Timothy Horrigan © 2011
December 9, 2010
Kronos Incorporated,
the company which makes the ubiquitous
Unicru personality test, does not use Unicru when it hires its
own workers. And yes it does hire workers on occasion. The Kronos
careers site uses one of those systems where you upload your
resume and a parser hilariously misconstrues it. The headquarters is
in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. There are the usual administrative
openings available in Chelmsford, and there are marketing jobs
available all over the globe— but the technical jobs are in
Bangalore,
India. As an alternative to applying through the corporate web
site, you can utilize monster.com.
I have sent Kronos a few application letters over the years. I could only find one archived on my current computer. There are other Kronos application letters on those useless 5-inch floppies in my garage, I am sure. On December 3, 2002, I tried to go over the head of the HR department by writing Kronos President Patrick Decker (who has long since been replaced by Aron Ain):
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December
3, 2002 Patrick
Decker
Dear Mr. Decker: I am eager to learn more about the current and/or future career opportunities with Kronos Incorporated. My resume is enclosed. You may be especially interested in my experience with Enterprise Management Solutions, Inc. EMS is a New Hampshire-based Navision Solution Center, i.e., an independent company which sells, customizes and installs Navision Solutions software, and provides customer support and training. My primary role at EMS was to customize and extend Navision Solution's accounting and database functionality by recoding the software using Navision's Pascal-like programming language, by adding new objects to the object-oriented programming environment, and by designing forms, reports, etc. EMS's biggest client was a hotel chain with over two dozen properties throughout the northeastern US. I set up their payroll (for roughly 1000 employees in 10 different states) and built a reporting system to track labor costs for every department of every hotel in the chain. I created custom reports to show sales, costs, and profitability by region. Perhaps my most impressive achievement was my creation of a modification to import room sales data from the legacy point-of-sale system into the Navision accounting system. In addition to creating a routine to parse the POS data files, I created a whole new set of journals and ledgers to record room sales and hotel expenditures. Our client was able to import the data directly into Navision without having to pass it through even a single Excel spreadsheet en route. My work for EMS was a great learning experience. However, EMS was in severe financial trouble, and some aspects of my working situation were less than ideal. I eventually opted to pursue a more rewarding career path elsewhere— hopefully, with Kronos.
Sincerely,
Timothy Horrigan |
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It turns out that Decker, who was evidently in his early 40s at the time, "retired" to be replaced by Aron Ain ten months before I sent this letter. It appears that Decker landed on his feet and got another gig with Tyco. (I am using weasel words here because I fear I might be mixing up two Patrick Deckers.) The unnamed hotel chain was Chalet Susse, who in the early oughties got rid of their hotels and reinvented themselves as a consulting firm called "Roedel Companies." Roedel is structured as an LLC. |
See Also:
The Bartleby Project: urging you to simply answer "I prefer not to take this test."
Tips on applying to Best Buy & other employers who use Unicru
