Oh, jeebus yeah. Anyone who hasn’t looked for work in a decade or two (retired folks, especially!) need to keep their advice to themselves. It’s rarely anything but laughably irrelevant, or downright condescending. Things have changed too much.
My sense is that back in the day, corporate jobs were easier to come by if you had the necessary degree (and maybe some luck and connections) and there was a lot more longevity. But the flip side was that it was a lot harder to change jobs and that you were kind of stuck. The company might transfer you across the country or you might end up in a dead end role until you receive a gold watch at the end of your career.
Exactly. My Greatest Generation parents are still telling me “People are always looking for smart employees.” If I rolled my eyes any harder, I could see Canada.
Smart employees aren’t valuable, because they aren’t drones who obey without questioning, and don’t fit into whatever box management and other employees expect them to.
“The hard part is just knowing when to reach-out to people and knowing what to say and how to say it.”
Good networking is the key, not just contacting everyone you’ve ever met, which seems to be the standard advice for job hunters. . And many introverts do it quite well because good networking isn’t about keeping a list of people who can do something for you, it’s about connecting with people you find interesting or enjoy working with, or you admire their skills, etc and then staying connected over time. Because you have to stay in touch even when you don’t need a job, which is hard to do unless you’re actually interested in the other person. It doesn’t need to be big or constant contact – A note on their birthday or just ‘thinking of you’, if you have a personal relationship, or, if it’s strictly a work relationship, referring others to them for expertise, sending an article they might like, a question you think they can answer – but it does need to be ongoing, i.e. an actual relationship. It’s hard to be inclined to help someone who isn’t interested in you until they need a job.
That’s a (the?) fundamental problem with employment in today’s white collar workplace. Gone are the days when companies would say… preferentially hire a 0-3 year experience young person, with the expectation that they’d train them in how to do their job and that they’d stick around for a while afterward.
Now it’s all plug and chug, especially if you’re in a more technical/transactional field. They expect you to hit the ground running and have the experience and skills to do that commensurate with the job they have hired you for.
It’s kind of shitty to be on either side of the table; plenty of times you see lots of resumes and interview people who are legitimately terrific and who would be great fits with your current workers, but they just don’t have QUITE the exact experience or enough of it to satisfy whatever requirement you got from on high. So you end up hiring the lesser candidate who checks all the boxes, even though they’re an asshole, weird, or just very narrow in their experience.
I guess what I’ve discovered is that companies always want someone “smarter”. And if you work in a market like New York or San Francisco, it tends to be inundated with smart people. Like there’s always someone who went to a better school, worked at a more prestigious company where maybe they were in their management training program, founded their own startup, whatever. Getting my MBA didn’t push me to the head of the line. In put me in a different line with MBAs from Wharton and Harvard Business School. A few years working at Deloitte out of business school in 2001 (a time when many of my classmates where having offers postponed or rescinded due to the dot/com crash and Arthur Andersen fiasco) then put me in a category where I need to compete with other Big-4, other big name consulting firm alumni, people looking to switch out of law or investment banking, etc.
And you know what? The “hire a bunch of smart people and we’ll find work for them to do” model didn’t work that well back then at Deloitte. Companies don’t want “smart people” IMHO (unless you are talking MIT PhD smart). They want people of reasonable intelligence who spent ten years becoming experts in whatever task they need them to do for the next six months.
This is true, but it’s also easier said than done, depending on what kind of work you do.
I kind of feel like there is an over-reliance on networking. For people a bit older than me (say over 50), even my generation, we learned to network before social media and LinkedIn. That meant people I actually know or have a real connection with. In other words, my real “network”.
The LinkedIn-driven networking they recommend now is really intelligence-driven “sales”. I’m contacting you because the information you posted about yourself indicates you might be in a position to help me and we have some tenuous connection through some distant professional or personal relationship.
You’re absolutely right. I knew the current version of ‘networking’ was different and you’ve explained it perfectly. The old-fashioned version was forging connections, the new version is salesmanship. And so different types of people will succeed at the new version. But I do wonder if the LinkedIn version of networking works as well, seems to me a lot like sending out 100 resumes in hopes of a few replies. But then I’m older and maybe just old-fashioned.
That’s been true for at least 10 years, maybe more. I’ve seen the education centers of a lot of big companies die as they don’t want to invest in employees.
But there are two types of managers - the type who want to hire people smarter than they are, and the type who want to hire people dumber than they are, since they are insecure. Maybe you ran into the latter type. I’ve worked for some of them, and also for the former type. They do much better in the long run, and are better bosses.
The first part is true. I know a headhunter who can’t stand that clients do exactly this. And no doubt fall further behind as they dither.
However I have two daughters and two sons-in-law, so I see the modern job hunting market quite well, thank you. And I hang out on the blog of an active headhunter.
I assure you that fuck ups are not a recent invention.
I’m not sure I can tell to be honest. I kind of feel like I spend most of my professional time on these highly complex, high profile projects for pretty senior leadership. Often without any prior expertise in the industry or functional area. And they usually go well. But then when I start looking for a job, somehow it feels either irrelevant to the hiring managers. So I can’t tell if it’s because it’s TOO complex and esoteric and the hiring manager doesn’t “get” it. Or if there is some higher level of complexity that maybe I don’t realize. Although I am pretty bright and I do tend to recognize when I don’t know what I don’t know.
Then again, I get hired for a lot of jobs I don’t know shit about beforehand.
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So I can’t tell if it’s because it’s TOO complex and esoteric and the hiring manager doesn’t “get” it.
It is this.
You clearly ‘pretty bright’. You do ‘get it’.
In my experience, sending out 100 resumes to positions you are qualified for should produce some results. Especially if you submit through personal contacts at the company and then follow up to HR and the hiring manager every couple of weeks. Although it can be difficult to determine who the HR rep or hiring manager actually is for a role at a very large company.
My career coach does seem to have taken exception to my upcoming interview. She’s like “did you apply the networking techniques we discussed?” I responded, “no, I didn’t have time. I just applied online and someone replied before I could reach out to anyone directly”. Like sorry, sometimes applying online actually works. Especially when you are applying for the exact same role you just did at a direct competitor.
the point is more that hiring managers act like they’re hiring you to work security at fort Knox when it’s just a mundane job full of mediocre workers. I’m. it sure when that happened.
a company will hire a smart employee then lay them off in a year. it happens all the time. being educated, good at your job, getting along well with others etc doesn’t really lead to long term opportunities for a lot of workers nowadays. companies hire for short term projects and then do layoffs. there is a core group of long term employees who are mostly older and established, and not necessarily the best workers, then an endless parade of younger workers who come and go in a lot of places.
Years after I graduated, I spoke to many college graduates who had good jobs starting out. In fact, they got jobs before they graduated. I didn’t have such luck, though, as my field didn’t offer that kind of service. Computer programming and many blue collar fields have this.
I applied to a resume writing service. I sent them my current resume. No reply. That bad, huh? I bought the recommended book from Amazon; I wish I had known about that earlier.
I got a job with the government. The hiring process was quite different. They brought me in three times and tested me each time, and I got impressive scores. Only one appointment was an actual interview (which I’m sure gave me the least marks). I was hired and I haven’t left since. The pension is so good I would never leave anyway, but another reason I won’t leave is I don’t believe I could ever find another decent job again. I feel like I lucked into this job. I had trouble even getting equivalent jobs at other government branches (they never called me in, so I couldn’t wow them with my scores), which I applied to before I became a permanent employee.
Where I work, there are many people who are good at their jobs who don’t want to be promoted. There are even several elderly employees who have no interest in retiring, with at least one complaining their employer is trying to shove them out and replace them with a younger employee. (His job is heavily computer-based, he is in his seventies, and he does it quickly and professionally.)
I don’t believe anyone can send out 100 resumes using personal contacts - because they’d get a job long before sending out the 100th resume. I was talking about spamming 100 resumes.
My son-in-law got a job through his LinkedIn profile. It definitely happens. It happens even more if you are highly qualified, like you clearly are. But for the person - like most people - whose resume is not going to stand out the personal touch increases the odds.
As someone that fits that profile, yes, you are right. It’s completely different these days and I really can’t relate.
Throughout my career, I worked for and handful of small businesses. We did business with other small businesses, mostly architectural and design firms and construction contractors. We met the people from the other companies our clients did business with. We all knew each other. For the most part, these companies were really small and didn’t have HR departments or employee handbooks or written policies or even firm job descriptions.
If the company I was working for decided that we needed someone, we’d just kind of let people know and someone we knew would decide to jump ship and come work for us, or maybe send a friend to us. If someone we knew and liked became available, we’d hire them and find something for them to do. We’d hire the children of clients for entry-level jobs. It was all fluid and we hardly ever needed to advertise job openings.
It was also a really political atmosphere with lots of alliances and backstabbing and rumors and gossip. There was no HR and no complaint or conflict resolution procedures and the company owners were all a little crazy. I did outside sales so I mostly just stayed away from my workplace as a survival mechanism.
When I read all these posts about HR and resumes and job qualifications and hiring procedures, Yep…different world
In my experience, too, the most desirable jobs usually get filled by internal candidates anyway, but there are a lot of motions to go through that waste everybody’s time.
Say I’ve got a nice Account Manager position open, and one of my Call Center guys, Bob, has been doing a great job and I want to promote him into this new role.
But HR says I have to interview at least five people, and three of them must be from outside the company. Fine, I’ll do that, then I’ll give the job to Bob, and the other four interviewees have no idea that they had zero chance of getting hired from the get-go.
I’m not even sure how one spams 100 resumes quickly. Even if you just cut and pasted the same resume, it still takes time to navigate each company’s career page. Every now and then I try it just to see if it works. I can’t get through more than a handful a day before I get tired and bored of it.
not just that but creating unrealistic job listing just to get an H1B visa hire is a thing. make a post asking for ten years experience with a technology that’s five years old and offer $11 an hour. after you can’t fill the job use in sourcing to fill it.