www.businessinsider.com: In the fall of 2020, I found myself in unfamiliar territory: I was looking for a new job. In theory, it was something I should have known a lot about as an economics reporter. But in practice, I was lost. Because I had stumbled into a great job right out of college, and stayed with that company for a decade, I was blissfully unaware of how soul-crushing it was to be a job seeker in 21st-century corporate America.
4 comments:
My general impression of the overall world of job searching is that it is a crapshoot. I feel that similarly to the world of college admissions, there are so many positions, applications, and applicants that it is nearly impossible to truly choose the best applicant. There are many good things about globalization that are present in our modern day, but it often means that people have too many options. My opinions have of course been shaped by my own experiences finding work, but so far in my life I have never been turned down for a job. I have asked for jobs in places that I am already involved with that are not fancy or popular. I think that the best place to be is one where you are in a very specialized, not very popular field in which you know everybody else in it. In that situation, you will ideally have people looking to hire you, rather than having to find a job.
I found this article extremely interesting. In the modern job market, there is such a massive amount of randomness involved. Like the article said, even random jobs can have incredibly large numbers of applicants, which means that it is very unlikely the people doing the hiring will give much thought to any individual application. I had no idea that services that allow AI to submit large amounts of job applications existed, but I guess I should not be surprised. With how much randomness is involved, it makes sense that an inhuman tool could have some success. I did find it a bit surprising that these sites were selling subscriptions for very high price points, but still had major bugs and the AI often messed things up. I hope that these bots don't gain popularity, because it would make what is already a bad situation much worse. It is much better in my opinion to get jobs based on personal links because it is very hard to know someone from just a resume.
I have heard so many harsh stories about the job market right now and how hard and frustrating it is to apply to multitudes of jobs only to hear back from practically none of them. And like this article said, there is such an influx of people applying for these entry level jobs, in the hundreds and thousands it feels like an impossible battle. I have heard of many companies now just using AI or bots to read resumes and cover letters and sift through the applications rather than have anyone actually look at them, which frustrates many people who then see that those same applications will have so many materials that you need to submit and personalize to the company. What I had not heard of before, but I am not surprised of their existence, are bots that mass reply to a bunch of job openings that are out there.
I've always found the Catch-22 of job searching very interesting. We are told at the same time to put individual effort into every single cover letter and resume however, especially as college students we are expected to apply to so many jobs that that level of precision for each and every application is not realistic. This is the first time I've heard about AI resume generators and Bots but I can definitely see why this technology would be tempting in this modern era of applying for jobs. from my personal experience and what I've heard from friends there's no good experience applying for jobs it's often tedious and many times you don't even get responses from the companies you apply to. As tempting as these AI Bots are they provide room for error and I personally would not trust them with my job applications especially in this industry at this time.
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