Seen that job listing for a while, its no coincidence

If I want to work at a big company, I would only consider small companies if the big ones don't want me and not if the big ones just want me a month later.

Edit: There's probably a book waiting to be written on the dodgy tactics of recruitment firms. Mind you, I became a bit less harsh on individual recruiters when I was in an office that shared a floor of a building with a recruitment firm and got to see how they treated their staff. They were too cheap to hire meeting rooms when they were doing staff reviews so we regularly had people getting complete bollockings in the shared kitchen area - which isn't much fun to witness and a pretty ghastly way to treat your own staff.

Perhaps too many people are now wise to this? And so recruitment firms have had to arrange for articles (such as this one) to muddy the waters ;)

Oftentimes, they're lazy (outsourcing most of their job to expensive recruiters and agencies), obstructive (creating all manner of stupid, bureaucratic, red-tape hoops you have to jump through before they'll approve whatever it is you're trying to do), and add zero value to the actual process of recruiting an employee.

My hat of HR know no limit.

Eighteen months later, after she'd been through two jobs and emigrated, they sent her a letter expressing interest.

I'm not sure what things are like where you are, but I have recently gone through a hiring cycle for an engineer and it honestly took this long to gather resumes that were worth pursuing.

EDIT: Can someone explain the negative votes? OP was right if the issue was: we can't find people, rather than: we're going to make the process even more rigorous and time consuming. Maybe increasing wages will draw more qualified applicants which will qualify for the tests faster?

It's interesting to see this possible view. We might be better off posting duplicates to make this nuance more obvious.

If your company is actually trying to fill multiple identical positions, it's probably best to make that clear somehow - that they're growing rapidly and the listing isn't for a specific position so much as that they're always open to hiring anybody who has the right qualifications.

As far as I know companies use piss tests, which don't detect most hard drugs after a few days. They detect pot for weeks. Hair tests will detect anything forever. They are more expensive but if companies actually cared about not hiring people who do hard drugs they would have to do them.

The only purpose I can see for it is that it is a legal leash they can tie to the employee to exert control on their lives. There's lots of other things companies would like to be able to fire you for, but they're either illegal or impossible to detect. Drug testing is one they're allowed to do.

I can understand drug testing people if they cause an accident, are intoxicated at work, etc. but to do it as a matter of course for employment is just to show you who's boss.

a) stop/pass the test

b) find somewhere that doesn't care

I used to work for a company that would regularly send employees into refineries and chemical plants that we were consulting for. They required anyone who would go on-site to submit to drug tests, even though they weren't directly employed by the plant operator. So thanks to their requirement, most of our company had to be drug tested routinely.

I do wonder if any of these insurance companies have ever actually proven that drug tests make the plant safer. I suppose it makes more sense when you consider that it's an environment where a routine screw-up could easily cause catastrophic destruction. But do they know for sure, or are they just assuming or protecting themselves from lawsuits or something?

People who, for example, smoke marijuana, will fail a drug test. Will they miss work because they're hungover from a Big Weekend? No, mostly not. Will some straight arrow call in sick because he or she got sick on Sunday evening? Yes. We know this. But to avoid having to cope with ambiguity or grey areas or hard decisions, we just let a "drug" test do it all.

Does it make sense? Often it makes none at all.