It isn’t easy. In fact, some say that great tour date researchers are born, not made, and that it’s not skill but talent that enables a person to find dates for The Black Crowes or sniff out new schedules for The Chieftains and Richard Jeni. Of course, brains, guts and an appreciation for the finer points of calendar mechanics are definite pluses when considering candidates for Pollstar.com employment, but weeding out the list of “undesirables,” those applicants who only want a paycheck, medical benefits and three Guinness breaks per day, is the Herculean task which faces our human resources department each and every day.

That’s why we farm out our applicant-screening duties to a third party. That way, we’re not bogged down with credit checks, fingerprint checks and DNA checks when evaluating potential Pollstar.com workers. Sure, it cost a few bucks to research an applicant’s ancestral lineage back to the pre-Woodstock era, or interview a job candidate’s high school buddies to determine if he or she only saw musically-correct concerts during the informative teenage years, but it’s well worth it. In fact, we attribute job-screening techniques such as 24-hour surveillance, wiretaps and mail interception as THE major factors responsible for the work force we have today.

For instance, just the other day we were considering an applicant that appeared to have all the proper prerequisites, such as typing skills, an eye for detail and a pulse. However, first appearances can be deceiving, so we left it up to our employee-screener to determine if the job seeker had all the qualifications needed to handle a seven day / 15 hour work week handling dates for bands like Further Seems Forever and artists like Jonny Lang and Junior Brown.

And we were amazed at what the screener found. Check this out: Picked up by the police for being a peeping Tom at the age of 12, charged with hacking the government’s groupie database at age 15, and arrested on suspicion of creating the computer virus that caused the great tour bus routing disaster of 2002 which resulted in a Cher / GWAR co-headline tour of downtown Buenos Aires. Plus, there were incidents of service charge fraud, celebrity impersonation and public intoxication arrests throughout most of his adult life. All in all, the screener discovered that he had been arrested 39 times, although, due to sharp lawyers and vanishing witnesses, he received zero convictions.

Needless to say, we hired him on the spot. After all, talent like that is hard to find.