Craigslist Poster to Employers: “Your Loss”
I’m not old enough to remember a time before online job applications were the norm.
I never knew the days when resumes weren’t sent out into the internet abyss, only to be lost forever.
I have no idea what it was like, back when keyword searches weren’t the one thing standing between you and an actual, face-to-face interview.
But I’m willing to bet jobseeking was a lot less infuriating.
One Craigslist poster captures the sentiment, with an open letter to employers:
Dear employers with job openings,
I just want to take a moment or two to thank all the companies that now only use online applications for the jobs for which I am best qualified. I’m so happy to know that in the past eight years, you have dropped the very impersonal practice of requesting well written resumes (which took the place of having me come into your place of business in person and fill out an application by hand) and now for convenience, give me the opportunity to waste my fucking time trying to guess what it is you want me to write in your online application fields in eight words or less, what work I’ve done that will make you call me for an interview. Because of this new-found simple-mindedness of yours, I can guarantee that you will have the weakest, most uninteresting, unmotivated new-hires EVER!
Because I have had to have more than three jobs in the past eight years, at which I have excelled, some of which I was laid-off from due to down-sizing, and most of which are your competitors in the marketplace, you will never know what I have done because you only allow three previous employers in your simple, automated application program or only want experience from the past five years.
Because I have always been capable of doing more than one thing at a time, you will never know that as a free-lance writer/costume designer/photographer, what I have done Monday through Friday to support myself quite well, thank you, is to be the most efficient, bright, hard-working, easy-going, intelligent and dependable administrative assistant an employer could wish for. But you will never know that because your measly-ass job application program is only looking for words your witless HR staff has programmed it to look for and then spitting out applications by people like myself with a form email thanking me for my interest and wishing me luck.
Thank you also for the Myers-Briggs psychometric type test to see if I actually would be able to sit next to another person and not drive them crazy.
Thank you for sparing me the waste of my time outshining most of your other staff in their presence by having me come in to your office in person, dressed to the nines, flashing my intensely alert eyes at you, and shaking your hand with confidence, yet sensitively. You wouldn’t hire me anyway because I’m probably more interesting than you and therefore a threat.
You have saved me from the humiliation of taking a position with a company that probably has the dullest, most unadventurous, most boring staff that has been hired through this elimination process of an online application to which you have given ultimate authority to decide, only by the selection of some dozen or so “key” words, to interview.
And we wonder why there are banks going under, businesses making toxic loans, stock market losses, medical errors, corruption, Bernie Madoffs in the world, and police who can’t allow a family to be with their dying mother so he can write a ticket.
Yours very truly,
The one that got away
The average career is now FIVE years. If you work as a temp/contractor, you can list your multiple jobs under your temp agency to fudge your experience.
Self-employment is now a more reliable source of income than a job anyway.
H.R. – what a huge joke they are, glorified data entry operators with a book that has all the “correct” answers to life’s most important questions.
I don’t suppose it’ll make you feel any better, but I can tell you for sure that job hunting 30 years ago (and 20 years ago, and 10 years ago) was also infuriating. In the old days, you went to a print shop to have your resume printed on expensive, subtly distinctive paper to catch the eye of HR. You sent dozens, nay, hundreds of these beauties out with well-crafted cover letters, and they vanished into some wastebasket with no acknowledgment of receipt.
Technology changes, but HR doesn’t get smarter or more appealing.
Make sure that resume paper is the special thick kind and obsess about grammar and spelling; that way the employer dolts can make a paper airplane out of it and throw it into the basura. Great country.
Corporate “hiring” practices are a joke. They hire people who are followers, puppets, imebiceles that do not rock the boat. Heaven forbid you have an independent thought or have an opinion. They like to hire wimps, emasculated “men” (boys) and silly girls (twirling hair and chewing gum-tennie boppers) as they are naive and impressionable. That’s why they get up at 7:00AM everyday M-Sat, 8-10 hours/day and become nothings. They are dull, lifeless, individuals who then get their 1-2 week vacay whereby they can stress out about their bossman, or the fax machine or that the grant in triplicate had a typo. Great life–rather not work, than be dying a slow death in USA corparate sh-thole. good riddance.
I still have a cache of Peppermint Linen paper that I used to use for my resumes. Which were designed using Pagemaker–clear yet intriguing designs the likes of which today’s publishing-software-for-the-masses could only dream of creating. Maybe the lesson is that HR folks NEVER read and appreciated the well-written resume and cover letter, and now they won’t have to.