I've heard that looking for a job can be a full-time job. And upon 3 months of vigorous looking myself, I am convinced that it is actually more than a full-time job. Set aside the obvious sodden state of the economy and the slower pace of hiring that occurs in the winter. The process has devolved drastically since not long before The Bare Naked Ladies had a hit single. Hell, it has devolved since the Shins had a hit single. Now every employer has their own resume-collecting bin, powered by "Toledo" or some off-shoot. You can still use Monster or similar sites, but just because you find a job and click to Apply there does not mean you will be met with the normal Monster service. Nowadays, you can easily be thrust into an endless charade of redirects, creating new usernames/passwords, and watching magic uploaders screw up all your resume details. And most of the time while staring at fake, yet extremely diverse and spunky, middle-aged somethings standing happily around a conference table.
I miss the job-prospecting days of yesteryear. When if you wanted to find a job, you'd pick up a newspaper, grab a Sharpie, make some calls, visit, or send a resume via postal. I can't claim that this process has ever worked for me, partly due to my generational upbringing, but this is what I recall as "normal" prior to computers hitting the scene. I'm sure some Wonder Years or Happy Days episode could also vouch accordingly. Nowadays, the newspaper is the last source you consult. You leave the Sharpie in the mug. And you certainly don't call anybody, send anything via postal, or visit. Not only are these techniques more than outdated, in several instances they are expressly prohibited. I've even seen jobs that capitalize the requirement not to call.
So with this technology that we have, one would think that finding a job would be easier. Wrong. The same luxury of copy-and-paste that job seekers use is also used by employers. In the past, I expect that a job description would be, say, 25-50 words long, only the important details. Something easily read and digested in 10 seconds. Nowadays, most job postings online include cut-and-pasted company history, mission statements, and EOE nonsense. You have to scroll, dissect, and try to determine if the stated position actually fits your skillset and goals. Never mind the title might say "Writer", the description could read like they want a cartoonist. I've spent time, myself, honestly reading a description before undertaking the following application steps, only to find after wasting 2 hours of my time and completing the process to be welcomed with a couple extra questions about my skills. Questions that were in no way relevant or described in the posted job description but that are apparently used to screen. Shit that I would have appreciated knowing 2 hours earlier. Oh, and again given the luxury of copy-paste, every job description includes every conceivable keyword one might use to narrow their search field. C'mon, "Janitorial Technician"??
I've created more usernames/passwords in the last 3 months than I have in the past 12 years. Seriously. It is annoying enough when you are required to create one for every employer you wish to contact, but when some intermediate site posing as the employer stands in your way of the application and forces another account creation, you want to slam your computer through the wall. Not only that, I've discovered that not all systems accept special characters in the passwords? WTF? Isn't that counter-intuitive to every password generating advice we receive? Yes, I'm guilty of reusing passwords to an extreme right now, but now I have sites that have slightly different variations. Oh well, not like I expect to hear from them anyway.
Moving on to the actual resume transmitting process. Several sites now offer, sometimes by choice, the ability to upload your resume in a PDF or Word format using the "Toledo" or similar software. It then tries to populate certain data fields with information extracted from your resume. I would say about 95% of the time, honestly, it screws everything up. And so you are faced with manually reviewing every bit of information that you scrupulously presented in your hardcopy bio. But what about when you did this 20 times before using the same exact "Toledo" (I hope I got the name right) software? Can't different employers just tap into that information..? No. Instead you have to create a new account, with password, and either manually upload or wait for the data interpreter to mis-copy your employment history again. For every employer. In addition uploading your PDF or Word formatted copy. Which who knows if anybody opens those attachments. Convenience, yes. But not for you.
There are plenty of other "undesired" elements of the process that I could mention. That frankly won't help much more in understanding the dilemma, or my blood pressure. Instead, as a general observation, is is clear that, since most applications are online now, the job-seeker's role is diminished to performing gobs of flawless data entry and market research in highly-irregular and less-than-reliable employer databases. All while playing the patient and level-headed hopeful-employee and recognizing that you may only ever get an automatic email in reply, if that.
My natural inclination, then, is to think of some way to better the system. If not for the job hunters, but for the economy, in general. What service are we doing ourselves by wasting countless hours, days, and months with inefficient match-making? Surely it is in the best interests of the nation to promptly and effectively place the right talent in the right positions. Much like sitting in highway traffic, individual waste, when aggregated, can represent significant national delinquency.
But I'm not too concerned with fixing the country at the moment. I just want the system to look more like I suppose it did in Kevin Arnold's years. Perhaps just shout out a C'mon Man! to the recruiters. Ask them to cut back somewhere on the amount of data we need to input. We found you on the internet, so don't ask us to specify where. (Are you taking all the shitty resumes, looking at where they saw your job posting, and adjusting your hiring strategies to exclude those sites? I don't think so. So stop wasting our time with this.) Don't ask us to create accounts. I don't ever care to visit your recruiting page again, or in the off chance I do, I want it to be warm and welcoming with very few data fields so I don't mind completing it again. Tell us if there is an optimal way to format our resume in Word so that your magic uploader gets it right every time. Or how about just synch your "uploader" with Monster or some other big site so that we don't have to re-input everything. We know you're special, that's why we put up with all this crap in the first place, but recognize that you might also be doing yourself a disservice by not making yourself more accessible to better candidates.
And yes, I'm a non-Hispanic or Latino white male. A non-veteran. And a non-smoker. Please just follow Monster's lead and put a simple checkbox for if I consider myself to be eligible for "diversity" reasons. I don't. I am 100% like you.
