The Difference Between the UTA Joblist and the Coordinators’ 411

On Monday’s post, where I wrote about the need to apply for jobs quickly:

Literally hundreds of people will apply to this same job. The coordinator will only look at the resumes until she finds five or six qualified PAs that she’d want to interview personally. Because so many people are out of work, that means she might look at only twenty resumes.

Daniel commented:

Aren’t you basically saying here that any of us who get the list through your site have a 99.9% of never having our resume looked at, since by the time it’s up here at least 20 people who have gotten it directly already have applied?

I was actually talking about the Coordinators’ 411. Those are almost exclusively production jobs, and production moves quickly. At the beginning of a season, the coordinator will have maybe a week before she wants to hire the first PA. (Sometimes, the first PA is hired even before the APOC.)

During the season, the coordinator can’t have any downtime between firing one PA and hiring the next. (I assume he was fired; who would quit in this economy?) Obviously, speed is of the essence.

The jobs on the UTA Joblist are a different kind of animal. They’re not production jobs; they’re almost all corporate jobs, with all that that implies– you wear shirts with actual buttons, you can wear open-toed shoes, you have regular work hours (and a regular work location!). When you’re let go, you are given two weeks’ notice (usually).

So, applying for a UTA Joblist job is not quite as hectic. Because they have time, potential employers will comb through a lot of resumes looking for the right candidate. You still do want to apply as soon as possible; that’s just true for any job ever, but it’s not like production, where you hear about the job in the morning, interview in the afternoon, get told you have the job that evening, and start the next morning.

All that being said, the reason I started posting the joblist here is because every other website that had it (including my own alma mater!) posted the list days late. I try to post it immediately, to help my readers.

The odds truly are against you. You’ve got a hundred to one shot of even getting an interview. That means you should apply to at least a hundred jobs.

(That’s how math works, right?)