See ME! Dammit!

In my long and mostly fruitless job search one thing became abundantly clear. The internet is not the job-seekers friend.

Dice, Monster, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and the myriad other sites serve only to give false hope, waste the job seeker’s time, mask real opportunities, and further isolate people seeking positions from companies with actual positions available.
“Now Hiring” signs don’t mean “We’re Hiring here at this location.”
“Now Hiring” means, “Go to our website, fill out an application and maybe we’ll get back to you… Probably not though.”
But there’s something else I’ve recently been considering;
The Frustration!

In times past, you could fill out an application at a particular location, and then check back with the same location via telephone to find out if you were likely to be called in for an interview.
Now you check back on a website, but what you get is something like “Under Review”, then you check with the website a few days later and the status is “Closed”.
Okay, fine, but couldn’t you have just sent an email rather than forcing us to log back into your system, and navigate through surveys about our satisfaction with the application process?

For God’s sake, most company’s SPAM us with truly useless shit all the time. Surely, a form email telling an applicant that the position has been filled, isn’t too much to ask.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat.
After 4 or 5 hours of that fruitless grind, plus filling out endless applications and personality surveys, (85 pages of questions in one case.) It becomes soul crushing.
As the unpaid bills mount up, you’re wondering when you’re going to lose your home, and while yet another “Placement Agent” blows smoke up your skirt… Well, you might tend toward getting well and truly;
PISSED OFF!

As I’ve expressed before, the internet is a way to isolate us rather than unite us.
The internet allows corporations to ignore their customers while maintaining the illusion of being helpful.
“Your call is important to us, Please hold for the next available incomprehensible offshore representative. Most of your questions can be answered online by visiting www.wedontgiveadamn.com”
The Walled Gardens of corporate hiring processes allow CEOs speaking before congress to make the case, “There aren’t enough qualified workers.”

The suits speaking in front of Congress have stats to back up that claim. They in fact, aren’t lying when they say they need more H1B1 visas. The data holds up, because the information they have, is generated by their HR department, and their HR department has such narrow focus, that no out of work American workers are even considered.
After all, very few American workers seeking positions are recent graduates of Bangalore Technical University! But there are plenty of H1B1 Visa applicants who are.

It’s safer and easier for an employee to pass something up the chain of command than to make a “wrong” decision about anything.

Hiring decisions are no longer at a manager level where the Manager of a department can say, “This person is qualified enough. What they don’t know, they’ll pick up in a week or so, and the PERSON, the human being, would fit nicely in our corporate culture, and my department.”
Instead a manager must sit, or more often a designee sits in a committee and the group decides who gets hired, much like the decision about who gets to be prom queen.

The frustration and anger simmering in America today is not, as South Park says, “They Took R jobs!”
It’s “We never got the opportunity to even be considered by anything other than a computer system or some Orwellian group think.”
We’ve taken the humanity out of employment, and business, which simply feeds the cycle of frustration and anger.
We need to start dealing with each other as people again.
Facebook friends are not actual friends, if you’ve never met them in person. Twitter friends are nothing more than names.
If you’ve never met the people behind the screen do their opinions really matter?