>It is rather unfortunate that government bureaucracy does not allow
>for their positions to be filled with the best qualified.  But that's
>nothing new.


I worked in the personnel department for the Agency for International
Development one summer during college--my job was to pre-screen applications
for specific positions, and I was given a copy of the job listing to go by.
If an applicant did not have the combination of Y degree and X years of
experience called for in the listing, the application was automatically
stopped there.  I thought this was a bit unfair, since it should be the
quality of the experience that mattered rather than the quantity, but I was
told that in order to be fair to all applicants we could not use subjective
judgements of the "quality" of  job experience at this early stage of the
process--that would come later at the interview.  I found this to be a paradox.


Julia Moore
Indianapolis Art Center