Wednesday, August 30, 2023

Don't Expect Me To Do Your Work


If a company asks me to "Upload Your Resume", that's fine. What should happen once I do?

It should be read

By a knowledgeable person

Who should then contact me directly for any follow-up.

What's more likely to be seen from a job applicant is that the company website immediately follows that action with a homebrew autofill of garbled nonsense it scraped from the resume's PDF. They honestly expect applicants to fix every little piece that the company's shortcutting screwed up, which is absurd. Any such company should have its board of directors and top five levels of executive hierarchy summarily jailed. It's unethical, cop-out behavior that doesn't belong in anything resembling a mutually beneficial work environment.

One of the three largest foodservice companies on the planet.
Not a single clue how to run their own operation. 
Worse still are the ridiculous levels of specificity so many applications call for- as though such things matter when dealing with qualified, educated professionals.

Don't ask for specific dates of employ. Year is always enough.

Don't ask for previous employer/manager/etc. contact information. Do your own digging.

Don't ask for employer street addresses. We likely don't know them any more than you do. Again, do your own digging.

Don't ask for GPA. Most university graduates don't know that even while the proverbial ink on their diploma is still wet. Plus, having them memorized is, for most competent people, a red flag in regards to prioritization.

Don't ask for a cover letter. Part of the hiring process is to ensure someone is a good fit in terms of education, skills, and culture. Cover letters are just opportunities to offer clever lies and show how well a candidate proffers Customer Service Polite. If you have to fake sincerity just to get in the door, it just rewards unethical, duplicitous behavior.

Though none of this really comes as a surprise. For example, Microsoft owns LinkedIn- how many of you knew that? The modern internet they've sewn up for themselves and their contemporaries (because 'competitors' is assuredly a lie) is geared almost exclusively towards data mining and targeted advertising, neither of which are actually necessary for it to function, and cause a great deal more harm than good. Such a premise readily extrapolates to the smaller corporations that dream of competition, and results in hamfisted nonsense like what seems like every online job application.

Automating the job application process is a terrible thing. It creates artificial scarcity while reinforcing institutionalized poverty through passive denial of access, all in the name of saving money.

If you can't afford to find suitable candidates in a competent, thorough, and ethically sound manner, why are you in business at all?

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