Doing a happy dance

My guy has a job interview this week! I've been with him for 11 years and he has had such incredible difficulty moving up career wise. He's very good at what he does, but he's a white male. In the area we live in women and minorities always get priority over white men. (I almost feel bad even saying that because I support affirmative action to some degree. The problem is in our area the situation reached the point of reverse discrimination long ago.) He found out yesterday that the hiring committee in our current district alters scores for people who score 100% on evaluations from their current supervisors. They think that no one should be allowed to score 100%. So they automatically drop those people by a few percentage points. It's completely unfair. My guy is one of those people who consistently score 100% on his yearly job evaluations.

It's not up to a hiring committee to decide that no one can score 100% from their current supervisor. That sounds unethical to me. It's strictly up to a supervisor to determine how their employees are performing. My guy thinks they are doing it to get away with hiring people who score lower, are less qualified and more well connected. The entire hiring process is shrouded in secrecy. They are like the Bush administration; they do whatever they want to do regardless of ethics. They do not think they have to justify their actions. At this rate I don't see how he could ever hope to move up if we stay in this town. If they keep this up I suspect they will find themselves with a huge class action lawsuit on their hands.

The upcoming interview is for a position out of town, which would mean a move for us if he were to actually get the position. He applies for multiple positions every year, both locally and out of town, but with his luck he gets maybe one interview every 3 years. We are just excited that he has an interview lined up.

This is the position he received an email about a few weeks ago. The employer contacted him via email to let him know they were hiring and suggested he might want to apply. It's in a newer and growing area of expertise that he has been specializing in full time for the past 3 years. He's always had interest in this work though. I strongly suspect that if he ever decides to get a doctorate this will be his area of interest. (He keeps insisting that if he gets a doctorate it will be in a different field. Yeah, right.)

When I read the job description I said, "This position is tailor made for you!" At first we thought they might actually already have someone else lined up and they just needed more applicants to start the interview process. We have come to the conclusion that they do not have anyone lined up to hire yet. They called him on Tuesday to schedule a phone interview for Friday morning. Then they called back Wednesday and asked if there was any way he could do a video conference. He doesn't have anywhere to set up something like that so they are sticking with the phone interview. He's happy about that though because it will allow him to refer to notes.

On Tuesday night he went online and did some research for the school district in question. He printed out an ENTIRE NOTEBOOK of data on their district! Last night while going over it carefully he discovered something which really annoyed him. He didn't like the way they had figured part of their data. He said the method they used made no sense. I said, "That's why they should hire you. You can read and analyze this kind of data better than anyone."

So we are now crossing our fingers for a good interview and hopefully a request for him to fly out ASAP!