In response may I say...

'In technology response time is the time a system or functional unit takes to react to a given input (wikipedia.org).'

Or 'The delay experienced in time sharing between request and answer, a delay which increases when the number of users on the system increases.'

Or the total amount of accumulated time EoTP has spent waiting for slack jawed, drooling, swivel eyed, intellectually challenged recruitment executives to actually provide some feedback to one of his job applications. As most never respond at all there is a factor for infinity built in somewhere in the formula.

When I look back over the last seven months without a full time job the one element that stands out amongst all the other ones (there are coloured graphs and pie charts as well a list in ranked order if you'd like to see them) is the time spent waiting. I've already blogged about this several eons ago so to save time I've just cut and pasted the same rant in...no just kidding a whole new rant fresh from the oven is yours for the reading.

The second quote above is quite instructive because it is a truism - if you increase the number of users in a system then the response time will increase. Like encouraging more rail users and wondering why the railway carriages are full or any Post Office queue. Today, and this is true, there is a line of 15 people waiting to post stuff and what do the staff do at my local Post Office - go for a break that's what. So response times increase unless of course you increase the ability of the system to deal with the number of users (such as saying loudly like I did 'How about some more staff then?' My parcel will now be off to Papua New Guinea instead of Peterborough). See what an education does for you, gives you deep insights into capacity management.

Let me put this to you then. You place an advert, you expect shall we say 300 replies. You are a reasonably large recruitment agency being paid an absolute fortune to recruit someone preferably warm and breathing and who can at least write their own name so they can sign their expenses. Do you:
a) tell your IT team to set up an automatic response mechanism to all answer all inbound CVs so that the respondents know that their precious manuscript has actually arrived and spent at least a few nanoseconds in the 'In' box before being sent to the Trash can?
b) Set up a mail merge facility in Word, manually enter the candidates details into an Excel database so you can post out received/hold on/reject letters?
c) Do you say 'Blow this for a game of soldiers let's not bother letting anybody know anything except the three most likely candidates as that way it doesn't eat into our enormous fat fee and our expense account lunch times?'

I think you know where my vote will be cast.

To deal with this tosh this you have to build up a defense mechanism.
The first is to visualise the person responsible for finding the preferred candidate and then thinking up ways of causing them much pain. The early Chinese dynasties have some useful tips I find.

Secondly you begin to know instinctively when the threshold for getting a reply has passed. For those on the volume on-line job search web sites it's the moment you send your CV - for the other positions once 10 days have gone mark the application dead and bury it. The ones that you will almost always hear from are those connected with public bodies as they are open to public scrutiny - however as the closing dates for these jobs are usually three years hence and they really, really like to consider all the candidates very, very carefully just in case you can sue them for discrimination, they tend not to make a decision for about 8 years and by that time we've all moved on and forgotten what is was we applied for.

Bill Bryson says that the only way to start a trend to actually get a response from organisations is to encourage random shooting of those slackers who just don't get back to you. I have to say it's a very compelling argument. Imagine how we'd all be if the emergency services worked that way. Make a 999 call and get a 'We might come, we might not'. That'd be fun.

So rant over for the week. If you have any comments post them below and I'll get back to you. Yeah right.