Job Seeker Crap Filters

It is hard being a job seeker in today’s economy. With all of the technological advantages we have today one would assume that nobody could get lost. We should be able to turn on some sort of cyber-jobs-GPS, plug in our destination and watch our career unfold on a high-resolution flat-screen display. However, the exact opposite is true. There is so much information available online it can be difficult to wade through it all. To make matters worse, there is so much misinformation that every job seeker has to develop a keen sense of what is real and what is not. In his book Net Smart Howard Rheingold talks about the literacy of “critical consumption of information,” aka, Crap Detection. I love this term because it is not enough to be literate in how to use media, but it is also critical to figure out just how much is a meaningless waste of some very inconvenienced electrons.

It is especially significant to note that when we speak of crap filtering we are immediately admitting that most of what we see in our electronically enhanced lives is really drivel. The fact that we know that information needs to be filtered is the first step. We need to be able to plow through the tons of “expert” advice, blogs, chats, emails and other online media like we a panning for gold and removing those nuggets that are of value to us. For someone engaged in a job search there is a lot of fools gold planted around for the picking. They are “helped” by the more unscrupulous and mercenary motivated characters by offering an easy path rather than continuing to suffer the prolonged search that most will require.

Online sources hold the vast majority of accumulated human knowledge about everything, but email is still a major portal of introduction to job seeking crap. Most of it is very obvious and not much more sophisticated than the Nigerian Prince email scam, but the tactful use of name dropping and an unfortunate timing can hit a desperate job seeker in a moment of weakness. The misdirection usually comes in the form of a half-truth that makes the rest of the email believable.  Here is an email I recently received:

Good day, our firm “Pro Quality Survey Inc” has found your CV in CareerBuilder database and consider that your qualifications and skills would perfectly fit for the part-time position of quality control manager that we now have available.

The details are as follows:

Job Opening: Quality Control Manager

Type of employment: Part-time

General job requirements:

* Knowledge of such programs as Adobe Acrobat Reader and Microsoft Office

* Basic computer skills

* Ability to print and scan documents

* Basic user level knowledge about household and kitchen appliances.

The job would be about doing quality control and writing reviews for new models of household and kitchen appliances.

If you meet these requirements and are interested in this part-time job opportunity, please contact us by email.

Our Human Resources Manager will contact you for an interview soon.

Most job seekers will have a resume in the CareerBuilder database, so this could be totally believable…except that it was sent to me and my resume has never been searchable. I won’t mention the name of the person supposedly sending this email because a quick search shows that there are at least a dozen people by that name on Facebook and countless other places who are possibly being spoofed. Another obvious sign of fakery is that it comes from a yahoo.com address. Any reputable business will have an exclusive domain name rather than doing business using a free email address. The company mentioned does not exist, or at least it isn’t listed in the first four or five pages of a Bing search that found 55 million hits. Another clue is the grammatically incorrect formatting of the text with incorrect punctuation, word choice and syntax. Finally, the “requirements” for this job would qualify just about everybody over the age of 13. Conclusion: 100% Crap.

So why do spammers think that they can get away with this? Well, a better question would be to ask CareerBuilder why they do exactly the same thing. The lure of the outward facing crap sucks the unsuspecting job seeker into a deeper use of their service. Unlike spammers, CareerBuilder is a legitimate business and I have used them on both the job seeker and recruiter side. One recent recruiting campaign for a hard to find financial skill received almost no direct applications, but data mining through CareerBuilder satisfied that need quickly as well as gaining employment for multiple job seekers. If it were not for the ludicrous bait used to try and hook me in this illustration the whole bait and switch exercise could be excused. The subject of this email is UnitedHealth Group is Interested in You – Act Now”So the lure to open the email in the first place is that I have been selected by this company. In the text of the message I learn that this is not from that company but from Whitney Nolastname, probably a Betty-Crocker-like pseudonym, an employee of CareerBuilder who is doing me a favor by helping me out based on my resume (which is not even close to this job) and my recent application (which is nonexistent). While the formatting of the title of this job looks unprofessional, it is a hyperlink to a real job. It appears that CareerBuilder Media needs to hire some quality control experts if they produced this email. Perhaps that is a little harsh, but the CareerBuilder brand is tarnished by a sloppy and unconvincing job match. To that person who is legitimately looking for and applying to an IT Project Manager — Enterprise PMO [sic] job this is a nugget. To me or to job seekers looking for something else this is crap.

Another interesting development is the sudden appearance, at least on my horizon, of CareerRookie.com. I am immediately suspicious of any email that gives me a link to somewhere I have never been before. I have software which is supposed to protect me from clicking on bad links, but why take the chance. This one hit several hot buttons including a list of recommended jobs which are not even close to my resume that they supposedly have for me. I am not looking for a job and if I were looking I certainly do not fit the profile for the apparent target audience of CareerRookie. After clicking the button relegating this to spam, I became curious and rescued the email before it was deleted so that I could take a closer look. As a job seeker advocate this might be something of interest that I could pass on to others. Somewhere at the bottom of their home page in one of a dozen or so small-print hyperlinks there is an “about” link. There we learn that CareerRookie is a division of (ta daa) CareerBuilder even though their logo appears nowhere else on the site. Its purpose is to connect “students and recent graduates seeking internships, part-time jobs and entry-level positions with the nation’s top employers. Users can also post resumes, get the latest news on companies and industries, sign up for automatic job alerts, view local career fairs and tap into advice on everything from writing resumes to on-the-job success – all from entry-level point of view.” Well, they certainly missed their demographic mark by sending that to me, but if you are in that group you may seriously want to check it out. One word of caution: Keep in mind that CareerBuilder and all of their brands are a business, not a charity. I know people who work there and they do genuinely care about helping job seekers, but as a company they also have to make money. On the CareerRookie home page is a prominent javascript slider with seven windows. The first is a title page followed by six which are 50% crap. Three of them are legitimate job links to companies and three are cleverly trying to sell you something.

This is not a rant about CareerBuilder. I love CareerBuilder. I love Monster. I love the whole job board concept! There is nothing not to like about an electronic medium online that allows job seekers to be more productive in their efforts. Most job boards do have to expose their business side to make a profit in a tough market and if they fail we would be losing a valuable job seeker tool. I encourage everybody who is looking for a job to fully engage their crap filters and dive right in. As a matter of fact, I encourage recruiters to dive in as well. An appreciation of the job seeker perspective may prevent you from feeding them any crap along with the performance of your job. I also encourage CareerBuilder to do a better job. You could be so much more!

Additional reading:
The Information Tsunami
Crap Detection 101