How a Good Idea Devalued us All
Capital of Nasty, an Electronic Magazine - ISSN 1482-0471
Tuesday, November 19, 2002 at 03:00 (575/104)
Categories:
Workplace
A friend of mine is a legal secretary. Sounds like a pretty good gig, eh? Experience and education, and all in a discipline that you see ads for all the time. It took her most of a year and hundreds of resumes. In the end she got placed by an agency rather than doing it on her own. The mighty CoN Editor in Chief himself has some laughing (because it's all so absurd) experiences in this as well. I've been smarting over my own failure to upgrade my job, and after hearing about these experiences I started wondering just where the job market is going nowadays.
On the one hand you've got the government crowing about how unemployment is at an all time low. On the other, the oh-so-many jobs that are out there all appear to be low end, retail jobs. Ever tried to pay a thousand bucks along with a month in rent on retail clerk pay? What's available doesn't pay you enough to rent in the GTA, let alone buy a home.
Right out of high school at the end of the eighties I found myself a well paying, union job that would have allowed me to buy a home and live a moderate, middle class lifestyle. The union in that place was broken in the early nineties and all of the career types I knew there scattered as the wages were slashed by eight to ten bucks an hour. The gormless fools who took their places had little if any education and most couldn't speak English. We tried to explain to them what happened but they seemed derisive. I hope they enjoy the strenuous physical labour that doesn't pay them enough to live here. I wonder how many good jobs are left out there in the arid wasteland of Canada's economy.
Anyone reading this has probably done the rounds on Workopolis, Monster or any of the other thousands of online job search databases. I can remember when these websites started up. They touted themselves as the new means by which people will find the job they want. Monster's slogan is still "Never Settle" and Workopolis likes to show you examples of all the people who made it thanks to them. Oh, so empowering, but only on the surface. There are over 31,000 jobs posted on Workopolis right now and 27 success stories. In four out of the first ten stories I read, the person involved was unable to find work in their field for over a year before they were successful.
I have a theory that the internet has made trawling for employees so easy that it has greatly devalued them in the eyes of the employer. With barely any effort an employer can get a raft of resumes and treat the applicants like shit because the effort involved is negligible. In days of yore when it took a real effort to collect together a bunch of applicants, they were treated like human beings because the company examining them had to put hours of work into finding them. Monster & Workopolis like to play the "doing you a favour" card in their advertising, but what they've really done is made us all a dime a dozen. In case you were wondering, I'm sitting here trying to figure out where all my damn resumes are going. Giant, electronic piles of resumes that don't even cost money to print exist in human resources email servers across the land. They are treated like the cheap information that they are. Deleted at will, ignored at no cost; we are made meaningless by the very ease by which we offer ourselves.
In the nasty little company I work for, my own manager has told me that she likes to post a position and collect a score of resumes and then remove the job offering. The people who applied assume that the job has been filled and forget about it. A few weeks later she posts the job again and offers twenty percent less than she did the first time. She sorts the incoming resumes into already applied and new applicants and tosses out the new applicants. Now she's got a list of dedicated, desperate people who she knows she can lowball when it comes to working out salary.
What the online job factories do is sell your volunteered data to people who can abuse it for their own profit. As I drive in to work and see Workopolis banners on the side of the road or I'm watching primetime television and a Monster ad that supposedly empowers us to "Never Settle!" comes on, I wonder where they found their wealth, and now I know; they took it from all of the job seekers, and they did it with a smile and a promise of empowerment.
Do you want to see job seekers treated with something other than rude, arrogant disregard? The answer is easy: take your online resume off-line and be selective about what you apply for. If the flood suddenly dried up, those hirers would value the glass of water you bring, rather than swimming in the excess they enjoy now.
An amateur lepidopterist, mediocre pugilist and expert sibylist, Tim had a dream last night that he was a fish in a boat race.
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an interesting and accurate take on the whole e-resume dealio. i love to read people tearing apart the status quo with well reasoned arguments and this one was just that, in my estimation. i especially like it when someone punctures the proffered and widely gulped "truth" of a marketing effort and shows me what it really is.
a pat on the back to the author, please. thank you for opening my eyes.
long live the King, Tim that is.
cliff
After reading Tim's opinion piece, I found myself in the odd position of agreeing with much of what he said, but for reasons other than those he has provided. As a professional agency recruiter I agree that the internet *has* greatly devalued job-seekers, but I put much of the blame for that on the job-seekers themselves, not the employers. Let me explain why.
I am, on a daily basis, bombarded with resumes from people who apply for jobs they are clearly not qualified for. These are not resumes that I have found on sites like Workopolis. They are from people who have seen a position that my firm is advertising, a specific position requiring a specific set of qualifications. These qualifications are clearly stated and just as clearly disregarded. Why does my firm get hundreds of unqualified resumes a week? Because it is so easy to send them.
It costs nothing to fire out as many resumes as you want by email, and as a result people do not make an effort to match up their qualifications to the job requirements. It just doesn't matter any more. All you have to do is press the "send" button and leave it up to the person on the other end to screen for themselves. Is it any wonder that in situations such as these, the people responsible for screening through the piles of resumes don't get a little frustrated by such a callous disregard for their time and effort?
Tim points out that "in days of yore when it took a real effort to collect together a bunch of applicants, they were treated like human beings because the company examining them had to put hours of work into finding them". This is equally true in sending resumes. In "days of yore", prior to the explosion of the home computer, you had to type up a resume or pay a professional to type it for you. That cost money, so you sent out your resume on a selective basis. In the days before the fax machine, you had to pay for postage and buy an 8.5 x 11 envelope to send your resume in. That also took money, and people took the time to make sure they were actually qualified for the job they were applying for. Email has made it so cheap and so easy, that people tell themselves "I have nothing to lose by sending the resume". So they send it.
I think they *do* have something to lose. What they contribute to, a little bit at a time, is the collective dehumanization of the job-seeking process. If you take the "I have nothing to lose" attitude towards applying for a job instead of trying to demonstrate how you are uniquely qualified to fill that job, then you have nobody to blame but you (and the thousands like you) that contribute to the cheapening of resumes, and by extension job-seekers.
Respect is a two way street. As a recruiter I would suggest to anyone that if you wish to be respected in this process, then start by respecting yourself. Treat your resume as a valuable document, not some handbill to be glued up on lightposts. Be selective about who you show it to, and use it to clearly prove why you are the best choice for the job. Finding a qualified resume makes wading through the mire of unqualified resumes worthwhile, but I wish I didn't have to go through the whole process. I'd love to give each applicant the respect they deserve as people, but if they don't respect my time and effort, it becomes a tough sell to get me to respect theirs.
Just my $.02
Thanks for the inside J-Lo, I was looking forward to your angle on it. It seems like the problem is endemic to everyone in the job market today - both seekers and hirers. The technology has made it too easy.
After reading your thoughts I think the final suggestion is even more substantial: take that online resume off-line, stop applying to everything because it's a click away. You're doing a disservice to everyone if you "Treat your resume as ... some handbill to be glued up on lightposts."
I read both Tim's article and Jon's comments. I was wondering if either one of you thought that the solution might lie in eliminating the ability to apply to a position on-line. So, the company could advertise the opening and state the qualifications, but the applicant would still need to actually mail a resume. This way you eliminate those who press send and attach a resume, or just fax something in because it isn't their paper anyhow. This way the potential employer would require an old fashioned method of delivery, and still make use of the theoretical benefit of a larger pool of people to draw from. In terms of benefits to the potential employee, lets hope that those who are not qualified would be less willing to spend the buck on paper, ink, an envelope and a stamp, so their resume would be more likely to be taken seriously. What do you think gentlemen?
Your suggestion is a reasonable one, but it works against the nature of business. When have you ever known business to take the right path over the path of least resistance?
Modern business isn't capable of long term consideration or even the most basic fecundity; it feeds on short term, myopic gain. With these blinders on business has no interest in restoring the value of hirees when it can simply collect databases of them and delete at will.
Having said that, the odd time I do notice certain companies requesting only mailed in applications... others would be wise to follow their lead as you suggest, but I'm not holding my breath.