Adam's Gripe of the Day (or Why Seeking Employment is a Full-Time Job):
So I spent several hours today calling a few places to get a name and address of who I should mail copies of my resume to. I was reminded of why I didn't go to the last Career Fair at Tech. I received the same response from every place I called: "Oh, you can just submit that info online." Which initially seems like a great idea because I can do it on my own time and don't have to interact with anyone, right? Wrong. Every employer has a different system for how they want you to enter your information. Very few of them will accept the nicely-formatted PDF version of your resume you went to all that trouble over. So after spending an hour inputting my data to NSA (what a horrible system they have where you have to look up codes for everything..) I decided to attack Lockheed. Halfway through, their server encounter "internal server errors." Oh well. Now, what really bugs me is that all this data entry used to be someone's job. Thanks to the miracle of the internet and the PC revolution, companies can keep thousands (millions?) of resumes on hand without taking up valuable floorspace. But they all want the information in a certain format so it's easy to search. This used to be someone's job. When a company received resumes, this person entered the data into a computer. To cut costs, they fired these people, hired a CS major to write a simple little data gathering program and stuck it on their website. Now entering all this info is MY job instead. Which is basically fine, except that every company wants it done a different, more complicated way. And in addition to all this hassle, submitting a bunch of 1's and 0's is never going to get me a job. All this data sitting on a server somewhere with millions of other people's data isn't getting anyone hired. To get a job under this system, you need to have a contact in the company who will take your nicely formatted piece of paper and show it to his/her boss who will say, "hire him," and then pass your resume on to HR for processing. All this internet bullshit is just a waste of time. Which brings me back to the beginning - why I was calling places in the first place. *sigh* And it's only Day 1 of my summer of job searching. I'm not discouraged yet, just annoyed.
So I spent several hours today calling a few places to get a name and address of who I should mail copies of my resume to. I was reminded of why I didn't go to the last Career Fair at Tech. I received the same response from every place I called: "Oh, you can just submit that info online." Which initially seems like a great idea because I can do it on my own time and don't have to interact with anyone, right? Wrong. Every employer has a different system for how they want you to enter your information. Very few of them will accept the nicely-formatted PDF version of your resume you went to all that trouble over. So after spending an hour inputting my data to NSA (what a horrible system they have where you have to look up codes for everything..) I decided to attack Lockheed. Halfway through, their server encounter "internal server errors." Oh well. Now, what really bugs me is that all this data entry used to be someone's job. Thanks to the miracle of the internet and the PC revolution, companies can keep thousands (millions?) of resumes on hand without taking up valuable floorspace. But they all want the information in a certain format so it's easy to search. This used to be someone's job. When a company received resumes, this person entered the data into a computer. To cut costs, they fired these people, hired a CS major to write a simple little data gathering program and stuck it on their website. Now entering all this info is MY job instead. Which is basically fine, except that every company wants it done a different, more complicated way. And in addition to all this hassle, submitting a bunch of 1's and 0's is never going to get me a job. All this data sitting on a server somewhere with millions of other people's data isn't getting anyone hired. To get a job under this system, you need to have a contact in the company who will take your nicely formatted piece of paper and show it to his/her boss who will say, "hire him," and then pass your resume on to HR for processing. All this internet bullshit is just a waste of time. Which brings me back to the beginning - why I was calling places in the first place. *sigh* And it's only Day 1 of my summer of job searching. I'm not discouraged yet, just annoyed.
