History of Job Search, Prologue

December 14, 2009 | (One Comment)

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 his next station in life. I thought this man was a hero. He’d helped arrange for over 3,000 US troops and their supplies to be airlifted into Bosnia in 24 hours during that war, and had served our nation in a way that makes you stop, consider, and feel small and ineffectual when you compare your career challenges to his.

I’d spend nights writing four-page emails to the Colonel explaining the job search as best I could, and the awful truth that we’ve blindly staggered into a system that takes our nation’s best people and puts them through hell and high-water as they look to find their next role in life. It’s sad and frustrating and wrong in so many tawdry, insensitive and demeaning ways. And I hate it. I really hate what the job search does to people.

So I’ve spent the past seven years at TheLadders trying to conquer it. And the best way to beat an enemy — especially if it’s an inchoate, intangible system for which nobody and everybody is responsible — is to understand it. To know it. To apprehend it.

To get there, I’ve studied jobs, the job search, and the history of both. I’ve interviewed, focus-grouped, and chatted with job-seekers, recruiters, and industry colleagues in mutual pursuit of the truth. I’ve been writing a weekly job-seeker newsletter for the past 329 weeks — Sunday 3 p.m. deadline for a Monday morning mailing to now over 3.4 million subscribers.
And most of all I’ve read e-mails. Man, have I read a lot of emails from people looking for jobs! From 2003 through 2006 I read every single customer service email we received — about 160,000 to that point — and since then all the replies to my weekly newsletter — about another 1,000 per week.

So over the years I’ve read something on the order of 320,000 customer emails from these job-seekers. And if I hope for anything in my career, I guess I hope to get to the point where people can say I know more, care more, and do more for the job-seeker than anybody else on the planet. That would be a real pinnacle for me. And as a guy who does career advice for a living, I suppose I’d say it’s good for your author to have lofty goals.

So to get there I’ve studied the system. I’ve learned a lot about it, and I’m studying it still.

And I know we’ll defeat it: the dark, bleak, black hole that swallows up people’s hopeful entreaties sent into the ether; the staggering, towering pile of information garbage that rains down on recruiters, human resources people,and hiring managers; the pathologies that sprang up when our good intentions and technologies lighted us the highway to hell.

But we won’t defeat it if we remain in the dark.

So I’ve decided to take everything I’ve learned about the job search — and the much larger body of knowledge that my several hundred colleagues at TheLadders have taught me — and share it here, on my blog, for recruiters, job-seekers, and people in the industry. And in sharing, I hope I can awaken a spirit in our industry — Online Recruitment — that has for too long been insular, isolated, and irrationally disposed to viewing industry colleagues as threats to their business rather than comrades-in-combat against our mutual sorrow — the despair, the depression and the sadness of the earnest and innocent professionals who have unfortunately found themselves bereft of a living and who turn to us all for help.

To those who will prefer to remain aloof and apart, these scribblings are not for you. But to those in the industry who care about creating the future of our calling, I invite your passion and your intellect and your labors in search of a better way to help people through the second most important decisions of their lives.

This marks the beginning of my series on “History of Job Search”, and I hope also the beginning of a great collaboration among the many people I admire.