), I would say this is solid history for the candidates with which we usually work. I can also immediately deduce that production/manufacturing work is not a good fit for this particular person.

“How is that,” you ask?

Of the four production jobs this person held, they were there for no longer than 2 months at any of them. This is clearly not a case of simply wanting a career change since the candidate has given production a shot (and failed) four different times.

You might then ask, “so what?”

Well, the production positions for which we hire have training times that can take anywhere from 3-9 months, depending on a number of different factors. General aptitude for the work is far and away the most significant. If someone cannot hold a production position for longer than two months, he/she has not even graduated from the training stages yet.

Why would I, as a recruiter, spend my client’s time and money to hire someone who is going to leave before training is over?

Answer: I'm not.

It's obvious production is not your cup of tea, so why would you apply for a production job?

Answer: You shouldn't. Try something else that is more in your wheelhouse. You'll thank me later.