I’ve dropped out of the job market. I give up.
I’m not retired. And it’s not that I don’t need the money anymore. I do. But I need intro-cranial bleeding, high blood pressure, and assaults on my dignity a lot less. So, I’ve adopted Howard Beale’s 1976 rant from “Network:”
I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!
Despite everything you read in Forbes, on LinkedIn, and in Fish & Stream, there’s something seriously wrong with the job search process today. Industry experts shrug their shoulders, claiming there are just too many people looking for work these days.
Poppycock.
There’s something fundamentally broken with the system. I know it. They know it, and you know it, or you wouldn’t be reading this essay. I just wish it had worked itself out a few years earlier before I still needed to earn money.
A 12-Year Old Enters the Workforce
I had barely reached puberty when my father “encouraged” me to enter the workforce for the first time. He told me it would 
teach me the true meaning of money; the same rubbish parents tell their kids today.
A friend of a friend of a friend heard about a job pedaling an ice cream cart around the neighborhood and told my dad I’d be a shoo-in for it, so he arranged an interview for me.
There wasn’t exactly a line around the block for the job. In fact, as far as I know, I was the only kid interested in the “opportunity.” The job description wasn’t complicated: sell ice cream bars until you ran out of them, or sunlight—whichever came last.
Even though it was more than 55 years ago, I still remember that first grueling interview like it was yesterday:
“So, Burt. You’ve got quite an impressive application here.”
“My name is Allen.”
“Right. I really like your resume, but it looks like you’ve never worked in the high-powered world of frozen dessert sales.”
“I don’t know what a resume is.”
“Ok. Let’s move on. Can you explain this two-month gap in your employment?”
“I went to band camp.”
“Where do you see yourself in five years?”
“In high school.”
“What would you do if you were faced with a hostile customer?”
“I’d probably cry.”
“Great. You’ve got the job.”
I didn’t look for work again until I was in high school. By that time, I’d discovered smoking, drinking, and girls—all at the same time—so my weekly allowance wasn’t covering my overhead anymore. I’d either have to begin a life of crime or get busy and find a job. My parents were in favor of the latter.
I managed to find a part-time job in a donut shop. You know, like the ones located across the street from your church? There must be hundreds of thousands of churches across the country, and every one of them has a donut shop across the street.
The job interview was more like a first date. They never bothered to ask me if I had any experience. After all, how many kids have commercial baking experience by the time they’re 16? They just took what they could salvage from me and hoped for the best.
It took about three days to complete my indoctrination. It was like a cross between working in a bakery and SEAL Team Six training. But, I managed to stay there for three years until I was fired for slipping “surprises” inside jelly donuts. I’ll leave the details to your own imagination.
With the Vietnam war escalating, and no particular career aspirations, I enlisted in the U.S. Navy right after high school graduation. The Navy didn’t give a hoot about my missing resume, either. They just told me to strip off my clothes, bend over and cough. Congratulations! You’re a member of the U.S. Navy. Enlisting in the military will always remain the easiest job I got and the toughest one to get rid of.
An Endless String of Whatchamacallits
Over the course of the next 20 years, I followed an aimless path of careers that led me to ski patrolling, cutting hair, driving buses, and directing traffic at Magic Mountain disguised as Bloop the Troll. I dug ditches, sold cotton candy at carnivals, counted ball bearings, and worked as a men’s restroom attendant. None of them required me to have a resume.
Even today, people still find jobs the old-fashioned way—by word of mouth—that doesn’t necessarily require having a stellar resume. Eighty percent of upper-tier positions are filled through word of mouth as opposed to online job boards, dating sites or Craigslist. But, just like my first job, you have to know somebody.
In the late 1990s, the internet changed everything about the way I went about looking for work. After I got tired of surfing for porn and ordering pizzas online, I started using it to find work. It was a godsend. Instead of confining my search to pointless minimum-wage jobs at local hardware stores, I discovered I could freely roam the earth! Of course, that also meant more competition.
Prior to the internet, people tended to stay close to home. When I was in high school, I found most of my jobs posted on 3 X 5 cards thumbtacked to the bulletin board in our local supermarket. I had a car so I immediately rose to the top of the list over the other applicants who still depended on their bicycles—or, parents—to get to work.
With so much competition these days, employers have resorted to a slew of well-meaning, yet unproductive methods for matching the perfect job with the perfect candidate. Like the resume.
Secrets for Creating the Perfect Resume
I have no idea what people are looking for in a resume. I suspect they don’t either. There is such a crushing volume of applicants 
for every job, recruiters are stretched beyond their limits to single-out the perfect candidate for every opening they have. One of the tools they use to help is applicant tracking software (or systems), often called ATS.
ATS was invented in 485 AD by Strophantes Erquemboure—a poor, but industrious Lithuanian shopkeeper—and introduced into the modern workplace about the time the internet started flooding human resource departments. HR managers were swamped by applicants from Delhi, India, searching for entry-level accounts payable jobs in Cleveland, Ohio. No one was prepared for the aftermath. It meant everyone had to up their game—on both sides of the table.
Resumes changed dramatically from one-size-fits-all, single-page lists of companies people worked for, to tall tales crafted by professional screenwriters that included specific “keywords.” It started becoming a game, beginning with job descriptions. Let’s see who can come up with the most cryptic definition of the simplest job. Some companies even ran competitions, with prizes awarded on Hawaiian Shirt Fridays.
Job descriptions used to be just that: a short list of things you needed to be able to successfully perform the job. If you had most of them, chances are you’d get at least an interview. Today, job descriptions have evolved into “wish lists;” lists of not only what employers need, but also tasks no one in the company knows how to do, using some unidentifiable language designed to make the job sound important:
- Core competency
- Empowering corporate values
- Scalable leverage
- Forward planning
- Negative feedback loop
- Onboarding the paradigm shift
- Synergized for optimum capacity
- Cascading relevant information
- Strategic staircases.
Not to mention, common euphemisms:
- Customer-centric
- Drilling down
- Touching base
- Maintaining the bandwidth to circle back
- Moving the needle forward
- Coordinating and synergizing corporate agreements
- Putting lipstick on a pig.
Better Applicants through Science
Applicants are told by resume writers that they don’t stand a snowball’s chance in Hades of landing an interview—never mind the job—unless they can weave those terms into their resumes. A different one for each of the thousands you send out:
Responsible for researching and documenting forward planning maintenance and troubleshooting procedures, ensuring effective communication specifications using illustrations, photographs, resulting in paradigm shifts in cascading relevant information.
Sounds easy, doesn’t it?
Years ago, I found an interesting job working for a local police department as an “Evidence Management Specialist.” That was fancy way to say “Property Clerk.”
They wanted someone to file, monitor all the thousands of scraps of smashed glass, doobies, needles, illegal firearms, medieval torture devices, body parts and human tissues associated with crimes committed within their jurisdiction. It was the most rigorous interview process I’ve ever experienced.
I started off by completing a standard, 100-page application, followed by tissue, hair, nasal, urine and stool samples. Then, I had to drive 200 miles to the next county where I was grilled by an overworked psychologist.
After I got back, they told me I’d have to take a polygraph test. You know, those tests where they hook you up to a web of electrodes, probes, and thermometers, while the technician screamed at me under a bright desk lamp. While thrusting his index finger in my face, he shouted:
“I’m going to ask you a few simple questions to help us determine if you’re the type of person we want to have in the Kickapoo Police Department. Answer each question yes or no.”
“Go ahead.”
“Is consciousness real?”
“No.”
“Is there such a thing as absolute truth?”
“No.”
“Have you ever taken anything from work, regardless of how small it is?
Dang. They got me.
Two things quickly shot through my mind before I answered:
Hell, everybody takes stuff from work. Pens, pencils, post-its, company cars. They all do. If I admit to taking something home as measly as a photocopier, I’ll be labeled a thief and never get the job.
On the other hand, they probably expect me to lie, don’t they? So, I guess I should avoid telling the truth.
For whatever reason, I didn’t get the job and was forced to re-start my job searching all over again.
Desperate for money and something to fill my free time, I reluctantly registered for a “temp” agency. But, they wanted to interview me first. So, I dressed up in my Sunday best and plowed through their interview.
The interviewer confessed that it was her first day on the job and wasn’t really sure what questions they normally ask, so she went down the standard list of “The Dating Game” questions in her staff manual:
“What is the weirdest thing you have done in someone else’s bathroom?”
“What’s a body part that you wouldn’t mind losing?”
“If you were arrested with no explanation, what would your friends and family immediately assume you had done?”
“What’s the most embarrassing thing a guest has done in your home?”
“What’s invisible but you wish people could see, and vice versa?”
After more than a month, the agency never sent me out on a single assignment. Probably because of my answers to her questions.
Throwing in the Towel
Finally, at my breaking point, I decided to ditch any hope of ever going back to a full-time, salaried job. If interviewing was this
tough to figure out, I can’t imagine what actually working would be like. So, I went back to freelance writing.
Here’s the thing about freelance writing. Like any job, it has as many pros as it has cons. The hours are great—work whenever you want to—even if it’s the middle of the night. But, often times, jobs are unpredictable. You never have to worry about getting along with your office mates; largely because there are none, so you rarely have to get dressed for work. You can simply work in your pajamas unless you need to run out for Pizza, and even then, who cares?
But, more importantly, freelance writers don’t have to be concerned with how to craft killer resumes. I never have. My work simply speaks for itself. If a potential client can’t find appropriate samples of my 15 years of work on my website, then maybe we weren’t meant to work together; and I’m not afraid to tell them so.
Most importantly, no one cares how old I am, what I look like or how I dress. They can’t even complain about how I smell. None of those things are important when you work for yourself. The only thing that IS important is the quality of your work and whether or not you can get the job done on time at affordable rates. That’s it. Period.
The job search process these days is a mess. I am so glad that I no longer have to participate in it. Furthermore, it’s only likely to get worse. For the first time in years, there are more job available jobs than there are people to fill them. If it’s this bad now, just wait until the next recession hits.
So, I’m gone. Vamoosed, skedaddled and out of here. The train has left the station and Elvis along with it!
