The Modern Job Hunt: The Agony and the Ecstasy / Additional Agony

Overview

The Advertising Copy: Thanks to modern technology, finding suitable employment has never been easier or more efficient! Websites showcase jobs in a wide variety of industries and make it faster and easier to apply, get an interview and get hired!

The Reality: The modern job hunt, from browsing employment listings to the final interview, is specifically designed to frustrate, degrade and emotionally damage the prospective employee. If properly administered, the whole episode will leave one questioning their self-worth and intelligence. Job seekers will end up desperate and pliable, making it all the easier for the system to hurl them onto the gears of The Machine to be crushed and mangled on the way to record earnings for shareholders.

Using Job Websites

The Advertising Copy: With websites like Monster.com, Hot Jobs and Career Builder, you can post your resume, search employment listings by location, experience level and job type and get expert career advice!

The Reality: Searching for jobs on the Internet will make you wish for a bite from a highly venomous reptile, just so you can get a couple of days away from the computer while you recover. On paper, these search engines are a godsend. However, in reality they have more issues than Ashlee Simpson, Lindsey Lohan and the Olsen Twins combined.

The biggest problem is that, evidently, job hunters are pond scum and what they want is irrelevant. This manifests itself in a few different ways. One way is that when you specify a certain radius in miles for the site to search, it routinely ignores that and adds jobs from outside that area, even if you have not toggled the check box to include surrounding areas. Also, there are often listings for positions in other STATES included in your results as well. This defeats the purpose of having search criteria at all. Why doesn't the fucking site just issue you a job at random for Christ's sake!

Whats the reason for this seeming indifference to the needs of users? Users don't pay the bills. These sites get their income from the businesses posting the jobs. They need to get as many job listings up as possible in order to maximize their income. So, one shouldn't be surprised when the entry-level job listing you're reading actually requires a year or two of related experience. Sure it's misleading but as we previously learned, you don't fucking matter.

Of course, the listings are the heart of these sites but other services are offered as well, like resume writing. On Monster, a professionally written resume for a recent college graduate costs $165; one for a mid career/professional job seeker is $179. It costs more if you want multiple copies and/or multiple formats. The price for merely editing and sprucing up an existing resume starts at $119! Oh yeah, when I'm in between jobs I totally look to drop that kind of money on resume writing services. Damn, and to think I was gonna go to the library, get a book on resume writing and use MS Word resume templates. How silly of me! Monster guarantees your satisfaction but as far as I'm concerned, for that amount of money, the only way that's gonna happen is if they throw in a sloppy blowjob too.

Job Interviews

The Advertising Copy: Interviews allow an employer to get a feel for how good of a match an applicant is with the position they are seeking to fill.

The Reality: Interviews allow an employer to get a feel for how good a bullshitter an applicant is. Oh, sure, there has to be a basic level of competence and skills there, but really, an interview is about how good someone is on their knees, er, feet.

The process is rendered fairly pointless by the fact that usually there is a standard set of interview questions that are asked. So even if you don't have any particular talent for extemporizing (or sucking dick) if one can simply learn the questions and formulate responses ahead of time they should be fine. Appearance is also important, of course. You have to show up looking reasonably well-dressed and well groomed; this is common sense to most job hunters.

The heart of an interview is the Q & A. Success in this portion of an interview is simple. One must tell the interviewer what he or she wants to hear and be as self-aggrandizing as possible. Just make sure that the exaggerations are consistent with your resume. For instance, if an interviewer asks, Why do you think you'd be a good fit here at AmeriCorp? If an applicant says, In my last position at GloboTech I killed a bear by stabbing it through the eye with my penis, that is an excellent answer as long as it is on the applicant's resume. Some job-hunters are timid, concerned about their prospective employer calling their previous employer. Don't worry; hardly anyone actually checks references. It's time consuming and to be honest, HR has significantly more important projects to work on, like finding a legal loophole that would allow for the liquidation of the company's pension fund.

Many applicants feel a great deal of pressure in interviews, too nervous to be self-aggrandizing and unable to bullshit. This is not helped by the often agonizing and pointless open-ended questions that interviewers often ask. These questions can seem like there is no right answer. This is, however, excellent preparation for the actual work world, where bullshit and stupidity are ubiquitous and right answers are as unattainable as a promotion or a raise.