I have always complained about living in the good ol' 50's (that's why the movie "Midnight in Paris" was so unforgettable to me). One of the facts to make me feel this way is the difficulty to land a job nowadays. Our old men never struggled with finding employment back in those days. There was a common cycle going on back then: Finish the school, get a job, get married and have babies. Now, we are not only worrying about the expenses of getting married or having babies, but we also have a few months (if not years) struggle finding a job in this competitive market. Correspondingly, after having couple glasses of wine, I decided to write my very first blog about the difficulties of finding an employment in the 21st century.
My university life did not go as I expected. My parents sent me to the North America for me to possess a "wonderful" education. However, after seeing them struggle paying my "international" tuitions, I took a different path. I started working under table and looked into the ways to get a Green Card in the US. The description for the US always goes as "the land of opportunities" so a friend of mine and I decided to start a company. In a short way of explaining this, the company eventually closed. With couple bucks I made, I decided to go back to the university and wanted to get an Accounting degree so that I can stick out in this competitive market for the possible employers. That did not go that well either. Anyways, I finished my two years of schooling in one year with a GPA of 3.6 out of 4. Then, I started applying to the jobs with such ambition and passion. Pretty much every job I have applied to has asked me to create that online profile within their website, sometimes fill out a questionnaire and submit a resume. I have been doing this with careful adjustments and full attention to detail for almost four months. Out of 50 jobs I have applied to, I was able to get three interviews: one with a friend's referral, one with a craigslist ad and one that found me on Bayt.com.
Right now, I am pretty exhausted of filling out these application forms and submitting them to a computer system that will select only 7% of the applications. Do I have a choice of doing this in another way? No. All I have been doing is to spend at least 30 minutes of my time filling out one single application with detailed adjustments, submitting it to a computer program and getting an automated email saying "thank you for applying". That makes me wonder: has any human ever looked at my resume, my GPA, my qualifications? Or the 21st century's most popular tool, the Artificial Intelligence, decided that I was not a good fit for the position. Who knows???
They have said these systems pick out the keywords from your resume. I have every possible keywords in my resume that is related to my field of study. Then, they say to follow up with the employers. I have followed up 80% of the employers and whoever picked up the phone said "if you are considered for the position, you will be contacted!". At least, I am taking the initiative to call you. Why not taking couple minutes of your time to talk to me? After all, what are the recruiters for? I always thought they were supposed to look at each resume and talk to the candidates who call them. I guess their duties have changed from talking to the candidates to looking at their candidate-selecting computer systems.
Many of us fine individuals are struggling finding a job with this new system. We are desperately sitting and waiting for the computer to pick our resumes so we can be granted with an interview. Our parents never had to deal with these kinds of systems. My father is telling me to walk in the office and hand my resume, because that's what he always did. Then, some manager would come and then, he would have the chance to meet the manager and impress him/her at his first try. Forget about meeting the manager, many of us will never speak to a human being. All we get is another automated response saying that "although you had many wonderful and unique skills, we decided to pursue with other candidates who we think are better fit for our organization." After writing all this, I only wish one HR person or a recruiter will see this blog and tell me their side of story. If not, oh well! I have tried.
