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Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

I have a teenager trying to get a job and is running into this.

The local grocery store used to have a certain time each week to show up and interview. Now they have a web site. My kid filled out the web site multiple times and they’ve never called or emailed to follow up. Kid followed up in person and they just pointed to the web site.

It’s frustrating because the stores are understaffed and always ask for applicants during checkout.

Same for local fast food places.

Their hiring process is so stupid.

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> It’s frustrating because the stores are understaffed and always ask for applicants during checkout.

If they wanted to hire more, they would. Understaffing is intentional.

Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

Or in this case, incompetence.

GP said the person jumped through the hoops to submit the resume online. They have the candidate's information; they're actively choosing not to hire.

The most likely explanation is that understaffing hasn't reduced revenue more than the additional staff would cost. That's not what I would call "incompetence".

I lived through some really tight job markets as a youth, and it was the most aggressive of my classmates who got the jobs. I would advise printing out a short resume that could be scanned quickly, then handing it directly to the assistant manager with an explanation of the web-site problem and declaration of readiness to get right to work. If they don't hire you right off, I expect some will at least tell you how to get to the front of the line.

No manager in the history of managers will currently take a paper copy of your resume, period. That's not even considering giving you a job, they just will not take a resume. It's more hassle for them to enter it into hiring software, if it's a big corp they have to justify why the applicant is not in the hiring software in the first place, and they most likely can't do anything about choosing you inside the software, for fear of racism/sexism by the corp.

100% of all managers will always tell you to apply on the website, no matter how broken it is.

We seem to live in different worlds. Every hiring I've ever seen has been on the basis of personal contact and paper resumes. In OPs case particularly, we are talking about local businesses, not big corps.

> In OPs case particularly, we are talking about local businesses, not big corps.

The local grocery store and fast food places are very likely to be big corps.

> We seem to live in different worlds.

Different eras maybe?

Or maybe different times? I’m guessing you aren’t in the states?

Do they have any friends? Referrals almost always get you hired immediately in retail.

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