Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Temper tantrums may work for two year olds........







"I got a good vibe from them," stated Elizabeth Bentivegna.







Elizabeth, a computer science major at Oberlin College in Oberlin OH, was contacted by a recruiter for a job interview with OnShift.  The company makes scheduling software for nursing homes and they had set up a 4pm interview with her at their Euclid Ave office in Cleveland OH.  She agreed to the appointment but adds that she told them that she probably would be a little late.  Elizabeth does not graduate until December 2015 so the interview was set up for a summer internship position.

She states that she finished with the interviews with two male engineers and a female hiring manager there by 4:20 pm and headed back to her dorm room expecting to hear good news in a few days.  Elizabeth received a phone call from Julie Maurer of Silverline Consulting in Akron OH and it was not the good news she had been expecting.  Elizabeth reports that Julie told her that they would have loved to hire her based on her personality and technical abilities but they couldn't overlook several things.  According to Elizabeth, Julie told her that she looked as though she was going clubbing and not to an interview, she had a huge run in her tights and she had been late even though she had told them that beforehand.  She added that Julie told her that she just wasn't "put together."

Many people have gotten rejected after an interview or not chosen after applying for a job but for some reason, Elizabeth took a huge offense to what she claims she heard over the phone.  She stated that she holds four jobs as a resident assistant, webmaster for the theatre and dance department, grader in an algorithms class and a lab assistant for an intro to programming class.  Her LinkedIn profile contains what looks to a long list of accomplishments and accolades but if you start to look at them closely, it almost appears to be a very puffed out skeleton of experience.

Regardless of whether she had been qualified for the position, they chose not to hire her.... that happens a lot in the real world.  Elizabeth chose not to take the advice she was given or had been hinted at and instead, took her beef public with a swear filled tirade online.  There has been no comment from either Silverline Consulting or OnShift as to what exactly had been told to Elizabeth but most, if not all companies will use the standard response of picking another person who was more qualified.  It can be seen from her online temper tantrum that she may well have pestered julie as to what she felt was so wrong with her interview and julie may have suggested some things to change in the future for interviews.


Whatever their reason for not hiring her, she was wrong in her choice of what to wear to the interview.  Even if a company has a very casual attire in the office, you have to dress for success and an office setting would require business attire unless specified that business casual is accepted.  The objective is to get in the door so that you can enjoy the environment you will work in.

Unfortunately it seems that we are living in a nation filled with an increase of entitlement and Elizabeth seems to be just one more example of that.  her tirade online though will certainly come back to bite her many times over in the future.  I could take a wild guess here and state that maybe the attitude she shows in her posting may be a good indicator of the attitude she had when she was interviewed.

A business can also check through many online services to get more of an idea of the kind of person you may be through your postings.  If you constantly show that you are out partying, doing illegal things or just have an attitude that no one will mess with me or my attitude, why would a company take a chance on you?  I am glad that she felt that she did so well in answering the one programming question that was posed to her but she has no idea as to how well any others answered it.  If this is a very small office or team that she was possibly going to join, temperament and personality may well play a part in the choice of employee because they will want to stay a cohesive unit.




There are few guarantees in life Elizabeth and you just hit one on the head with a sledgehammer........ your posting is sure to have future employers running for the hills before they even think about hiring you.  There are ways to publicly post your dissatisfaction with that interview and you found a very incorrect way of doing it.  Naming the company you felt dissed you only points out the fact that you have no fear of splashing another company's name all over the internet if they do something you don't like in the future.

Take this lesson and learn from it and hope that someday you will be able to get beyond the temper tantrum stage of your life and see that it is competitive out there........... an interview begins almost from the moment you leave your car......



Related stories on this blog:

http://wreckvhavoc.blogspot.com/2015/04/entitlements-again.html

http://wreckvhavoc.blogspot.com/2015/04/set-me-up-to-whine-through-life.html

http://wreckvhavoc.blogspot.com/2014/11/but-you-have-to-pay-stomp-stomp.html

http://wreckvhavoc.blogspot.com/2015/03/but-i-am-right.html




Hat tip to the Advice Goddess for the story idea


http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/woman-vents-anger-facebook-being-5555094

http://www.cleveland.com/tipoff/index.ssf/2015/04/sexism_or_lack_of_professional.html

http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/girl-goes-on-profanity-laced-rant-over-job-rejection-because-of-unprofessional-clothes/

http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2015/04/what_oberlin_college_senior_el.html

http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2015/01/10_most_outrageous_things_you.html

http://www.dailydot.com/lifestyle/programmer-denied-job-clubbing/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ebentivegna

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