Hives, Prednisone, and Sweet "No Thank You's"

B'
Well, who the hell knows what "caused" this, I certainly don't, and neither does my doctor.  Hives.  I broke out in hives last Saturday and not just a few.  By Saturday night I thought I was having The Worst Heartburn Ever, I was downing Benadryl trying to keep the itching under control.  Agh!  Went to the doctor's on Monday and I got dosed.

Allergic reaction, sure; but to what, I have no idea.  Worse, it could be caused by contact to anything within the past month and boy have I been out and about the past month.  I'd post pictures, but really, I did that on facebook, so I'll just show you the arm rash and leave the foot shots out of my blog.  Still, it's kind of like being in a science fiction film.  My skin welts up for about 15 minutes with burning and then it dies back down and you can't even see that anything was wrong.  The patches have been, for the most part, consistent in their pattern and location, but I have gotten some "interesting" sites.  At least it's not oozing and disgusting as that year I got chiggers in Indiana while on the I-90 RoadTrip.  Those were horrible.  This is just painful.

Onto the job search update.  There are plenty of companies who do not respond at all to tell you you are out of the running for a job.  This is frustrating because you want to follow up, to understand if there is anything you can do to progress through the "slush pile" which follows the "Submit" button.

The answer to that is no.  Frankly, a friendly little, "Thank you, but no thank you," would help a person who is looking for a job know to cross that one off their list.  This is important because one of the dilemmas one faces while looking for a job is the question of how many jobs in one company should a person apply to when you haven't closed one of your other applications?  Is two too many open applications?  How about four open applications?  What if they never show the jobs "closed" in any manner?  How is your resume "seen," or cover letter "seen" by the various applications?

That said, to me, I now see that as a "not a good match" company.  I might have been interested in them, but without a mechanism to understand if / how you're moving through the process then I don't see them as investing in treating people with some basic respect.  It's annoying to have to go back & follow up at all the various dashboards / individual job notices, but that's not the real problem.  The problem is there is no indication that a "proceed" to apply for another job isn't imperiled.  I have no problem being rejected for unknown reasons, I'd just ask that I be informed I was tossed out of the pool.

This company at least tracks your submissions and color codes for active (red) or dead (black).  But this, too, goes back to the Tracker you need to make for yourself.

My tracker has the date I submitted, the company name, the title of the job description, and I have inserted a hyperlink to that job description because NOTHING IS MORE EMBARRASSING than

being on an interview and not knowing WHICH JOB you're talking about.  Yes.  That happened to me.  Yes.  I did that.  Sometimes, if I'm unsure if the job description hyperlink will remain live (e.g., think of the job descriptions posted on sites like LinkedIn or Dice, which are trawled / scraped, and not the company's own site), then I copy & paste it in a Comment in my Excel Cell for the job description.

I also have a tracker for the "dashboards" - basically, the larger companies have a tracker for all the jobs you've submitted to.

But going back to the topic at hand, say a job's been showing up as submitted to for a while and still shows open, I'd guess that if you haven't heard from the company in three weeks you might as well just count yourself as dead in the water.  Those are the irritating ones.  Those floating lumps of non-state submissions polluting your clean little tracker.  I just want to " slap them in their face just to get their attention." 

But I did get three of the nicest rejection letters this week for two jobs.  One was a true long shot, but I figured, "Why not?"  The second one was from both the HR rep & the hiring manager at the company where I flubbed the technical review.  Even  as the company was large, receiving those didn't hurt as much as they "ended the story."  And that was fine.

My "numbers" are improving for call backs, so I might be getting better at selecting to which jobs I might actually have a near fit.  But warning, I found out from one of those call backs that the first job I thought I'd applied for to them only had my cover letter and not my resume.  Be ware when applying through the job sites.  If you can find the job on the company site apply there.