Beacon Partners

I applied for a designer position they advertised back in June 2014. It appeared to be strictly a print design position as there was no mention of web development -- HTML/CSS, JavaScript, etc. I applied and was almost immediately contacted the HR rep for a phone interview.

Of course, this went down just like every other phone interview with an HR rep I’ve had — no real discussion of design anywhere. I asked if there was any programming required, “Will this require advanced programming or do you have a team who manages your website?” She very slowly responded with “...I...think...that’s a part of this job.” In other words, she didn’t know and was just guessing. Whatever. I said I’ve got HTML/CSS in case that skill is needed. She said the next step would be yet another phone interview — seriously? — and THEN if you pass you’d be invited to an in-person interview. About a week later the HR rep called me to tell me the team is not interested in pursuing my candidacy because they are focusing on finding someone with “a more technical background who can do web programming.” Then the job got re-posted on LinkedIn — with not a single change to the description, i.e, no addition of “must know HTML/CSS, JavaScript, PHP, JQuery, etc.”

According to the LinkedIn statistic, there were 53 applicants after the first posting. Gee, if you’ve just disqualified all 53 initial candidates because they didn’t have the web programming skills you are now demanding, don’t you think you should…oh, I don’t know…add that requirement to the job description?????

Unless, of course, they rejected me because of my age and she just couldn’t make up a more credible excuse...

A few weeks later, they posted it AGAIN on LinkedIn. And, again, there continues to be NO edit to the job description, i.e., no mention of the “technical background” they told me they were now looking for in a candidate. And the LinkedIn stat at the time (which, strangely, has been removed) revealed the applicant count had gone up to 105. No, there couldn't possibly be a single qualified applicant in there...