Job Search Without Groveling

A lady wrote to me. "I've read some of your columns on job interviewing, where you give really unusual answers to the standard interview questions. I've read some other stuff of yours about resumes, where you tell people to use a human voice and avoid the black hole entirely."

"Yes, that is the sort of stuff I write for job-seekers," I replied. "Do you have a question about any of that?"

"As I was reading one of your articles, it hit me," she wrote, "that there must be an overarching principle tying all of your advice together. These aren't just isolated tips you're writing columns about; you've got a whole methodology for job-seekers."

"That's true," I wrote back. "I pretty much hate the standard job-search approach. It's grovel-ly, for one thing. It doesn't work - that's another problem. I don't endorse it. I advise job-seekers to forget almost everything they know about getting a new job."

"You mean, things like lobbing resumes into the black hole, and waiting forever to hear nothing?" wrote the lady. "That, and writing resumes that sound like robotic battle drones wrote them, and writing cover letters that say nothing about the actual role, and blather on about the goofy requirements in the job ad; and groveling at a job interview, or expecting anyone to, and lots of other stuff," I wrote. "So, give me the scoop -- lay it out," wrote my correspondent. "Okay," I said. "Here's the story." And here it is for you, also:

In my opinion, we teach a lot of nonsense to job-seekers. When I was a corporate HR VP for ten million years, I read reams of the droning, all-sound-alike resumes that job-seekers usually send to employers. Those things are horrible; you may have one, yourself. We know that the funny, warm, smart, live person called Us is nothing like the dull creature coming through the pages of our resume. I don't blame job-seekers for writing resume dreck like "Meets or exceeds expectations" or "Motivated self-starter."

Boilerplate, corporate-speak resumes are the worst, but almost everyone has had one (and most folks still have one, today). Who can blame a job-hunter for writing resumes in such a robotic voice? We've been trained to do that. In the standard resume, all the life is sucked off the page. We get "results-oriented professional" when we're actually dying to know what Sarah or Javier is like, and how his or her brain works. I say "dying to know" because I've spent enough hours with hiring managers to know that plenty of them who really, really know they have important business problems to solve also know that they need sharp and capable people to solve them.

Who the candidate is, at a more fundamental level than the degrees and certifications s/he holds or even what kinds of work experience s/he has, turns out to be the most important question. (Of course, it's the one topic the standard recruiting process treats as an afterthought, if it's considered in the process at all.)

Hiring managers and plenty of HR people know the system is as broken as Humpty Dumpty, but they don't know how to break out of the standard frame (writing endless lists of picky job requirements, context-free lists of tasks, no human spark or context for the role provided, nor a good reason why any halfway-sought-after job-seeker should bother to apply.)

Of course, even worse than the standard resume-writing format is the awful way we write job ads! Instead of opening the kimono an inch and writing "We have a terrific product, but our inventory control system is ripe for an overhaul; we're looking for a crazy-about-process and collaborative Inventory Control Manager to put that together and make it happen." We should be telling a story in our job ads -- a compelling human story that may get the smartest, best job candidates (the only kind of we want -- right?) to care about what we're up to. We do just the opposite. We write "The selected candidate will have skill X and certification Y, will speak Greek, have a taxidriver's license, and tap-dance." Why the heck are we talking to our own talent pool in the third person? Are we trying to drive talented candidates away from our doors, and directly toward our competitors? It sure sounds like it.

(Did I say the selected candidate will speak Greek? I meant Ancient Greek.)

When we've successfully insulted the talent community with our condescending, third-person job ads, we invite the talented people within reach to toss resumes or applications into a black hole career portal where a human being will never read what they've written. Why would we ever believe we could decide who's talented and who's not by asking "What was your supervisor's name at this job?" or "What were your tasks and duties?" Who the heck cares about tasks and duties? We should be asking job-seekers what they've accomplished, what they care about, how they feel about where they've been and where they're headed.

The interview part of the hiring process may be the most broken piece of all. Where we need free-ranging, easy-going, substantive conversation about business issues and their solutions, we use brainless, rote lists of questions instead. We ask job applicants inane questions like "What is your greatest weakness?" as though somehow plumbing the depths of our job-seekers' souls will help us decide whether or not to hire them. As though it were appropriate to ask a fellow adult human during a business conversation, "What are your failings?" As though people naturally come with failings and are defective. (That's our Puritan ancestry, peeking through the centuries.)

There's no doubt about it -- our recruiting process is about as broken as it can get. Employers are starting to feel the pinch in the talent department. One headhunter friend told me today that she's got twice as many openings as she has great candidates. The smarter employers are already starting to re-evaluate their last-millennium recruiting systems to see where they might be letting sensational candidates drift out of the process (or virtually beating them away with a stick, in some cases). If you're involved with the recruitment of new employees where you work, you may want to make a suggestion to your HR chief. Talented people won't beg for a chance at a job. Why on earth would anybody want them to?