You have to be contactable to be in business!

This is not just another rant about tech recruiters but businesses in general. This just so happens to be an example from a tech recruiter but other businesses are likewise as bad. Why is it that this is happening? I really don't recall businesses being so bad before. Is it the ADHD or ADD brought on by technology and the endless Facebook and Twitter usage that makes people working at such businesses so bad?

So today I was at DICE looking for jobs. I came across a job for a sysadmin in Dallas! Now why Dallas when my search agent clearly filters for jobs in San Diego. And it's not like I didn't come across it before as I had reported it before. Of course, DICE seems to pretty much ignore any reported jobs and this job got "renewed" in that deceitful manner I spoke of before. Looking over the listing I could see nothing that would cause this to be found by a San Diegan search agent.

So this time I emailed DICE directly an asked about this. But I also saw that if I hovered over the Contact button I got a phone number. So I decided to call Robert Half, the recruiter with this erroneously posted job. I figured I'm helping them out by informing that their job posting probably isn't too effective if it's showing up as a San Diego job.

The number was to Fort Worth and after explaining the situation the receptionist there said that she'd transfer me to the San Diegan office of Robert Half and the the call promptly got dropped! Ok people make mistakes so I call back. This time, of course, I get a different receptionist and have to explain the whole situation yet again. I do and she says that she'll transfer me over to the San Diegan office again. I mentioned that last time the connection just dropped so the previous person must have just mishandled it. I was hoping this time that this receptionist would be more accurate. But no, wham, just dropped again... Ugh.

So I call up, yet again, in an attempt to help this guys out. Why am I exerting all this effort I think to myself. So again I have to explain everything and when she was about to transfer me, yet again, to the San Diegan office I stopped her and said, "Perhaps you can give me the phone number and I'll dial it myself". She gave me the phone number and I called. I got a bot saying to me what the office hours were and hung up. It was then that I noticed that it was before 7:30 Am when they open up. I would have thought they'd have an answering machine active for non-business hours but no. So I decided to call after 7:30 Am.

Now I call and get "If you know your parties extension you can dial it now, otherwise dial 0 for an operator". Well I don't know any extensions so I dial zero. It goes through catortions and eventually starts ringing the line again. After several rings I get - "If you know your parties extension you can dial it now, otherwise dial 0 for an operator"! I did this a few times to just verify there's no way to get through!

As I said - you have to be contactable to be in business! Why are business falling down so badly on this simple task? It boggles the mind!