Seeing the job market from the other side

I was getting annoyed and disheartened about applying to dozens of jobs over at ny.craigslist.com, taking about an hour to write the cover letter for each one, and then never getting so much as a courtesy email from anyone.

Then my roommate posted a position there and got 150 resumes in 24 hours.

So now I know why nobody ever writes me back.

Mike Schiraldi
Wednesday, June 25, 2003

geeze. that's disheartening.

www.MarkTAW.com
Wednesday, June 25, 2003

I did recruitment selection for a firm some 5 years ago, and even then, when everyone seemed to be getting hired, resumes came in by the hundreds per day. The reason, of course, isn't the job market, but rather the fact that the software market is one of the few markets where even the gainfully employed still spam out their resume endlessly (even when they're in positions that they're happy with). Couple that with the fact that unqualified dreamers spam their resume to every job that they see hoping that they'll apparently win the job lottery, and by some stroke of luck they'll just pull it out of the pile and hire them.

The sad thing isn't the number of resumes, it's the knowledge that in all of that noise the real gems will often get overlooked (out of sheer necessity the pruning process can become arbitrary things like typeface).

Jimmy Chonga
Friday, June 27, 2003

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