Job Searching 2008

I look down and see my unpedicured toe nail peeking out from my shoe. I hope the recruiter doesn’t judge my feet. We all fidget, an orchestrated group of nerves with papers. We fix our hair and pull down our skirts; we straighten our ties.

The recruiter calls my name, I look up and smile and extend my arm …

And here’s my PS:

I’ve spent over six years in the recruitment advertising industry so I came to my job search armed with insider knowledge. The niche job boards, the applicant tracking systems, the Linked-ins, the social networking. But it seems that although I seem to know the roads and highways to a destination, I still have to sit in the same traffic.

Job-hunting has gone mostly virtual; we fill out countless online questionnaires and enter in our job histories, our education background, special skills. We check off boxes, click radio buttons, and fill out the obligatory, yet optional, EEO statements at the end. I always choose to answer that I’m white and a female; I’m not sure if this is helping or hindering my cause.

To say that the face of recruiting has changed dramatically is an obvious understatement. People’s qualifications have come down to bits and bytes—keywords on resumes. When a hiring manager needs a candidate, they conduct a search on their internal resume database. The right applicant is served if it had the correct ingredients—matching keywords. The strategic candidates treat the job descriptions like a reading comprehension section of a standardized test. We read the job descriptions and then insert the appropriate keywords onto our resumes, hoping one of them will yield a successful result.

For those good on paper, this system works. For those of us who are good in person, we yearn for another approach. Perhaps corporate recruiting should take a lesson from actors—we should all come in for an audition.