It’s been a while since I’ve looked for a job; for a while, I was on the other side of the process and had the opportunity to examine it from the no-pressure side of things.
I've run up and down the socioeconomic scale and helped multiple people (probably over a hundred at this point) get jobs ranging from people who don't speak English to high ranking VP types. The reality is that the more valuable your labor is the easier it is to find a job and the better that job is likely to be in terms of pay, benefits, conditions, etc. Unskilled recent immigrants have an incredibly difficult time getting a basic job while experienced engineers or marketers will get people randomly trying to recruit them several times a week.
This tends to go against most people's instincts. They think the less valuable the job the easier it is to get. But it's often the opposite. And in fact this is a longstanding basic pattern of human labor. Low skill households have an abundance of labor and a lack of opportunities to transform it into wealth. High skilled (not necessarily rich) households have an abundance of opportunities to transform labor into wealth to the point they usually cannot fill them all. The transition from one to the other creates all kinds of problems because the person goes from a world where the opportunity to work is itself valuable to one where a primary skill is triaging which work is worth doing.
Anyway, the point I'm meandering toward: job searching is itself a skill. One most people are bad at because the average person applies for jobs maybe a dozen times in their life. And being bad at it is more impactful at lower socioeconomic levels than higher ones. Interpersonal connections (ie, "hey, I know a guy") is a way to skip the process. And one well worth taking advantage of if you have access to it.
"This tends to go against most people's instincts. They think the less valuable the job the easier it is to get. But it's often the opposite."
This is a sort of profound observation, IMO. For what it's worth I generally agree that there's big element of "if your labor was more valuable, people would want it more" mixed in here. I didn't get much into people who get headhunted/recruiter attention here, but that's an entirely different sphere as well that doesn't quite overlap with the "I have a friend who knows people" sphere.
They have an underlying similarity in that headhunters and networking fundamentally serve the same purpose. They reduce search costs for the business/job seeker. And if you don't have either the social capital or a skill in a market where people will pay headhunters then you need to get good at job seeking and bear them yourself. Another example of the Parable of Talents.
Which is relevant because your complaint that the job search process sucks is fundamentally about the fact you're being personally asked to bear these costs. And that there's a low incentive for companies to reduce these costs. Which is because they can force you to bear them for a variety of reasons that have to do with how the labor market works.
I'm worried I'm skipping a lot here and might not be fully coherent. I have a long rant (literally book sized) buried somewhere inside me about how almost everyone misunderstands how the labor market works and so often go about searching for jobs suboptimally.
I've worked most of my career with significant portions of interviews and hiring, and I fully agree with you. People on both ends of the hiring process tend to misunderstand how it works and what the goals are.
Can you help me shape up my resume cos am tired of not being successful with countless applications. My email is kwabina.adomako@yahoo.com. Let's pick it up from there. I will be very glad
The worst applications are the ones where you upload a resume and then they make you restate everything in your resume over again, but with more information required (address of your 4th-most recent employer, for instance) and with annoying pulldown menus.
Academic hiring is unbelievably worse than this. The resume is only one tiny part of the insane, demoralising process they make you endure for a precarious, underpaid contract of 1-3 years. The application forms they demand you fill out are extensive and many require essays on bullshit topics. The last one I did took six hours only for it likely to have gone straight in the bin.
Absolutely. There are some applications that have those BS parts required by law, so it's not even that employer asking for the information - so they are not very likely to even read it all. They look at the portions that apply to them.
I'm sorry you've had such unpleasant experiences. In our firm we make a very short questionnaire and ask everyone who applies to fill it out. The questionnaire is always made with the role being hired for in mind (e.g., "improve this text" in a job with a lot of writing) and generally usefully divides the field. We don't really ask for or look at resumes until much later. I wish more firms would do this.
I do too. For what it's worth I really do believe there are individual companies who are doing better or even exceptionally well at this; I've run into processes that are very humane and people who really do intentionally work to do better. It sounds like you are shooting for that, so kudos to you.
This, 100%: “[Like] most forms of evil, the vileness of the resume-based hiring process is banal and often unintentional.” The human rat race in a nutshell.
I pray God opens the networking avenues for you, leading you through the doldrumish middle stage (through the Red Sea like the Israelites, not the Egyptians 🙃).
I cannot tell you how many positions I've seen filled long before an external job posting goes live. That is, the hiring manager already knows who will get the job, but needs to comply with HR requirements to post the job, review resumes, interview some number of candidates, etc. before they can make the "official" offer to the person they were planning on hiring in the first place.
This process is ABLEIST to all of us *disabled* folks that have difficulties with communication and social interactions. (I'm autistic late diagnosed. I bet there are many undiagnosed neurodivergent Engineers).
Everybody knows people with "contacts" are the upper class of the labor market. Humans are no more advanced than that. We still prefer to interact with those we know or those who know someone we know. Which makes life difficult for those who don't know anyone important.
For that reason, being the one of the fifty (or five hundred) chosen in a resume-based hiring process really is a big win. That is a potential step from the class of people who don't know anybody important to the class of people who know at least some important people. Getting in by resume is not only the opportunity to get a job - it is the opportunity to hop from the resume class to the class with one or two contacts.
Sending in one's resume is to ask for something unusual and difficult - social mobility.
Agreed that there's potentially a lot of upside. But that's on a cost/reward spectrum - like, there's even more upside to winning the lottery, but a lot of people still consider the lottery to be a pretty raw deal.
I think it comes down to essentially being a thing you sort of have to participate in - if you don't, you are almost guaranteed to fail/stagnate, unless you can find some better way around the filter.
What I'm trying to say is more or less that resume-based hiring is not the bad thing. Class society is the bad thing. In a class society like ours, people who are the buddies of influential people are always at a big advantage. The children of the buddies of influential people are also at an advantage.
The resume-based hiring process exposes the gulf between buddies and non-buddies in all its awfulness. Still, it is not the cause of that gulf. To the contrary, it is a partial remedy to it. Without any resume-based hiring, only buddies and buddies of buddies would get any jobs above the minimum wage level.
We know human society is a small world network and everyone strives to escape their local network and become a hub (someone with many connections). Its how human brains work. I'm not justifying this structure, but to me it seems like biological reality. And AI is about to make this problem much worse or much better depending on which futurist you talk to.
I don't think there is anyone alive who would go through the resume process IF they had a backdoor of some kind - internet fame, recommendation etc. We do it if and when there is no other way.
The problem with letting yourself fly off the handle when you are in my situation (unemployed, barely keeping a rage-and-sorrow-based temperment in check) is that you end up looking like a lunatic. I think if I had written this during less tempestuous times, I would have been a little more strident, maybe. Right now I'm being careful to keep my bit in.
I've been applying via indeed for years now. occasionally getting the standard rejections, getting the occasional scam job postings, and for the most part, no response at all. I thought maybe I did have a "weird resume." One resume is for Graphic Design, and at the top I include an illustration. I should probably drop the illustration, but in truth through indeed, that resume doesn't even get seen. Most of the jobs I apply for use the standard indeed resume format.
I've sent out hundreds of resumes. I can tell you, the jobs I have gotten most of my life weren't by resuime at all. It was by getting around that part. I had someone vouch for me at just about every place I got a job.
As someone who has a very obscure engineering degree, I share your hatred of resumes. I had to add a short explanation on my resume so employers would stop interpreting it as a graphic design degree.
My other big annoyance with resume-hiring is the insistance that your GPA must be above a certain number. No exceptions! Not even if you have an amazing explanation for the slightly-too-low number and can prove that you're otherwise qualified.
"A word of warning related to that: Because I both hate resume-first hiring processes and I’m talking about applicant-side problems, a lot of this is going to read as a condemnation of employers as a class - it’s not that, and I’ll explain why as we go."
Actually, you pretty much are doing exactly this in the article by saying that they have no choice because the power imbalance is tremendous. Which is actually more kind, more accurate, and more consistent with calling them out "as a class" than calling them out as individuals.
I'm not sure if we still have an active complaint here or not - like you've identified the places where I let the employers off the hook somewhat; is there still something left to be desired?
Well, I would have phrased it as "I'm condemning employers as a class, not individually," which I think is more consistent with the rest of the article.
At the end of the day, though, this article gave me what I wanted was the kick the in balls to stop perfecting and tweaking every last pixel on my resume as a means for procrastinating the shit I like even less (the dehumanization that you mentioned (and lots that you didn't) that ensues)
Hm. I think the disconnect here is that I'm not exactly condemning employers. I'm sort of condemning the process every employer uses - which would be a condemnation of them, except I don't think there's an alternative. It's like condemning someone for sawing off someone's leg without anesthesia; that's a valid condemnation if anesthesia hasn't been invented yet. But if it hasn't, it's not the surgeon's fault.
That's what I was sort of getting to - it's like, employers aren't going to improve this. They don't even know how even if they wanted to put in the effort. Your best bet is to just not let your leg go septic in the first place.
Ah. Yes we are fully in agreement it sounds like, and only differ the semantics of “condemn as a class.”
I took that to mean “condemn the owners of the means of production,” which seemed appropriate, if still not adequately transformative, because one would need to propose a viable alternative system by which the means of production could not be privately owned.
Inimical, what process would you use if you were an employer? I think IQ tests are illegal, but I guess you could create a work project and have people do it, then measure their performance somehow. I've heard this is getting more common in coding.
No contacts have I
Only this resume, sir
I said to the void
he says he's a five
but then everyone lies
he's resume three
I've run up and down the socioeconomic scale and helped multiple people (probably over a hundred at this point) get jobs ranging from people who don't speak English to high ranking VP types. The reality is that the more valuable your labor is the easier it is to find a job and the better that job is likely to be in terms of pay, benefits, conditions, etc. Unskilled recent immigrants have an incredibly difficult time getting a basic job while experienced engineers or marketers will get people randomly trying to recruit them several times a week.
This tends to go against most people's instincts. They think the less valuable the job the easier it is to get. But it's often the opposite. And in fact this is a longstanding basic pattern of human labor. Low skill households have an abundance of labor and a lack of opportunities to transform it into wealth. High skilled (not necessarily rich) households have an abundance of opportunities to transform labor into wealth to the point they usually cannot fill them all. The transition from one to the other creates all kinds of problems because the person goes from a world where the opportunity to work is itself valuable to one where a primary skill is triaging which work is worth doing.
Anyway, the point I'm meandering toward: job searching is itself a skill. One most people are bad at because the average person applies for jobs maybe a dozen times in their life. And being bad at it is more impactful at lower socioeconomic levels than higher ones. Interpersonal connections (ie, "hey, I know a guy") is a way to skip the process. And one well worth taking advantage of if you have access to it.
"This tends to go against most people's instincts. They think the less valuable the job the easier it is to get. But it's often the opposite."
This is a sort of profound observation, IMO. For what it's worth I generally agree that there's big element of "if your labor was more valuable, people would want it more" mixed in here. I didn't get much into people who get headhunted/recruiter attention here, but that's an entirely different sphere as well that doesn't quite overlap with the "I have a friend who knows people" sphere.
They have an underlying similarity in that headhunters and networking fundamentally serve the same purpose. They reduce search costs for the business/job seeker. And if you don't have either the social capital or a skill in a market where people will pay headhunters then you need to get good at job seeking and bear them yourself. Another example of the Parable of Talents.
Which is relevant because your complaint that the job search process sucks is fundamentally about the fact you're being personally asked to bear these costs. And that there's a low incentive for companies to reduce these costs. Which is because they can force you to bear them for a variety of reasons that have to do with how the labor market works.
I'm worried I'm skipping a lot here and might not be fully coherent. I have a long rant (literally book sized) buried somewhere inside me about how almost everyone misunderstands how the labor market works and so often go about searching for jobs suboptimally.
I've worked most of my career with significant portions of interviews and hiring, and I fully agree with you. People on both ends of the hiring process tend to misunderstand how it works and what the goals are.
Can you help me shape up my resume cos am tired of not being successful with countless applications. My email is kwabina.adomako@yahoo.com. Let's pick it up from there. I will be very glad
Sure. My email is "the" plus my username at gmail. Send your resume there along with what kind of job you're looking for. I'll send back some notes.
Resume sent. Thanks
The worst applications are the ones where you upload a resume and then they make you restate everything in your resume over again, but with more information required (address of your 4th-most recent employer, for instance) and with annoying pulldown menus.
Academic hiring is unbelievably worse than this. The resume is only one tiny part of the insane, demoralising process they make you endure for a precarious, underpaid contract of 1-3 years. The application forms they demand you fill out are extensive and many require essays on bullshit topics. The last one I did took six hours only for it likely to have gone straight in the bin.
Absolutely. There are some applications that have those BS parts required by law, so it's not even that employer asking for the information - so they are not very likely to even read it all. They look at the portions that apply to them.
I'm sorry you've had such unpleasant experiences. In our firm we make a very short questionnaire and ask everyone who applies to fill it out. The questionnaire is always made with the role being hired for in mind (e.g., "improve this text" in a job with a lot of writing) and generally usefully divides the field. We don't really ask for or look at resumes until much later. I wish more firms would do this.
I do too. For what it's worth I really do believe there are individual companies who are doing better or even exceptionally well at this; I've run into processes that are very humane and people who really do intentionally work to do better. It sounds like you are shooting for that, so kudos to you.
This, 100%: “[Like] most forms of evil, the vileness of the resume-based hiring process is banal and often unintentional.” The human rat race in a nutshell.
I pray God opens the networking avenues for you, leading you through the doldrumish middle stage (through the Red Sea like the Israelites, not the Egyptians 🙃).
Appreciate it - thank you.
I cannot tell you how many positions I've seen filled long before an external job posting goes live. That is, the hiring manager already knows who will get the job, but needs to comply with HR requirements to post the job, review resumes, interview some number of candidates, etc. before they can make the "official" offer to the person they were planning on hiring in the first place.
This process is ABLEIST to all of us *disabled* folks that have difficulties with communication and social interactions. (I'm autistic late diagnosed. I bet there are many undiagnosed neurodivergent Engineers).
not to mention disparate impact among every other axis you can imagine (class/race/nationality/etc.)
This leaves five candidates - a hand-picked elite, a top 12.5% of qualified candidates.
I would add here, these 5 candidates in no way represent the best picks for the position but the elite per judgement of one's opinionated HR.
He/she might throw statements like "not a culture fit".
How about "AI" readers these terrible HR people use?
Fuck, we are said to add keywords to resume so HR people actually bother to open them.
Freeloaders.
Everybody knows people with "contacts" are the upper class of the labor market. Humans are no more advanced than that. We still prefer to interact with those we know or those who know someone we know. Which makes life difficult for those who don't know anyone important.
For that reason, being the one of the fifty (or five hundred) chosen in a resume-based hiring process really is a big win. That is a potential step from the class of people who don't know anybody important to the class of people who know at least some important people. Getting in by resume is not only the opportunity to get a job - it is the opportunity to hop from the resume class to the class with one or two contacts.
Sending in one's resume is to ask for something unusual and difficult - social mobility.
Agreed that there's potentially a lot of upside. But that's on a cost/reward spectrum - like, there's even more upside to winning the lottery, but a lot of people still consider the lottery to be a pretty raw deal.
I think it comes down to essentially being a thing you sort of have to participate in - if you don't, you are almost guaranteed to fail/stagnate, unless you can find some better way around the filter.
What I'm trying to say is more or less that resume-based hiring is not the bad thing. Class society is the bad thing. In a class society like ours, people who are the buddies of influential people are always at a big advantage. The children of the buddies of influential people are also at an advantage.
The resume-based hiring process exposes the gulf between buddies and non-buddies in all its awfulness. Still, it is not the cause of that gulf. To the contrary, it is a partial remedy to it. Without any resume-based hiring, only buddies and buddies of buddies would get any jobs above the minimum wage level.
We know human society is a small world network and everyone strives to escape their local network and become a hub (someone with many connections). Its how human brains work. I'm not justifying this structure, but to me it seems like biological reality. And AI is about to make this problem much worse or much better depending on which futurist you talk to.
Yes. And the best thing of all must be to be a hub with many financially influential people as hangarounds.
I don't think there is anyone alive who would go through the resume process IF they had a backdoor of some kind - internet fame, recommendation etc. We do it if and when there is no other way.
This wasn't angry enough; damn the system, burn it down to the core, Shakespeare hadn't met a hr rep before he commented on lawyers
The problem with letting yourself fly off the handle when you are in my situation (unemployed, barely keeping a rage-and-sorrow-based temperment in check) is that you end up looking like a lunatic. I think if I had written this during less tempestuous times, I would have been a little more strident, maybe. Right now I'm being careful to keep my bit in.
This explains a lot.
I've been applying via indeed for years now. occasionally getting the standard rejections, getting the occasional scam job postings, and for the most part, no response at all. I thought maybe I did have a "weird resume." One resume is for Graphic Design, and at the top I include an illustration. I should probably drop the illustration, but in truth through indeed, that resume doesn't even get seen. Most of the jobs I apply for use the standard indeed resume format.
I've sent out hundreds of resumes. I can tell you, the jobs I have gotten most of my life weren't by resuime at all. It was by getting around that part. I had someone vouch for me at just about every place I got a job.
As someone who has a very obscure engineering degree, I share your hatred of resumes. I had to add a short explanation on my resume so employers would stop interpreting it as a graphic design degree.
My other big annoyance with resume-hiring is the insistance that your GPA must be above a certain number. No exceptions! Not even if you have an amazing explanation for the slightly-too-low number and can prove that you're otherwise qualified.
For some reason all I can imagine here is that your PhD is in "Photoshop head-swapping" and that you build bridges, or something like that.
"A word of warning related to that: Because I both hate resume-first hiring processes and I’m talking about applicant-side problems, a lot of this is going to read as a condemnation of employers as a class - it’s not that, and I’ll explain why as we go."
Be a lot cooler if you did
Actually, you pretty much are doing exactly this in the article by saying that they have no choice because the power imbalance is tremendous. Which is actually more kind, more accurate, and more consistent with calling them out "as a class" than calling them out as individuals.
I'm not sure if we still have an active complaint here or not - like you've identified the places where I let the employers off the hook somewhat; is there still something left to be desired?
Well, I would have phrased it as "I'm condemning employers as a class, not individually," which I think is more consistent with the rest of the article.
At the end of the day, though, this article gave me what I wanted was the kick the in balls to stop perfecting and tweaking every last pixel on my resume as a means for procrastinating the shit I like even less (the dehumanization that you mentioned (and lots that you didn't) that ensues)
Hm. I think the disconnect here is that I'm not exactly condemning employers. I'm sort of condemning the process every employer uses - which would be a condemnation of them, except I don't think there's an alternative. It's like condemning someone for sawing off someone's leg without anesthesia; that's a valid condemnation if anesthesia hasn't been invented yet. But if it hasn't, it's not the surgeon's fault.
That's what I was sort of getting to - it's like, employers aren't going to improve this. They don't even know how even if they wanted to put in the effort. Your best bet is to just not let your leg go septic in the first place.
Ah. Yes we are fully in agreement it sounds like, and only differ the semantics of “condemn as a class.”
I took that to mean “condemn the owners of the means of production,” which seemed appropriate, if still not adequately transformative, because one would need to propose a viable alternative system by which the means of production could not be privately owned.
Inimical, what process would you use if you were an employer? I think IQ tests are illegal, but I guess you could create a work project and have people do it, then measure their performance somehow. I've heard this is getting more common in coding.
Have you checked out EnjoyMondays.com? They seem to be putting the power back into the applicants hands.
Narrator: /they weren't./
I never could get this link to work. Is that what we are talking about here?
No, I didn't even try to click it, because whatever it is, it can't change the fundamental power imbalance that all of this lunacy is downstream of.