Adventures in Job Hunting

Ok, so I just wanted to share a few things that I’ve picked up on my hunt so far. I could go into a post on each of them and maybe I will later but for now I’ll speak in summaries. Pretty much, this is about some of the problems that I’ve had over the last 8 months. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a perfect candidate for everyone and I’ve learned a LOT of new skills over the last few months, but it’s the overall process that I’ve found just broken.

So I started out easily enough with a resume, a LinkedIn account and pasted my info on job boards as I applied. As the holiday season slowed things down I re-evaluated my resume and had it re-done. Eventually things started to move as I learned some new tools and advanced my AI skills, but here’s what I found out about the process.

AI tools that recruiters use filter your resume and you are often quashed before you even get looked at. I read a post from a recruiter that applied for a handful of jobs to see what it was like for those hunting for a position, and she customized her fake resume to each position and was certain that she would get selected. What happened? She was auto-rejected by 4 out of 8 ASAP and then rejected 2 more times in a day after. This is what I’m fighting, all of us are.

Now, fast forward to today. I’m having a decent few weeks getting calls and bites from recruiters and interviews too! I spoke with one person that gave me the other side of the coin. He had an open job and got 120 resumes and they broke down like this: 117 were OUT OF STATE, 2 required visa help, the last 1 hadn’t worked in over 3 years. And each one was viewed manually. He told me that he’s stuck filtering out all of the garbage resumes that are tailored to each position with things that aren’t true about candidates - and the actual ones that are qualified are getting filtered out!

Meanwhile, the position he liked me for (which in say 8/10 ways was ideal) the company rejected me because a lack of experience in a tool I’ve been teaching myself for months and can get AI help anytime I need to: Power BI.‍ ‍

So I’ll share an image of a dashboard I made - in Power BI - that is totally interactive, with real Population Health data from all of New England that I made over the last few days. Pretty much this process is broken. AI is helping us all but it’s people that make it happen. We need to get a bit of reality back in this process.

Thanks for letting me vent!