Those Jobs are Reserved

Since I know The Company has no interest in my welfare and no interest in doing the right thing and converting me from Extended Tenure Extra (ETE) employee status to regular status, I have begun looking (with my manager’s blessing) for other opportunities within the company to become a regular. As I mentioned previously, I interviewed for an on-site System Admin slot on the new team that’s being created. While I had a some hope that this would happen, the reality of the situation is that the ONLY way I would be hired was if the hiring manager couldn’t get enough regular The Company employees to apply and transfer departments. If that happened, then the hiring manager could go to his boss and say, “We can’t get enough applicants to apply and we have this ETE who’d be perfect for the job. Let’s convert him and bring him on board.”

Well, the manager just barely received enough applicants so that bringing me on was not an option. It figures but that’s life.

Anyway, my even getting an interview was an exception to the rules The Company has laid out. You see, if a manager gets permission to either back-fill a regular Company slot on his team OR he gets an FTE (budget to hire a Full Time Employee, which in this case, we’ll assume is a regular Company employee position) for a newly created slot on his team, then that manager will post the job on the internal Company job posting site. ETE employees may not apply for those jobs, making their chances of getting on as a regular much harder. Further, if a manager has posted a job and it is slotted as “regular,” then he can’t hire an ETE anyway. He can only hire those employees at The Company who are already designated as regular employees. Thus, the system is further rigged against ETE’s.

However, let us say that a manager wants to hire from without The Company. Then said manager would post the job on the external website and people outside could apply.

This is where things get interesting. Did you know that on most company job pages, a great many of those jobs are already “taken?” It is true.

In the case of The Company, a manager may already know whom he wishes to hire. However, said manager has to post the job on the external site to give the pretense of making it available to everyone.

So, lets say my manager wanted to play with the system this way and that he has permission to create a new regular slot on his team and that he has permission to hire outside The Company. However, his true goal is to hire me, thus making me a regular employee. So, he’d submit the paperwork to HR, have the budget approved, and then HR would post the job on the external site. My manager would then tell me, “OK AstroNerdBoy. I want you to go to the external site and apply for job #ABC123.” I’d then go and apply for said job.

My manager would then be sent not only my resume, but the resume’s of someone like you who may have applied. Your resume wouldn’t even get looked at because the job was already reserved for me. My manager then might go through the formality of an interview and then I’d get a packet in the mail with a job offer from The Company.

Ain’t that sweet?

It is not just The Company that does this. I know for a fact that many large companies do this. I won’t mention any names, but that’s the way it is and that’s what I’m up against as I attempt to find a regular slot via the external Company site. Those managers already have contractors or ETE folks they’ve already decided to bring on board and the job posting is a fake, designed to fulfill Company requirements.

Frankly, The Company should allow an ETE to apply for internal jobs and be converted that way without this underhanded, sneaky crap they (and other companies) pull.

Still, I may get lucky and score a real job. Maybe.