— Archive for the ‘History of Job Search’ Category —

• History of Job Search, Job-seekers in 2010

  Before we get to the topic of the state of job-seeking and job-seekers in 2010, we should address the one truth that anybody in HR, recruiting, or the job search will tell you: job-seekers generate too many applications for jobs, frequently applying for jobs outside their expertise, geography, and qualifications. Every single recruiter focus group I’ve been in over the past seven years has made it clear that the 21st century model generates far too much “noise” to “signal”, and that fact is having a deleterious impact on all involved. Job boards Now the problem is not strictly a job-seeker problem. The rise of internet job boards has contributed mightily. The absence of friction in the 21st century job search — by which I mean the time and cost of finding and applying to jobs — plays into job-seeker behavior in an insidious way. With mass job boards like Monster [...]

  Feb 9

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• History of Job Search, Newspapers

  Prior to information being free, ubiquitous, and liquid, it was costly, shepherded, and structured. The contours of information availability, like those of a topographic map, radiated outwards from geographic centers of production. Printing presses were large, immobile, and based in cities. The newspapers they produced were perishable, costly to ship, and the value of local news content to the audience decreased with each mile distant from the source. In a sense, the information available to you was tied to the land upon which you lived. Although limiting, these costs and geographic considerations were the reason that large, professionally-written, locally-focused newspapers were viable as businesses. By contrast, neither one-man bands nor a nationally distributed paper such as USA Today were economically feasible until very recent times. The history of newspapers is the history of mass-produced information being shared among burgeoning urban populations. The business history of newspapers is the combination of [...]

  Dec 29

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• History of Job Search, The Industrial Revolution

  When George Washington became President, we were mostly a rural country. In fact, when he was inaugurated, three-quarters of working Americans worked on a farm. And with the 2010 Census coming up, it’s interesting to remember that the very first census in 1790 showed that out of 3,929,326 Americans at the time, only about 200,000 of them lived in towns larger than 2,500 people. So how did we change from a country of Jeffersonian yeoman farmers to a nation of Dilbertville cubicle gophers? If free market capitalism is about, well…, free markets, then why don’t we still buy, produce, and consume everything in markets? I mean the old kind of market, the ones that existed long before Piggly Wiggly and Von’s. The type that you can still see abroad when you travel — the butcher and the leather-maker and the guy selling vegetables from his farm — all under one [...]

  Dec 22

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• History of Job Search, Before Jobs

  The notion of “jobs” and choice in one’s career is a modern invention. No, high school students back in the Bronze Age didn’t sulk in angst while choosing between “hunting” and “gathering” as a career. And the original Goths and Vandals didn’t fill out applications to become pillagers. For most of human history, what you did for your daily bread was determined by caste, church or king, and enforced by a societal molasses that discouraged new solutions, change, or movement. “Self-actualization” was tough to come by when 98% of humanity picked crops by hand and never traveled further than 25 miles outside their birthplace. Peasantry, serf & servant, and the horrific existence of slavery, define the vast majority of effort of all the human beings who have ever lived. Peasants in an anarcho-syndicalist commune being repressed by the system. The long trip from wandering around the savanna to seeing Hootie [...]

  Dec 17

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• History of Job Search, Prologue

  My passion in life is jobs. I find them fascinating: it’s the intersection of human emotion, desire and dreams, and the more mathematical world of economics, markets, supply and demand. The field requires empathy, tough love, and a knowledge of human psychology while also profitably employing left-brain skills like econometrics, data analysis, and statistical studies of human behavior. I stumbled into jobs a decade ago and embraced what I found there: a calling that is rewarding, meaningful, and damn hard. Which makes it fun, worthwhile, and a job where I find myself wishing for more hours in the day. It scratches everything that itches on me. I was the first customer service person at TheLadders.com and remember long nights catching up on the backlog of replies to my Monday newsletter. There was one Colonel in Texas who was retiring from the Air Force after twenty-odd years and was looking for [...]

  Dec 14

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