Job seeking from a hunters perspective Blog

Job Hunt desires and humor! January 13, 2011

Do you ever get the urge to step outside and scream at the top of your lungs, I am somebody dammit and I am qualified for the jobs I submit too.

I know that I do.

The other idea that just popped into my head was to have in large 16 or 18 point bold Ariel font at the top of my resume the following.

For human consumption only!  Not responsible for making scanning software ignorant!

or the other idea,

To be read by an intelligent caring human being preferably a hiring manager.

But that would be an oxymoron then wouldn’t it.

I would like to get a large gathering of HR professionals, I use that term very loosely, and give them all a behavioral and psychological test/interview. Provide them with with all the assessment test to take. When all was completed I would match their results up to a industry standard job posting and fire everyone of them that didn’t  match exactly.

Then I would post their postions and if they applied would send them a form letter saying that although we were impressed with your quailifcation we found much better qualified candidates.

Just what are the qualifications for an HR position?

Heartless?

Unable to see potential from reading a resume?  Is reading still a requirement?

Reading Comprehension? Replaced by scanning software!

Pigeon Holing?

Rationalization?

I think that one day soon I will search for HR positions to see what the requirements are.

Will it require them to have every combination of alphabet after their name?

Will it require being a recent college grad willing to work for dirt but have 15 years of experience?

Will it say that most of you who apply while qualified will be told your over or that there are better qualified than you?

Career Coaches are another target pet peeve of mine!

How to find a job by committee consensus! A group of self appointed career coaches gathered for a week of drunken debauchery and decided these are the things that you need to do to find a job.  Of course we have jobs so we don’t nor care if they work.

Research was done recently on LinkedIn profiles to find the most used and abused word and phrases and the total was 50. I read all 50 and found that every single one of them are what you are told to use to stand out by career coaches and so called HR experts.

By doing this they have rendered these words and phrases a meaningless to hiring managers.

It did not surprise me that when I checked I my resume and profile not one single word or phrase did I find.

To differentiate is to not fall inline like a lemming with everyone else.  However scanning software is not AI (artificial intelligence) and can’t tell that you are qualified and differentiating.   Apparently neither can HR nor career coaches.

Let us not forget the battle over resume length!  The trenches are dug and the battle wages on. It appears to be evenly matched and no winner any time soon.

I think the one page reasoning is that there comprehension time isn’t long enough to get to page 2. How did they ever get through college?

Maybe the reason is because the 2-3,000 resume they claim to receive  for 1 post is lighter than if you has some 2,3 or 4 page resumes in the pile. There job doesn’t require heavy lifting.

I once sent a professional profile instead of a resume. I received a call from an HR type who couldn’t comprehend what the profile was saying and asked for a 1 page resume. Chronological of course!  I said for a mid level manager position a 1 page resume would be insufficient. His reply was that is what I was told to ask for. I said then I rescind my application because I cannot work for a company like yours. Then I had to explain rescind.

I apologize if I sound like I am complaining it is just that I tired of having to deal with a system that is terribly broken and the people in the system will do nothing to fix it.  There latest committee fix to the problem was to change their name from Human Resource to Human Capital to make themselves feel less hated. Well it didn’t work you still look like incompetent Bozoos from the outside looking in.