I’m unemployed, single, and it’s uncomfortably hot out. While my morning started off fine enough with a long walk and stop at the farmers’ market, I’ve been cranky for the past few hours. I don’t know if it would be better or worse to have a partner in these moments. On the one hand, they might help me snap out of it. On the other, tempers could be short and fuses could blow. Absent that, it’s up to me to figure it out. I sat down to look for jobs. I think that was the trigger.
While it doesn’t have to be awful, the job search process can be pretty bleh. There are a lot of similarities to be drawn between looking for work and looking for love (online dating). You can easily spend countless hours swiping profiles or searching job boards and in both cases walk away empty handed with no new prospects. You are often at the mercy of timing and luck in terms of when a new person or interesting position appears. You can do a whole lot of outreach and quite often will get no response. There is a lot more rejection than connection in both, and even when there is a connection, there’s an entire interview process to see if it’s a good fit. Of course, if things work out well, there is plenty to be excited about, and in both types of interviews, it’s helpful to be excited about that long-term prospect.
There is also a feeling of defeat after the search – or if not defeat, a sense of “what’s the point?” I spend very little time looking for love. I don’t know how much time I spend looking for work – probably not enough. There will be days when I don’t find a single job worth applying to. When that happens, I question a whole bunch of things about myself. Am I being too picky? Am I selling myself short? Am I looking in the right places? Shouldn’t I just do something? While I feel like I can answer yes or maybe to most of those questions, I also feel like I don’t know how to go about it any other way. It’s hard for me to be aware of my blinders. I use the same search terms because they seem like the best search terms, I use the same sites because they seem like the right sites, I look at the same types of jobs because they’re the types of jobs I feel I can be successful at. Yet I feel like maybe I’m doing it all wrong.
When I’m not questioning my approach, I tend to get frustrated at the search process itself. My two primary job boards are LinkedIn and Indeed. Both have ways to search, sort. and filter (by date, relevance, etc. etc.) But there are a few features that would really help. As just one example, I can include postings from a particular organization, but I can’t exclude in the same way. This becomes an issue when companies flood the job boards with positions. Recently, Susan G. Komen foundation posted what seemed like over 100 positions – all of them nonprofit executive director positions (one of my searches). They posted them in multiple markets. The result was page after page of their posts. What made it worse was that the jobs were only open to affiliate candidates. And so, because I can’t exclude the organization from my search, I simply have to click through the pages until they’re all gone and I get more relevant results. Catchafire and Taproot – two organizations that recruit volunteers for nonprofits do the same thing. It’s frustrating to do a search that returns 100 results, 97 of which are not relevant. It’s a minor inconvenience, and for a guy who has nothing but time on his hands, I probably shouldn’t complain. But, the added bit of tedium to an already unpleasant process sometimes makes the difference between searching and taking a nap.
I began this post because I sat down to search today and noticed a change on LinkedIn. Lately when I’ve gone to the “my network” tab, a page I use to see if there are new connections I should make, I’ve noticed that LinkedIn is pushing a lot of “celebrity” accounts. It used to show me recommended Penn State connections and recommended Memphis connections, but today, my suggested people are Tim Tebow and Ariana Huffington and Brigette Hyacinth (I don’t know who she is, but she has 3.2 million followers). I doubt any of those people are going to help me land a job or even notice if I followed them. The list went on… quite literally twenty or thirty rows of recommended profiles and pages and groups before I get to anyone I would remotely know. This does not feel like an algorithm that is working in my interest but instead one working to build out these already powerful influencer personal brands.
The net effect of all of this? It just makes me cranky. Or maybe I started out cranky and this just exacerbated the problem. Maybe I need to shake my fists at some clouds, yell at the kids on the lawn, or bitch about some ailments. I hopped on LinkedIn and Indeed with the intention of giving the job search the old college try. Yesterday I applied for a job that felt good and exciting – I was hoping for a similar experience today. Within an hour I was feeling frustrated, petty, and resentful. That’s when I feel I’m at my worst. I should probably just read or start some other project to help myself snap out of it.