Job hunting is an area very near and dear to my heart since,
after an unfortunate economic climate and a revoked job offer upon my return
from Thailand, I find myself back on the market. I, like so many others, find
the job seeking process to be one that is painfully outdated and if I’m being
brutally honest, massively ineffective.
I’m going to seemingly contradict myself here, but bear with
me for a minute.
I feel that I have a fantastic resume; I also despise
my resume. Let me explain.
By comparison to the resumes of my peers and
those who I would be competing against in the job market, my resume is probably
pretty damned impressive. That said, those simple 2 pages say almost nothing
about how useful I could be and how much potential I have to grow within an organization.
Part of the issue is that when you condense a human being’s life down to 2
pages, just about anyone is going to sound impressive when they list only their
greatest accomplishments (particularly if HR professionals are spending an
average of 15 seconds per resume, or wherever that statistic is at these days).
However, companies don’t just want to know how you are going to be at your
best. They should also be curious as to how you will perform on a day-to-day
basis and, even more importantly, at your worst.
The other issue is that your resume states almost nothing
about your future and who you could be.
What are your goals (real goals, not that cheesy opening sentence you have at
the start)? What kind of potential and ambition do you have for growth? Why are
you even interested in this position? What are things you may not even know
about yourself that someone else may see?
At the heart of the matter is this: companies are still
engaging with talent in the same way that they have been for over 50 years.
Sure, the process has become much more streamlined and automated with the use
of keyword software and filtering surveys, however, all this has really done is
reduced the number of man-hours required by HR. Resumes are static documents
trying to represent the complexity of a dynamic individual hoping to score a
job in a (hopefully) dynamic organization. I understand that no company could
ever spend the required time looking at each of their applicants, but
given the number of jobs that are filled outside of the traditional method
(through networking, referrals, internships, etc.) one has to question the
effectiveness of traditional recruiting.
I’m sure any HR professional reading this is cracking their
fingers, eagerly anticipating the literary assault they are about to unleash on my comment
section about the effectiveness of resumes and the things they like to
see. Regardless, I maintain that each individual is
different and as such, each hiring manager is looking for different things. With
most recruiters hiding behind the anonymous veil of an online posting,
applicants can only hazard a guess as to how to tweak their resume and write
their cover letter to give them the best shot at an interview.
Well you know what? Not me.
I’m done with job postings. In the first two weeks of January alone, I
have scheduled 9 different meetings with people at companies I am genuinely
interested in. These meetings give me the opportunity to engage with another
person who represents the culture of their organization. From there, I can tell
them the things they are actually interested in, instead of a line about being
the high school council president. I can also ask them questions about both their organization and the job position. You know what?
I have no idea what the hell a Competitive Intelligence Outside Consultant does
and the two paragraph description just doesn’t cut it.
It dawns on me that I shouldn't end this rant completely doom and gloom.
Technology is changing and organizations are hearing the cries of the
hopelessly unemployed such as me. LinkedIn has started recommending jobs to
me based on my profile, though I wish I could tell it to stop sending me entry-level
engineering jobs now that I have my MBA. The Ladders has suggested thousands of
jobs to me as well… I just think it has me confused with Patrick Bateman. Regardless,
both still ultimately funnel your application down to the traditional resume
& cover letter.
Perhaps the most promising technology is in a company I have
had an opportunity to pilot: WhoPlusYou. The premise is simple: you build a
very extensive profile that distills you down to your most basic and important
skills, traits and interests. Jobs find you based on a matching of those same
basic elements. When a match is made, the organization and the individual are
connected, allowing the individual to choose to share a variety of support
documents such as presentations, videos, PDFs, images and of course,
traditional resumes. While the company is in early days, I’ve been impressed
with what I’ve seen so far.
Yet while I am optimistic, I am cautiously so. I
still question whether 2 pieces of paper, a software program or a handful of survey
questions can ever gauge a person in the same way that a 2 minute conversation
with another human being can.
