We have all heard about the problems with finding the right employee for the jobs you are trying to fill. Usually from my vantage point as a hiring manager my biggest problems have been about resumes that did not make sense for the position being filled. It is very hard to go from an AA working at a McJob to a required PhD working in research which is usually the kind of job I am trying to fill, and my average job candidate resume is the McJob. Usually that means they are just filling out the paper work and spamming the job systems with garbage resumes on some forlorn hope that they will get a job they are totally unprepared for.
The interesting flip side to this is that I recently posted my resume on one of the major job boards because that was the price of looking for jobs at their site. The resume I posted was my teaching resume; I am only looking for teaching gigs, preferably online so that I can go pursue the other things I think are worthwhile, like my startup. What has been flabbergasting to me are the responses I am getting back from recruiters.
I am dead clear what I want to do, the opening preamble of the resume is:
“The idea job will focus on teaching the next generation of technology and business leaders the skills, creativity, thinking, and business/technology acumen to succeed in business and technology. As well, the job will have significant Social Networking, virtual meeting, and online interaction that lead to better comprehensive learning on the part of students.”
Fairly clear cut and dry, I just want to teach, been teaching now for seven years and I really love it a lot as a job.
What has been coming my way though has been a mishmash of job “opportunities” that have no relationship to what I posted online as a desired job description. I have gotten offers to be a program manager for an environmental company selling their environmental products. I have had three opportunities to become an insurance salesperson (and a direct sales job is something I am not suited for in terms of personality or temperament). I have had multiple franchise opportunities so I can go open some form of restaurant which is also something that shows nowhere in my background. The last restaurant job I had was in high school asking “do you want fries with that?” And the military would like to have me back, which is cool I loved the time I served in the navy, but not sure if I am really cut out to be a navy band member at this time. I play a pretty good bass guitar but that is about it, and the navy does not do punk rock.
What this tells me is that not only is there a major disconnect between the people who are applying for jobs that they are not suited for, but to add insult to injury there is also a major disconnect between people who have jobs to fill and do not really look at the resumes that are on the job sites.
With all this not looking, the real talent is getting buried in a morass of people working on divergent ends, where no one gets hired because in the impersonal way we look for jobs, there is no way to rise above the noise. The most frustrating part of my job is going through resumes that do not match the job description, and that is looking like it will be quickly followed by fending off recruiters who didn’t really read my resume.
We often laugh about how finding a job is broken, and now I know it is broken from both sides of the process. Sadly this means that the only real way to find a job is to do this by personal connections. This makes LinkedIn and other sites like that more important than the general job boards that have millions of members. Of all the people I have hired lately, none came from a job board; all came from personal inside recommendations. It is time to seriously make some friends because the public systems are seriously broken from both sides of the process.
(Cross-posted @ TechWag)
