Today I applied for three jobs, around our clients’ e-mails and the phone’s jangling and the staff’s worried questions. Two of them, I’m probably not qualified for (but nothing ventured, nothing gained). One, I could do with exceptional panache, but the language in the posting subtly suggests they have in mind a twenty-something, or at worst a crotchety old thirty-something.
And therein lies the most discouraging element of my post-layoff prospects: age discrimination. There’s not a snowball’s chance in Hell that anyone is going to hire a soon-to-be 64-year-old woman. The sense that I’ve got to keep trying anyway, even though I don’t have even the remotest shot at getting hired, is agonizingly frustrating. To say the least.
And here’s an even more elegant frustration: technology that wastes my time and ultimately wastes the employer’s time.
All three prospective employers asked that applicants first upload a résuméand then retype almost every line of the résuméinto online forms, often in a format that makes it difficult or impossible to copy and paste.
What is the point? If you’ve already got the whole résumé, why have the applicant keyboard all the information in again, line by freaking line? What a crushing time-waster! It took a good three hours to perform what should have been three 30-second tasks.
And imagine the time wasted on the other end! Someone has to plow through all those dreary, redundant lines. Probably more than one someone: at most colleges and universities, search committees have at least three people, and often an admin assistant runs interference by reading and screening applications first.
So what we have here is a procedure that unnecessarily wastes at least five people’s time!
Other than limiting the number of job applications any one supplicant can send out in a day, what, really, is the point? And how does this permutation of technology make our lives better?
Oooh this gets my goat. As well as those online applications that don’t tell you they won’t be allowing you to send in the cover letter you’d painstakingly composed, or those apps that cork up the entire uploaded/transported document. *shudder* After dozens of these apps, it’s gone beyond funny.