Conducting Interviews

At work I’ve been helping a coworker conduct interviews. She’s got three open positions and we always have a lot of trouble getting positions filled. New Mexico is an impoverished state with a poor tax base, so the state jobs don’t pay well. We have almost no leeway with how much we can offer job candidates. We fight with HR for the highest possible offers, but we fight over extra pennies, not extra dollars.

Meanwhile, Santa Fe has huge numbers of multi-million dollar second homes for ultra-rich people who are not residents and not paying taxes here. So the cost of living in Santa Fe is at least as high as Denver or Austin, and nearly as high as the San Francisco Bay Area in places, but without the local incomes and tax base.

Because of the low pay and high cost of living, high employee turn-over is our Achilles heel. In addition to doing everything I can to keep my own employees happy, a huge part of my job is interviewing candidates.

One of the sets of questions that we ask in the interviews is about what they are  looking for in a job, as well as what things they “would like to avoid” in a job. It’s amusing to listen to them try to answer that in a professionally positive and politically correct manner.

Speaking of stupid – my whole team (plus two other teams) all have training next week. The all-day training is being held here in Santa Fe, but it happens to be in a different state building than our regular office building. They are making all the employees fill out a form for permission to drive themselves to that building in their own vehicles, rather than driving themselves to our regular building, checking out a state vehicle, and then driving the state vehicle to the other building. This is when most of us live much closer to the state building where our training is located, than the state building where our offices are located.

The form requires proof of car insurance, proof of licensing, and proof of having passed a defensive driving course. One of my new employees has passed his course but hasn’t gotten his certificate yet. So now what? Once we get everyone’s forms filled out correctly, we have to route them up through the management chain all the way up to the Deputy Cabinet Secretary for signatures.

I’m sorry, but that’s stupid.

Meanwhile, we have a sour gas plant in our jurisdiction out in the San Juan Basin that appears to be spewing NOx, VOCs, CO2 and H2S. Some of their primary pollution control devices have apparently been deliberately removed, plus others are intermittently failing. They’re probably overwhelming their emergency flare, which they are apparently now relying on as one of their primary controls, and we’re fielding complaint calls about locals ending up in the hospital. My team is going through 3 years of extremely complicated pollutant data and permit history to nail these guys. We don’t have time for stupid shit.