Students are encouraged to beat the path to such job platform doors as LinkedIn, and they do, just like to other job marketplaces where companies post descriptive job openings to attract a larger candidate pool. At first glance, it looks very promising because a job seeker can easily set the criteria through filters to match his interests and area of expertise.
It feels convenient for a job hunter to send Resumes through the available shortcuts that such platforms offer, for example: Quick Apply, Easy Apply, or Express Apply. It saves a lot of time and is somewhat promising.
But then there are a lot of companies with matching job posts that require candidates to apply externally, in their own HR systems or adjacent enterprise-level systems such as ADP, Oracle, or PeopleSoft. In this application journey, candidates are sometimes asked to reply to questions that seem overly extensive and even unnecessary, such as the exact street address. ethnicity, disability status, date of birth, or social media profiles. Besides that, there are fields with additional questions where candidates must repeat what they already articulated in their Resumes, which plainly voids the purpose of the latter.
Because of how nationally accessible and easily discoverable these job postings are, candidates from every corner of the country can apply, meaning that recruiters and hiring managers must spend a lot of time selecting, filtering, interviewing, narrowing down, and then interviewing again the selected candidates. But even before the select pool of candidates reaches the sight of recruiters, ATS (Applicant Tracking System) uses algorithms to narrow this pool down. And because AI does not deal with ambiguities, proximities, or allegories, it only selects the ones whose applications or resumes have literal matchings to the job criteria, word by word. And on top of it, we've seen cases when the AI selection systems were trained on biased historical data, which deprives many deserving candidates of being noticed.
The analogy that comes to mind when I think about this Globalized and yet restrictive and inflexible selection process is the professional version of dating fatigue, where there is an illusion of plenty, and yet, nobody in particular who really matches you, regardless of how algorithmically compatible a candidate may seem.
Job hunting these days resembles gambling, where you put a lot of time and effort applying to countless jobs, to only receive a reply from a few employers, or even none. With such regular time drain, one may start thinking: is it even good advice to tell someone to keep pushing? Not to give up when you get rejected or unnoticed by tens and hundreds, and even thousands of employers on the global marketplaces? This just does not feel right. There must be an alternative, more realistic, and less time-draining approach. How did we interact with each other before the age of technocracy, and how did we find the right people to help us with something? By word of mouth.
Perhaps it is a good idea to stay local and practice authenticity with your network, expanding it gradually and slowly, without any mechanical or overly generic substitutions. But this is just a vague idea of how to make the job hunt more meaningful and precise, without the bitter aftertaste of time loss and meaninglessness.
