3 Tips: Rip Van Winkle Looks for a Job

The last time I personally looked for a job was some 29 years ago when in 1990 I applied to a dozen universities for a tenured faculty position in engineering. I landed at the University of Illinois in the department formerly known as General Engineering, spending 20 years working on genetic algorithms, coaching senior design projects, teaching graduate and undergraduate classes, and starting iFoundry. I retired early from that position in 2010 to start Threejoy.com and BigBeacon.org. I recall this history, because that 1990 search was of a different era. A few of the applications were sent by email, but many of them were submitted through the Post Office (!!?) as printed documents, and it was largely a person-to-person old-fashioned kind of search that was common decades ago. Thus, it was with some trepidation last week that I volunteered to work with a close relative (call her Andrea) to help her find a job in the age of online applications (Monster, Indeed, ZipRecruiter, etc.).

Rip's First Impression: A Cartesian Jobs World

In doing some preparatory work to get together with Andrea, I dug into the maze of online employment and company HR sites, and my first impression was that the employment system had been made rational in a way that might make Rene Descartes smile. All those neat little sites, waiting 24/7 to take in your application for work, backed up by AI, filters, and algorithms to match applicants to positions, and, indeed, the process of applying for a job has never been easier.

That, of course, is part of the problem. Microeconomic theory suggests that when goods become cheaper (job applications become easier), their numbers increase, and the job hunter today faces competition from tens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of applicants for the same job. And this is exactly the situation Andrea faced. She had put in dozens of applications and received back a handful of nibbles, none of which had led to gainful employment.

I drove from my home in Douglas, MI to the major midwestern city where Andrea lives, and first thing we did together was to put together a spreadsheet analysis of all the job applications she had made. I must confess, that there were no clear patterns from the spreadsheet. Some companies take their online applicants fairly seriously; one of the applications with a major insurance company led to a series of interviews for a good-paying job in a sector with growth potential. Many of the responses Andrea received were from what can only be called pyramid schemes, and sites like glassdoor.com helped filter out those scammers. Other positions were real jobs, but many required Andrea to pay for additional training on her own before she could start. Many of those positions were with small independent offices of a larger company; and though they offered full-time work, many offered no benefits, and oftentimes a key component of the pay package was commission or otherwise results based.

A glance at Andrea's resume showed that it was in very good order and not part of her hiring challenge, but time was running out, and the situation for Andrea had become urgent. Her husband was in school full time, she needed work, and we needed to crack the code of the new-age job system right now.

Rip's Tip #1: Stick to Your Knitting (or Bring Your Own Needles)

In reviewing her previous applications, one of the things we noticed was that Andrea's efforts to move from retail and food service into more lucrative positions were not panning out. The insurance interview was a near miss, but the feedback from the real world was that companies today, more than ever, want employees with the education, skills, and experience that benefits them right now. Some 39 years ago my wife was able to parlay her training as a school teacher, and then shoe sales assistant manager, into a solid job with a major insurance company in which they footed the bill for her training, and later promoted her to sales manager. Today, employers are impatient, want you job ready on day one, and you either have experience in their field or you get the precursor training they require on your own dime.

This led my search with Andrea to return to her experience in retail (apparel) and food service and focus on jobs that she would fill effectively on day one. So after the spreadsheet analysis, we targeted online applications that would ring and harmonize with her resume's bells directly.

Rip's TIp #2: Act as if Job Search Is Still Human

The failure of the original blast of online applications to yield much response, suggested to me that we needed to hit the road in an old fashioned, door-to-door, press-the-flesh kind of way. Fortunately, Andrea's apartment is located near miles and miles of retail and food service establishments, and many of the applications made the previous evening were with organizations with stores within a fifteen minute commute.

We got together early the next morning, after stopping at Fed-Ex to print a bunch of old-fashioned copies of Andrea's resume, and we hit a local mall. We started by going to an anchor store with an old, venerable name, and asked the person at the information counter whether they were hiring and to point us to the HR department. It turned out that the person behind the info counter was the store manager. They were hiring a limited number of positions, and an informal interview ensued which led to a more formal interview two days later.

We walked togther purposefully through the mall. My role was to keep up the spreadsheet account of the visits and offer moral support. Andrea walked into stores that interested her, and some had hiring signs out front. Many of them had managers on duty, and quite a few of those took a look at her resume. Those that had online sites asked her to go online and apply. Some took old-fashioned handwritten applications. And as I watched all this, it seemed to me that job search has changed in terms of record keeping, as many companies now use online job aggregators or company-wide HR sites to collect and file basic job data. But as we went from store to store, it was also clear that the idea of a fully rational Cartesian job system is an illusion. My main takeaway from this experience is that

Job search is still a human enterprise.

Although many business and organizations spend large amounts of money and time on presenting a professional, polished web site to job applicants, the managers responsible for hiring in those same business and organizations work the system with a variety of very human moves:

• The redirect. If someone has applied online to the company, but not for the particular position available at their store, the manager redirects the application to the particular position with the push of a button.
• The check in. If someone of interest applies in person, but hasn't applied online, the manager directs the applicant to apply online and check in with the manager subsequently.
• The cheat sheet. Sometimes the check in is supplemented with a cheat sheet. The hiring manager asks the applicant to apply online and then gives them a business card or even a printed sheet instructing them to circle back via email or phone outside to let them know that the application is now online. Note, that this circling back is outside the automated system. All of these various moves allow the manager to exercise human discretion based on their personal experience and interaction with the applicant.

Thus, we see that the online backbone effectively screens applicants out, and smart managers and applicants find ways to restore to a process that would otherwise be driven by bits and bytes in an SQL database.

Rip's Tip #3: Professionals Need to Inject DIY or Paid Humanity

My search with Andrea was in the service sector, and seeking work by walking into a service location where on-duty workers and their managers are customer facing (and applicant facing) is not particularly disruptive; however, if your search is in a more professional environment in which people are heads down doing accounting, engineering, law or some other largely cognitive task requiring concentration, interruptions are not usually welcome. In the olden days, you would apply to such jobs by mail (or by referral) and a relatively small number of resumes would receive personal scrutiny. Today, however, the Cartesian Job System, effectively screens out many, if not most, applicants, and some way needs to be found to return the search to a more human one.

I puzzled over this for a time, but but my parenthetic comment above about referrals and my writing this post on LinkedIn gives important clues to a solution. In the old days, formal job systems through the front door were supplemented by personal knowledge and intuition through referrals and networking. Today, professionals need to circumvent the Cartesian Job System with intentional networking efforts. This can involve using professional meetups (meetups.com), existing personal contacts, or the creation of new personal contacts through systems such as LinkedIn. Moreover, professional staffing and job search firms can also inject a needed element of compensated vetting and referral into a job search when DIY networking efforts are not cutting it.

Rip's Relief: Being Human Still Matters

I must confess that I was relieved to see that job search today isn't that much different from what I was used to back in olden times. Yes, the systems are shiny and sleek, and to me they give the impression that applying for a job is like a video game, but my experience with Andrea helped me understand that at root, being human still counts. It would be easy for a young person today who never experienced the old ways, to be fooled by the rational appearances of job search websites and company HR systems, and thereby assume that going through the virtual front door is enough. Rip Van Winkle says, no, you need to show up, you need to make personal connections, in person or through others, and in that way you have a reasonable chance of getting hired.

And by the way, the efforts for Andrea panned out. In a short time, we were able to put together about 15 active prospects leading to 5 interviews, 4 offers, and one new job.

Conversation-in-action around this topic is welcome via comments or at [email protected].

David E. Goldberg is perhaps best known as an AI pioneer (genetic algorithms) and for his first book Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning (1989); his latest book is A Whole New Engineer: The Coming Revolution in Engineering Education (2014). In 2010, Dave resigned his tenure & a distinguished professorship to work full time for the transformation higher education. A trained leadership coach (Georgetown) and president of ThreeJoy Associates, a change leadership, coaching, training & consulting firm in Douglas, MI, Dave works with an amazing cohort of change agents both in- and outside of his ThreeJoy? Coaching Club. Dave can be reached at [email protected].