...and generally a bit shit?
My DSD spotted an online job advert on Sunday for a position she really wants. The advert had been listed since mid-June and the closing date was mid-July. She registered and filled in the basic contact details, and planned to spend this weekend coming filling in the (quite lengthy, core competence-based) application form.
On Tuesday she received an email informing her that as the interest in the position had reached high levels, they were bringing the closing date forward to midnight last night. She completed about half of the form that night and, as she is currently self-employed, she rearranged her day yesterday in order to finish early and complete the form.
She was unable to log-in yesterday to get back to her partially-complete form; she just received a repeated error message. She checked the email in case she had misunderstood or mis-read the date but it definitely said midnight on 2nd July. She tried to contact the company's technical support team - there was no phone number listed anywhere but she tried via email, their Twitter feed and their Facebook page. Unfortunately she had no response and midnight came and went without her being able to complete the form. She spent the evening working on what she could remember of the core competence examples in a Word document anyway, in the hope that she could C&P them in quickly if the site came back up later. Just before midnight, in desperation she emailed a copy of her CV with the Word document attached and a brief explanation asking them to consider her application under the circumstances.
This morning she managed to speak to someone in their HR department and asked if they would accept it; she was told no, they would only accept their standard forms. She double-checked that she had understood the revised date correctly, as you could argue it might, at a stretch, have meant midnight on Tuesday i.e. the start of 2nd July, and she had. She then asked if they would extend the deadline under the circumstances and was told no again. Essentially it's just hard lines, they make no guarantees that the online application system will be available and they have sufficient applications not to need any more.
Personally I feel that if this is indicative of their working practices, she has had a lucky escape (and I also suspect they probably disabled the online system deliberately yesterday to keep application numbers down) but she is understandably disappointed as this is a career path she has been wanting to get on for a while now and vacancies aren't advertised very frequently.
AIBU to think this is a pretty unprofessional, arbitrary way to handle recruitment?