An article about having trouble filling jobs; but there is no indication that the hiring manager made any effort to determine why he is having trouble getting people to show for interviews.
Makes me wonder if he knows why and just isn't saying.
Small town? Too far from major cities? Wages that are an insufficient draw for the type/location/work schedule?
Being from this region, I'm guessing it's the location, Fort Recovery. The nearest cities are Fort Wayne and Dayton, which are both small cities, and they're about 1.25 hours away. Fort Recovery isn't near any interstate highway. The job ads probably show up for everyone in Cincinnati, Columbus, and Indianapolis, and once they GPS it, they probably realize how far it is (2.25 hours from those cities).
The salary and benefits are competitive though ($65-70K/yr is what a mid-level software engineer makes), which is probably why a lot of people fire off an email.
Not to mention the two body problem. Dude wants to hire an experienced supervisor; that sounds to me like someone 10+ years into his or her career. That person most likely has a spouse, and maybe kids. The plant is in the middle of nowhere, so there's poor job prospects for the spouse. And a teeny little town often doesn't have the best school districts either.
The ad [1] also doesn't mention relocation support, so it's presumably up to the worker to self-finance a $10k or more move. And before anybody complains about the price, have you recently priced a move with a grownup life, including real furniture -- beds, couches, dressers, a lease to be broken or a house to be sold, job search expenses for the spouse, etc.
In order to entice petroleum engineers to work above the Arctic circle or on an oil rig, energy companies compensate them accordingly. The wages offered in the story just aren't sufficient for this location.
I read the story and didn't notice anything about rejecting candidates due to their age. He mentioned the ages of a couple, but it didn't seem like anyone was ruled out because of it.
He mentioned the age of David, the guy who got out of the army in 1985. He is brought up in the fifth paragraph. I was pretty surprised age was brought. But David hadn't had a full time job in awhile either.
It's not stated or implied that such candidates were considered unfit to hire, merely less-than-ideal - I took it as an indication that in this place, pretty much all applications are from less-than-ideal candidates, some of which turn out to be very promising (Gloria), while others are impolite and entitled, or don't even show up.
As I read the story, "Dads Resume" was a specific candidate, so named because that was evidently the filename of the email attachment.
That said, there was at least one explicit age reference fairly early on. It put me on edge. But not a lot more was made of it in the article, and I had some sense that a fair number of the candidates invited for interviews were at least middle-aged.
'Dads Resume' is called like that because apparently he can't even type up a resume on a computer, a skill that is right down there under 'assumed to know, not even listed on the job requirements' along with 'tying own shoes' and 'not forgetting to breath'.
I tend to tie my shoes once and then just leave them tied until the shoe falls apart and needs to be replaced. I wouldn't consider "tying own shoes" a major requirement for anything outside of maybe an acting career. ;p
Makes me wonder if he knows why and just isn't saying. Small town? Too far from major cities? Wages that are an insufficient draw for the type/location/work schedule?