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 and CareerBuilder pushing aspirational marketing messages to the general public, inappropriate applications are not only no longer discouraged, but actively encouraged.

Applying for jobs outside of our abilities is endemic to the “free-for-all” model. We’ve all done it, myself included — yet the innocence of “what’s the harm” in applying for that job “I could grow into” has created substantial pathologies for the recruiting function. Particularly in desperate economic times, job-seekers with little understanding of how the job market works, and the pressing crush of bills to pay, will allow themselves to engage in the self-defeating behavior of applying for jobs outside of their expertise. For that, we in the online recruitment industry have only ourselves to blame.

Further contributing to this systemic problem is the way in which job boards generate job discovery among their users. The keyword-search architecture, made so extraordinarily popular by Google, does a disservice to our job-seeking customers by putting the fruit of temptation just one click away. The default behavior of a user on job sites is to type in a title and hit return, thus providing a tantalizing list of possibilities across the nation, and leading too many applicants down the wrong path of spreading their effort across dozens or hundreds of jobs rather than focusing their search efforts on the few dozen positions for which they are most likely to be considered. While location is offered as a secondary search field, the likelihood of any user using that box is inversely proportional to the anxiety they feel about their job hunt.

It’s natural for people, particularly those in the midst of the stress of a job hunt, to gravitate towards the behaviors that are easy and away from those that are uncomfortable. Clicking ‘apply’ for a job seems like a productive activity, and, unfortunately, lulls too many job-seekers away from the uncomfortable, but important, activities of following up and networking into jobs they’ve already identified.

Career path
The typical professional in 2010 approaches his career prospects very differently from the professional of fifty years ago. While this shift is separate in cause from the technological revolution, it has also impacted job-seeker behavior in substantive ways.
The most obvious difference between today and fifty years ago is the decline of lifetime employment. (Although it’s interesting to note that our research into the historical archives finds references as early as the mid-1960s to this “worrisome” decline in corporate loyalty.) The viewpoint that ten years at one company is “too long” is gaining prevalence, particularly among younger professionals and in larger cities. The sentiment that a decades-long tenure indicates an inability to generate outside interest rather than admirable loyalty to one’s company has greatly impacted the velocity with which professionals change jobs. The average six-figure worker, as a result, will change jobs every four years.

Without a consistent relationship or mutual sense of obligation with one, lifelong employer, professionals are now in the position that they are responsible for creating their own career paths. Career growth, which was previously the province of the HR or Personnel Department, has been taken over by the professionals themselves. Professionals create their own growth throughout their careers by moving through different industries, functions, geographies and company sizes.

The 21st century Job Search is a direct marketing problem
With the impact of these two forces, the job search has evolved from a tactical process problem — apply to jobs through the paper, land one, and stick with that employer for several years or decades — to a strategic one. More specifically, the 21st century job search is a complex marketing problem, and the closest parallel is direct marketing: the creation of an effective message, sent to likely ‘buyers’, in which a ‘call to action’ is the paramount goal. Similarly, the desired outcome of the job search is for the job-seeker to get their message in front of the right person at the right time to secure an interview which can lead to a job offer. This combination of message, audience, and targeting, is new for he job search, and has not yet achieved widespread understanding by the professionals it affects.
The analogy bears some considering. If we consider how American Express tries to get new card members, Pottery Barn tries to acquires new catalog customers, or The Economist tries to attract new subscribers, we’ll understand that a professional looking for a job needs to consider target audience, list construction, message, channel, and budget.

The Economist, for example, wouldn’t send a direct mail piece to the list of subscribers to Popular Mechanics — the likelihood of those buyers wanting to also receive The Economist is too low. Similarly, if American Express were trying to expand the user base for its Plum Card from American Express Open, it wouldn’t buy billboards and do radio ads in conjunction with the Lansing Lugnuts minor league baseball team. (Go Lugnuts!) Although the Lugs provide fantastic family entertainment, the overlap with small and medium size business owners isn’t substantial enough to warrant it.

So when we think about the professional’s job hunt, she has to take into account the same type of targeting considerations. Out of the 100,000 or so recruiters in the country, perhaps a few hundred have positions for which the professional would be considered. And out of that segment, the reality is that perhaps only a dozen will actually end up interviewing her.

To get to those interviews, she first needs to determine who to contact. Presently, this is done, mostly inefficiently, through job listings or ‘friends and family’ rather than a criteria-based search for likely prospects. And then she needs to “qualify” those contacts — determine whether or not they are really looking to hire somebody with her background, skills, and experience. The old adage about it being a numbers game leads to wasted effort, and that wasted effort not only does not generate results, but also leads to a feeling of futility among many job-seekers.

Once she’s identified likely prospects, she’ll need to market to those buyers through multiple channels: in writing, by phone and “door-to-door” (the in-person interview); yet, today, most job-seekers have little experience in how to do all three well, especially those outside the fields of sales and marketing.

And the written resume, which is the crucial and central opportunity or her to get her message about her capabilities, achievements, skills and talents, is, properly considered, no different than a direct mail marketing piece. And like great direct mail, it needs to grab the buyer’s attention and let him know what you can do for him.

And when we consider what is at stake — the typical professional job-seeker on TheLadders is “selling” approximately $860,000 worth of their labor over the next five years — this is the largest sale most professionals will handle (I’ll quibble over whether housing really counts because of the replacement value of housing).

And that leads to one of the great disconnects in a professionals’ career.

Because the 20th century model has faded away, and success in the new model requires a much more sophisticated understanding of sales and marketing, most professionals find the 21st century job hunt confusing, disorienting, tedious and depressing. The changes that have swept through our marketplace and industry have occurred so quickly that professionals have not had time to educate themselves, form effective action plans for tackling the job search, or adapt to the present system.

With that unfortunately bleak assessment, based on my experiences in job-seeker focus groups over these past few years, let’s turn to the other side of the equation and look at how the 21st century is impacting recruitment.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 4:38 pm and is filed under History of Job Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.