Good question, for our hiring prerequisites have changed over the years. There was a time when sheer brute strength was the top requirement to win the Pollstar.com blazer and beanie, and our cube farms were filled with workers possessing the strong bodies and even stronger stomachs needed to deal with the concert industry when rooting out dates for UB40, The Toasters and Avril Lavigne.

However, excellent health, bulging biceps and semi-evolved cranial structures only got us so far, and we soon realized that intelligence and concert itineraries go hand-in-hand, for one needs a sharp mind and an even sharper head if one is to build a career upon sorting the dates for Clint Black or D12 in a clear, easy-to-follow, chronological order.

That’s why our founder, Festus Pollstar, decreed that only the best and the brightest may work at Pollstar.com, and he quickly issued a proclamation to all the leading universities, laboratories, think tanks and drunk tanks. “Send us your geniuses,” ol’ Festus cried. “Send us your brain surgeons, your mathematicians, your physicists and your rocket scientists so that they may rise to the height of their abilities! Send us your best and we’ll give you the largest, third-party concert database the world has ever seen!”

And they came.

Flash forward 80 years and you’ll find that the trail of university diplomas, doctorates and PhDs ends at Pollstar.com, making this humble establishment the ultimate brain trust of the new millennium. Quantum mechanics, cosmic string theory, radical dermatology – all the advanced sciences come into play so that we may confidently state that Red Light Sting will be in El Paso on July 13.

But Festus was nobody’s fool. Instead, he belonged to us and he quickly realized that Harvard, Yale and Fresno City College could not keep up with the labor demands needed to assemble tour schedules, like the latest routing for Billy Currington, or updated itineraries for America and Brad Paisley. That’s why Festus instituted the Pollstar.com mental rehabilitation program so that society’s miscreants, the criminally insane, social deviants, as well as those suffering from deviated septums, could rise high above their own personal misfortunes and spend productive lives plugging dates for Mel Tillis and Sick Of It All into our vast digital database.

However, nothing ever works out as planned, for try as we might, there are some people who can’t be reconditioned into smart and sane Pollstar.com workers. They come into our offices ranting about conspiracies, about how the concert industry plans on subjugating humanity by forcing us to bow down to higher ticket prices and even higher service charges. They see everything through the narrow blinders of insanity, and all the radical surgery, behavior modification and electroshock therapy the world has to offer can’t turn them into reliable Pollstar.com workers capable of posting accurate schedules for Hank III, Van Halen and John Mayer. Sure, we wish we could help them, but when you get right down to it, you can’t win them all.

Instead we wish them well and give them directions to the Fox News employment offices. Sometimes you just have to move on.