Easy as if you never worked here

As mentioned in one of the previous posts (The Perks of Knowing an Engineer), the careers website is pretty much useless in referring someone else for a position in your company. But how good is it at finding yourself a job?

After all, the corporate line at the Shitshow is that it is better to retain an employee than to lose an employee. You'll know this to be true if you ever tell them you're leaving, because they're never happy about it. The company doesn't want you to leave after they put all that time and money into developing you into an asset. So they came up with some creative measures to keep you around.

The first line of defense are the flunktional managers. They're supposed to help you reach your career goals by working with you to develop a career plan. As we all know, flunktional managers don't do this because your career goals and their career goals are in opposition. You want to expand your skill-set by changing positions; they want to keep you in the same position forever so they don't have to find someone new to replace you.

The second line of defense to retain employees is the trusty Careers website. It has all of the open job positions in the company, and you, as a current employee, have the inside track. Right? Wrong.

1. There aren't really any special job postings for internal employees. While you have to log in to get on it, this internal website is exactly the same as the external one.
2. A hiring manager is better off hiring someone from outside the company so he is not accused of "cherrypicking" from another manager's team. Who wants to create a rift between managers, or even entire departments?
3. Financial rewards are given to employees when candidates are hired on their referral, but only when candidates come from outside the company. So by hiring an internal rec, you just gave up 1,000 bucks that could have gone to your buddy co-worker.
4. If you're trying to change careers into a different field, then why would some hiring manager, that doesn't even know you, hire you? He'd rather hire someone with experience. He doesn't give a damn about some corporate goal. He just cares about his own team.

So I tested it out. First, I applied for those prestigious career-changer job postings: Business Development, Finance, Marketing, etc. Next, I applied for a bunch of engineering jobs that I was adequately qualified for. Then, I applied for several engineering positions that I was over-qualified for. Finally, I applied for a janitor job posting I ran across in the Facilities category. In total, I must have applied for about 20 internal job applications. Can you guess how many job offers I got? Or how many interviews I got? Or how many call-backs I got? Or even an lousy email telling me that someone even looked at my resume? Zero! Exactly zero.

Because I can't even get offered a janitor position at the Shitshow, I throw rocks.