Searching For a Job is Broken, part 2

Musings of a hippie trying to learn to be a hunter.

You can read part one here — Searching For a Job is Broken, part 1

The whole process of looking for jobs has not changed in a while. People are looking for jobs, and employers cannot seem to find the talent they want and need.

Job seekers are sitting at home firing off application after application, and mostly waiting for some response. Employers are drowning in a tidal wave of inbound interest, which often has little differentiation between the hundreds of applicants.

The market has too much friction. There are people that want to add value who are operating at less than their potential output. There is value being left on the table. We need ways to get people to the place where they want to be to add the most value. Companies want the best they can find, and humans want to find a place that they add value, feel valued, and feel like they have a reason to wake up.

It does not appear to be working well for either side. I recognize this all because I am an outsider to this process.

I have never had a ‘real’ job in my adult life.

I have never applied for a job that turned into work. I either started something or organically found the next thing. I never looked, applied, got interviewed and got a ‘job’..for me, it all just ‘happened’. It has been happening for 25 years now, so I must be doing something right. I am well aware of how lucky I have been.

I am looking for the next opportunity, and part of this is also exploring the ‘job market’. I am finding the whole process weird and foreign. I am used to just showing up and talking and starting to work and some things turn into something and a bunch of things don’t and then suddenly I have a ‘job’ that just kind of appears to support whatever I was doing.

The whole ‘hunting for a job’ seems so formal and inefficient. It is like a weird high school dance version of dating before marriage. I feels almost like an Elizabethan courting ritual.— and it kind of works, but again, it is a little alien to me as it is actually a very new experience.

As a startup founder turned software company exec turned investor turned coach, I have a lot of skills. From a ‘what makes me tick’ perspective, I thrive when there is something new to tackle, a new initiative to undertake, and a whole new set of unknown problems to figure out.

I have skills, a willingness to dive in and do what needs to be done, and that my experience might be valuable to many potential employers (or so one would think).

I don’t check the boxes that someone that took a normal career path would check, and part of this is my fault as I did not make a list of all the things I have done and every business and sector has a slightly different take on every role.

Because I have worked with startups, I have become a high level generalist, doing whatever needed to be done to build a product or company, with enough skill in all the disciplines to get the job done, and to know who to hire when the time is right.

I don’t quite fit into neat little job descriptions that seem to constitute the majority of employers needs (or at least what is listed in job descriptions), which often seem to focus in my individual accomplishments and skills. My own ‘superpower’ is building and running awesome teams. It is a collection of soft skills that don’t translate well or as cleanly as having a microsoft certification or knowing a particular programming language or framework.

I know I have to sell myself to any organization. I am trying to figure out a good value proposition, but the customer discovery process is not easy. Again, it is very formal, and often has one matching a ‘checklist’ of skills.

Each opportunity exploration is an interaction with one company, that goes through the same steps of applying, getting vetted, having conversations, an offer (or not). All of that work and effort of mutual discovery gets lost. None of that effort seems to help either party if the decision is a not one that leads to a job.

Being on the ‘other side of the table’, I recently had the pleasure (actually it was not pleasurable, it sucked).. of having to wade through a couple of hundred inbound requests regarding a LinkedIn post I did trying to find some developers for a portfolio company.

I was thinking.. I am not going to read all these, let alone respond to them. I was just trying to source a developer, thinking someone in the local community might be looking and happen to see my post. (there were two, which did get forwarded along). I was not ready for a tidal wave.

I am not going to burden the CEO I am working with by forwarding all (hundreds) of these.

Man.. this sucks.. I just ghosted people. Probably good people willing to work and maybe a gem of a person waiting for their break, or someone who just had a kid, or.. well.. I was the nameless, faceless a-hole on the other end of the message who just did not bother to dig and see if there was something there. times one hundred. I tried to sort out the ones that might be worth responding to, but most (90%) made it clear that they did not even read the post I made. (note to people looking — if there are instructions, follow them. If I am vetting someone and they cannot follow instructions, it is not a good look.) I probably missed someone in there as I was glancing through the list.

And this was not a job posting that was promoted widely. It was just a linkedin post. Hundreds of responses. I can only imagine what an ‘official’ job post would result in.. thousands of responses?

They put effort in. I don’t have time to reciprocate. Crazy imbalance here. I did not feel good and it just feels like a lot of wasted time. It was also not lost on me that on the other end of the message chain was another human being — whose effort has now been reduced to a line in a spreadsheet that can be sorted alphabetically or by date of receipt.

This just seems clunky — and it pushes my buttons as I hate to see human effort wasted. It just feels like millions of people running into locked doors repeatedly until one opens — until they land a job. The whole ‘job hunting’ and ‘landing a job’ like you just fought a tuna for hours just has all the hallmarks of the past where life was pure struggle — the fight to survive has been transposed and a job has become a proxy for buffalo meat and whale blubber.

The process seems to me to be — ready for something new and better.. so much of it revolves around the idea of a ‘job’ where one person is allowed to work for another at the discretion of the person with money.. a one way arrangement. It is not the people, it is the model. It is time for a new one, that looks to match the hunter and the hunted, the fisherman and the fish and replace the battle with a more human (or possible more creepy and tinder like) search for mutual attraction and benefit.

I don’t (yet) have a solution, but I am experiencing the pain of the problem from both sides and I think there must be a better way.