I once sent ONLY a cover letter. I was semi-retired, seeking a part time position. I sent a one-sentence summary of my career highlights, and said I would phone next week for an appointment, to which I’d bring along a detailed resume’ and samples of my work. I got the job.
Yeah, a lot of people think the way you get a job is to go and formally apply and then wait for a response. Then they get frustrated when an overloaded system isn’t working for them. But it kind of speaks to my point. If everyone is trying to backdoor the system because it’s not working, that’s not a system. That’s just random chaos.
I remember my first real job out of college 25 years ago. After months of typing up resumes and cover letters and snail-mailing them out (this was before Monster, Indeed, LinkedIn and all that) with little to no success, I ended up picking up the Yellow Pages and dialing every civil engineering firm within a 1 hour drive of my parents house. Ended up working for one 5 minutes away in my home town who happened to be a owned by a college fraternity brother of mine (I didn’t know him as he was 10 years older).
It’s kind of not that different today, except with LinkedIn, everyone and their brother can now find anyone and hound them for jobs, sales opportunities, donations, whatever. So now no one benefits.
I think there is a difference between “easy / hard” as in certain jobs are highly competitive or require significant training and skills and “easy / hard” as the system is incomprehensible and arbitrary.
Or maybe, it’s more accurate to say that it is exceedingly difficult to match individuals with specific jobs because often the requirements are so specific and companies are run so lean that there is little room to train someone into a new role.
Like my first job out of business school was “hard” to get because, like many jobs, it was a competitive field in a competitive market and required advanced degrees and skills.
Once you have the necessary skills, experience and qualifications, I don’t think it should be that hard to match those people and jobs.
“there”. Come on dude. You’re never going to get hired if you put mistakes like that on your resume.
And yet I never seem to meet a poor lawyer.
Probably that is because they likely are not presenting themselves as lawyers but instead as what ever pays-my-student-loans-and-rent non-law job they have been able to find after graduating from law school. There are far fewer lawyer openings than law graduates, lots more. Law schools should not accept or graduate more law students than there are genuine potential openings. Of course, that isn’t going to happen, too much revenue in fees and tuition.
https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-Lawyer-Salary-by-State
Those lawyer salaries look at or above the national average.
Of course law schools aren’t going to “not accept or graduate more law students than there are genuine potential openings”. That’s ridiculous. First of all, they would have no way of knowing that. Second, it’s not a fixed thing anyway. And finally, anyone capable of graduating law school is capable of assessing their job prospects and interest level and deciding how much they want to risk it.
There are companies like Purple Squirrel whose sole purpose is to take your money and introduce you to contacts at companies you like - contacts who have the reach and probably even decision authority in hiring. I have not personally used PS - never had to - but if you are desperate and willing to spend some money, it might be worth a try. You should of course research the target company thoroughly before you open up your wallet.
If your resume is good, targeted marketing of yourself in this way might just work out for you.
It’s a scam. Or at best it’s just another 3rd party recruiting agency marketing themselves as doing something different from any other recruiting firm (except YOU have to pay). I am more than capable of reaching out to my network at any number of top tier companies or identifying potential hiring managers through LinkedIn and positioning myself. Whether or not my resume makes me an ideal fit for a particular role (i.e. a “purple squirrel”) is not going to change.
No one is going to do your job search for you.
I had two interviews yesterday:
Company 1: An engagement manager role at a big data / AI company that was a direct competitor of my last company. I had applied online and they had responded a few days later. So for that particular case, the system worked where I was an experienced candidate applying for the exact same job I was doing before.
Company 2: A growing startup founded by the former CIO of a Fortune 500 company who was a client of mine about 5 years ago. Coincidentally, their recruiter had also reached out to my former boss who thought I would be a great fit and introduced us. Independently of that, the job placement agency I’ve been working with had also recommended the role through their “hand* picked opportunities”. The recruiter I spoke with also happens to be from the same college as me.
These are both great opportunities and all. Of course I still have many rounds to go through and I assume other people in competition for the role. But it’s also a bit disappointing that to land these interviews I need to be either an exact fit or have an orgy of connections to the company already. Because there aren’t an endless number of companies like that. And what if I want to do something different altogether?
- “hand” being whatever algorithms they use to search on job title and location.
C’mon. Somebody had to type in the search string and click on the results, by hand.
I assume some bot just pulls it out of my resume.
The important thing is, two interviews and you only need one job. Gotta like those odds.
Good Job! Both sound pretty good!
But honestly, I’m glad I have a civil service job where I can coast to retirement and pension in about 8 years.
National average for what? Early-mid career IT folks with BS degrees? 75k is certainly not what people think of when they think of “lawyer money”. Most people think of lawyers as commanding the sort of salary that a partner at a small firm, or a senior associate at a large, prestigious firm has. But most lawyers aren’t partners, and don’t work for large firms- they’re self-employed, work for the government, or are associates in smaller firms that don’t pay super well. And with the exception of the government and self-employed, the rest all come with heavy billing requirements (> 2000 hours a year billable). So you literally have to bill for a full work-year’s worth of hours (or more), and still do stuff like go to team building exercises, the doctor, kid stuff, etc… none of which is billable. And for 75k.
Seems damned awful to me- a LOT of work, and pay that’s not commensurate with that amount of work. I mean, if they’re being paid 200k to do all that then I don’t feel too sorry for them. But 75k? That sucks badly.
National average for “jobs”. I’m sure most aspiring attorneys figure this stuff out before going to law school.
I mean it’s the same thing for “IT folks”. Not everyone goes into IT and gets a job at Facebook or Google making $300k a year.
Back in 2001, people in business school were having their six figure offers delayed or rescinded because the economy was starting to tank. I was excited that mine was only delayed until the end of the summer. Just to make sure I could start in time to have the World Trade Center fall on my office.
I agree with you though. It all seems like an awful lot of “work” for not that much payoff for a job that can disappear overnight.
I don’t like those odds at all. I know for a fact that they are looking at 4 other candidates for one of the jobs. And the other job still has round of behavioral interviews, take home tests, etc.
I’m sure they do, and I’m also sure that most aspiring attorneys are the super-competitive types who assume “it won’t happen to me”, and figure they’ll be the ones working for the big prestigious firm, pulling in 300k (or more) as an associate. Then they’re surprised when they’re an assistant DA making 60k a year, or billing 2000+ hours for a small/mid sized firm and only making 75-80k.
I was just trying to paint a silver lining.
Take home test?! Fuck that noise.
Yeah, well I was surprised after getting my MBA that I would be eking out a six figure living jumping from shit job to shit job across various big name consulting firms, tech unicorns, and Fortune 500 financial services firms because of various economic, environmental, and political catastrophes, not to mention half the places I worked appeared to be run by incompetent morons. But hey. Shit happens.
You pick a career based on your interests, abilities, and financial opportunities and you make the best of it.
Yeah, we’ll see. I mean I don’t care. I’ve been through all kinds of interviewing nonsense - case interviews, take home tech tests, whiteboarding, I even had one interview for IBM’s Strategy Consulting group where they grouped all the candidates into teams and made us deliver a group project. I’m pretty good at most of that shit.
I’m just kind of pissed because I had to do this 18 months ago. After a frustrating job search, I ended up in a job that actually turned out to be kind of awesome for me and then it all got fucked by COVID-19.
I think that’s what’s kind of frustrating about the whole job search process. Going from working with CxOs and executives and incredibly smart technical people to dealing with and being judged by these “professional HR” types and “career coaches” who are dumb as shit.
I think the thing with lawyers is they never know when some big fat case will fall in there lap. . Take out in California with the billion dollar judgement against big tobacco. If lawyers take their 33-44% commission that’s HUGE.
But frankly I know lawyers that are barely getting by and doing work that should be done by paralegals just to get their foot in the door. Also when you hit 50 you are out the door.
That’s interesting- between my e-discovery/forensic data mining stint (at A&M, FWIW) and my prior and subsequent careers, I’m pretty much amazed that most companies actually function at all.
The lack of understanding of what their companies actually DO, and what they’re paid for by upper management is kind of astounding and depressing. I mean, at my last employer the sole actual deliverable was a report that told how we met various metrics and how we saved them money versus letting those employees go to their regular doctors using insurance. It literally took the execs at the company six years to catch a damn clue and realize this and quit focusing on operational nonsense that would have probably handled itself, and that the clients never actually saw, one way or the other.
I’ve been reading the book ‘Bullshit Jobs’ by David Graeber. It’s a kind of depressing take on the modern workforce, but a lot of it seems to ring true. As a consultant, I don’t know who has the bigger “bullshit” job. Me or the senior management at the companies who hire firms like the ones I work. Probably both as most of the time it’s not work that’s critical to the company, let alone society.
Certainly getting paid six figures to collect email for corporate attorneys qualifies IMHO. Although I managed to take it a step further and land a job advising the legal department for a Fortune 500 company on the “strategy” for collecting emails. At that point I no longer had to “do” it.
Although feeling like most corporate jobs are overpaid bullshit kind of makes it tough looking for a job at this particular point in my career.
Well, there are overpaid bullshit jobs, and then there are overpaid bullshit jobs. I mean, I’m a business analyst, which in theory, is definitely an overpaid bullshit job. In a lot of ways, my job sounds a lot like that guy in “Office Space” who takes the specs from the customers to the engineers.
But the thing is, there can be real skill involved, and there are definitely different ways that you can be successful at the job. Some people (most?) lean into the jr. project manager side of the job- that requires motivation, attention to detail and people skills. Some people lean more into the actual requirements gathering and customer-facing side of the job- figuring out exactly what the customers want, why they want it, and how they actually want it to work. This requires a fundamentally different set of skills than being a jr. project manager, and is IMO, where the real adults vs. kids divide is in the career. Anyone can run down a list of to-dos and outstanding stuff for a project manager, but it takes some real skill to be able to engage with the customer on their own ground and figure out what they’re actually asking for/what problem they’re really trying to solve, and how they want it solved. And if need be, gently guiding them to something feasible or realistic. It’s all too easy to just document what they have to say in detail, without actually making THEM think about what they’re asking for and what consequences that may have for their organization.
So at its best, it’s worth all the money you pay. But in my experience, maybe 1 in 5 people with that job title can actually do that- the other 4 are just non-technical IT generalists who do a valuable job being the lubricant that keeps everything running, but who aren’t actually doing technical work or skilled non-technical stuff.
I imagine most jobs are like that- there’s a kernel of real work there that the good ones can do, and do well, but there’s a lot of accreted bullshit that makes the job as a whole look like nonsense, because that’s what the not-good ones concentrate on.