Tag: job

Ghost jobs – old and busted. Ghost interviews – new hotness?

Ghost jobs are a thing, but this week I had a… ghost interview.

Got a call last week about a job for which I had applied. Got a screening interview scheduled on Monday (August 24th) and was amped up for it. It was a Teams call, so I sign on 5 minutes before the interview, and waited.

And waited, and waited. No one else came on the call. I asked in the meeting chat whether the call was mis-scheduled — the person who created the meeting was in Kansas but the other person invited to the meeting was in my time zone. I also emailed the person who booked the meeting. So, not having anything else to do, I waited and browsed the internet during that time. An hour passed, then another 15 minutes, and I signed out.

I then emailed both persons in the meeting to inform them of this and said I was open to rescheduling the meeting anytime this week. I then received an automated response saying the other person on the call was on vacation until Tuesday.

However it’s now been two days and no response. Yes, I checked my “spam” folders just in case. This is not a small company, this is a major company in Canada with a sizeable presence in the USA as well.

It strikes me as rather bizarre that a company would call me to schedule a meeting and then ghost me. It seems really unprofessional. And, for me, quite depressing.

Canada Revenue Agency — please do better. Your web site is broken.

So I saw a job ad on LinkedIn announcing that the CRA was hiring new personnel to answer phones for people with questions about their taxes. Being that I’m someone looking for a job, I decided to go to the CRA web site and submit my candidature. Several days later they still don’t have it, nor — as far as I can tell — do they have anyone’s candidature since posting the ad, and the weird thing is that they seem to be blissfully unaware of this. Let me walk you through the process and you’ll see why.

First, I went to the CRA web site and looked for the “careers” link. Job opportunities link

I click on the Job opportunities link, which takes me to the careers page, where I see a Candidate Registration link, which I click.

Submit your candidature

In the resulting form I select that I’m a member of the general public, and click on the data privacy statement checkbox. So far, so good.

Candidate registration 1

In this second Candidate Registration page (experienced UX writers will share my annoyance at having two consecutive pages with the same name, but let’s ignore that) I enter the appropriate data and click on the Next button.

Candidate registration 2

And voila! an error message. “The session has timed out”.

Session error (029)

But I did not let this deter me. I clicked on the Exit button, which took me back to the CRA front page, completed the process again, and this time… I now got a different error, “Our services are not available at this time”.

Error 010 - service is not available

I shared this last error message in the LinkedIn ad for the recruiting drive and haven’t heard anything from them since. The ad appeared on Tuesday (IIRC) and the web site SNAFU is still there.

So, dear Canada Revenue Agency, if you see no submissions for your recruiting drive don’t conclude it’s because nobody wants to answer people’s questions about taxes. It’s because your web site just. doesn’t. work.

Maybe you guys should be concentrating to hiring people to make sure that your web sites are usable instead of obsessing about killing public sector jobs, because having fewer and fewer staff isn’t going to fix things on your end.