Is This Brutal Job Market Even Worth It?
A 12-year veteran of technology marketing, and what do I have to show for it? A pink slip and an eau de cash scent on my resume that instinctively makes HR cost-cutters reach for their holster where they keep their “OVER QUALIFIED” ink stamp. Let’s face it, if you’re the Rolex among your breed of professionals, they may want you, but in this recession they’re just not buying like they used to.
Forget the 64-piece toolkit, what employers are looking for are individual screwdrivers, hammers, and chisels, AND they want them at a bargain basement discount! Do you remember that Brady Bunch episode of Johnny Bravo? Greg Brady got a singing gig just because he “fit the suit”. Forget about his true singing and guitar talents. The producers wanted one special quality he possessed, the way he fit in his predecessor’s stage costume, and dubbed over all the rest.
Employers have become increasingly quicker to judge. They don’t know you or your special talents, and frankly, they don’t care as much any more about how diverse your background is. How do they know, maybe you just want a job, and are weary of looking because it’s expensive to not be working, and there are bills to pay, and cool things to do. In my case, how does having high qualifications mean that I’ll run out on a job the first chance I get. They don’t know that I’m an expert at making lemonade from any situation. It’s rather presumptuous of employers to assume that one wants to earn a certain amount of money to be happy. They don’t know the loyal person I am, the work ethic I have, the number of companies I’ve helped become successful, or the millionaires I’ve helped create through successful acquisitions of tech companies. Let’s face it, if you’re the Swiss Army knife, forget it. You’re better off being the wooden toothpick at the Chinese food checkout counter at the time when it’s needed the most. Cheap, single-purpose, and abundant. That’s what’s selling like hot cakes out there. You have to be a specialist. Jack (or Jill)-of-all-trades doesn’t mean jack any more.
So, what’s the big deal, why not just target your search? If you’re asking, then you must be currently employed. However, if you’re reading this, subconsciously you’re also probably constantly wondering for how long you’ll have this job. Maybe there’s already tons of writing on the wall, and you’re looking for a bailout plan, or maybe even just some kind of safety net. My words of advice for the weak of heart or stomach: take care of your job.
Whatever your motivations are at the moment, one thing for sure is that now it’s no fun to be out there looking. I have my own shortlist of things that annoy me about the current job market. I say annoy and not appall because I’m not out there looking myself. I’ve got a formula for financial freedom, so I don’t need to work for others the way I used to. However, if I look at it from a traditional job seeker’s perspective, there are many firsthand experiences that concern me about the job market, and the challenge it represents to anyone who seeks to attain financial freedom.
Er, I’m old enough to be your daddy
As you get older and more experienced in your field, the best gigs you’ll ever land will be from people senior to you who see you as bringing in fresh blood into a company. The job market out there in my tech marketing field of work is filled with tons of young college grads who actually took courses in things that I learned from the school of hard knocks. Heck, when I was going through my business program, I was featured in the campus newspaper for starting a controversial student club that was using “university resources for commercial purposes”. What I was actually doing was rallying a bunch of tech companies to donate hardware and software, so students who wanted to get into Web development could actually get their hands on some cutting edge stuff because the school wasn’t going to provide it any time soon enough. Yeah, there were maybe a few sponsors who got something out of it, but not in massive excess of what they put in. I wouldn’t doubt it if they now have a Twitter 101 course in the course catalog at San Francisco State University where I studied. The tech marketing field being the musical chairs game that it is, is now filled with those young college grads who sooner or later end up looking at your resume. It’s not unlike Neil Armstrong coming back from a 5 day trip to the moon and finding a new college grad sitting in the latest and greatest version of NASA’s space flight simulator. Step aside, Neil.
Wait, don’t move! There’s a huge chip on your shoulder!
OMG, the attitude of some recruiters. I can remember the days when I used to get headhunted out of my comfy post at whichever company I was at. Those were the good old days. Now, one minute you can get a courteous, but hurried, call from a starving recruiter who thinks he can earn a buck off you (if not from the other 75 candidates he’s juggling for that same job requisition), and the next minute he doesn’t know you, doesn’t remember, or disappears all together. It’s so common nowadays that the job your recruiter was so hot on the trail about was closed by a competing starving recruiter, or that it simply got pulled or postponed by the employer. Don’t even get me started on the rescinded offers, drab interviews that cut off at the sound of the lunch crowd marching out of the building, or the neglect to provide status on positions when asked for it. Those courtesies are just no longer there anymore. Oh, and did I mention to forget about that nice printed letter or postcard arriving in the mail from the HR department stating that they’re glad you applied for their job opening, and here is the status. Now, the most you can expect is an email auto-responder, unless of course they’re ready to interview you. Then they’ll call you, but that’s only for a phone screen, because they’ve got so many other candidates to go through. Pray you’re not the first person they called because if you are, statistics show you are 97% guaranteed to not get the job.
Isn’t there some technology to deal with all this technology?
Crisis or not, there are a ton of jobs out there, but also guess what? There are 24.7 million unemployed or underemployed Americans out there vying for those same jobs. What’s more, the U.S. isn’t the only country in a recession. Who knows what sort of traffic those same job sites you go to are getting from foreign nationals hoping to escape their lousy situation with an American-sponsored H1B work visa. What all this translates to is a huge feeding frenzy within a relatively small pool of jobs. Many of those positions being advertised are for newly formed departments that displaced the previous occupants of a ground-zero product group that was ousted, so the close cycle to land that new gig can take much longer, or the job can simply get pulled or evolve into another job requisition, and then you’re likely out of the picture. Out with the old, in with the new. Companies are reinventing themselves as they go, and the smarter ones are out there shopping for specialized components to get a specific job done as they navigate their respective increasingly competitive landscape. There’s no splurging on the phone/fax/scanner appliance. They want e-fax.com accounts that do one thing, and do it cheap.
To get a job in this economic climate, you have to be better than the next person at playing the law-of-averages, while keeping the quality of your applications high. That means that you have to be better at sending out more resumes than you’re used to sending, to a factor of 5, and getting very narrowly focused in your communications. No more one-size-fits-all resumes or cover letters. The saying used to go: if you can’t bedazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with B.S. Those days are gone. Your job hunting tools need to be sharper than ever, or you’re guaranteed to go into the round file, under “S”.
As if this wasn’t enough, now you have all those awful job forms to fill out. Uh, hello, can somebody explain to me why there isn’t a universal standard for handing off resumes from one entity to another. Why at the pinnacle of technology, and during an unprecedented economic crisis, do we find ourselves dealing with this type of technological inadequacy? I mean, come on, how useful is it for companies to keep your resume on file if they don’t hire you the first time around? Nevertheless, every large company out there feels that it’s a necessity to have its own database of applicants, and the disparate technologies they use to collect the data doesn’t speak to the job boards; leaving all the manual, repetitive data entry work to an already overburdened job seeker. You have to draw the line somewhere. Personally, if somebody ever asks me to fill out a job application at a job interview, I refuse to do it. When online, I simply click away.
With all of the hoops you have to jump through now just to land a phone interview, I’m surprised people are still willing to work so hard at attaining such mediocre rewards. After all that effort, you get to be back at a desk, with a whole hour for lunch! Woo hoo! I can be dismissive about this topic because I’m actually an authority on the subject. I’ve been working since I was 12, and I’ve always managed to hustle my way from one good opportunity to another. I was raised by hardworking parents, so I learned how to put skin in the game. Later in my career, all this hopping around from job to job was like my badge of honor. I was a free spirit at the top of my game, skilled within my niche because I could move from one job to the other with grace and minimal effort. Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.
Once I hit the compensation ceiling within my marketing field of work, I must admit I got a bit reckless. After all, what is success for, right? My entertainment habits became more exquisite, and it was starting to draw negative attention among my peers. I was the only employee traveling to Europe from San Francisco for a long weekend EVERY MONTH. I was the only one giving away 25-year old bottles of imported Moldovan red wine around the office. Soon, I found myself in a bit of a social bubble. I started to “sneak off” on monthly trips, so nobody would make an issue of how I was able to do that, etc. You know how office rumors work. I went through the Frankfurt airport so often that soon I was getting hello hugs from the wait staff in the airport lounges. My specific tastes for the good life were also quickly starting to alienate me from my local buddies (as opposed to those buddies I visited when I traveled), and I found myself doing things like abandoning pub crawls after 5 minutes if it looked like a low-class affair. Hey, I’ll be hitting 40 soon, you have to get picky, right?
I wanted to have the good life, and I wanted to bring my friends along, but not if they were only going to be squandering my time and not contributing anything that would lead to either their or my success. Wanting a higher class of life meant also being around people who were of like mind. The best friends I’ve ever had have been those who are open about their dreams, hopes, and aspirations. The interesting thing was that at the center of most of these discussions with these good friends was the topic of the dead end jobs we were all at. What does it matter if you’re netting six figures a year if you need much more than that to do what you really want to do in life? What good does earning that kind of annual base do, if you’re afraid to take off for a long weekend each month to enjoy it because when you come back you might find a pimply recent college grad sitting at your desk. Everyone has a different standard for what makes them happy. I won’t insult you by saying you can make X amount of dollars from my system, just because I know X is a believable number to you. I don’t know you, nor what you’re capable of. I know what I’m capable of, and I know what I’m willing to exchange for the effort that I put into things. I’ll tell you one thing: I’ll never go back to work the way I used to.
At the end of the day, don’t you ask yourself if this brutal job market is worth all the trouble and effort you put into landing a new gig? What I do now nets me a significantly higher return on the effort I put in, that doing anything else now is inconceivable. The bottom line is there’s a much simpler way to make a buck, and it’s not necessary to put oneself through the agony of surviving the local job market. Just side-step it.
When I consider my marketing career outlook and financial future, I’m actually welcoming turning 40 this year.