You know when you’re doing a 5000 piece jigsaw? No, me neither, it's my idea of hell, but imagine it. Imagine the thousands of bits of cardboard on a coffee table. You’re looking for a specific piece. Your eyes become accustomed to homing in on bits that fit in with the shape of the gap and the colour scheme of the surroundings. After a few days of staring at the coffee table, around the same time that you go mad, your brain completely gives up caring whether the pieces have any visual merit - so long as they look like they might fit.
Welcome to recruitment!
Welcome to recruitment!
At a time when good job opportunities are increasingly scarce and competition is increasingly tough, many job-hunters are striving to make their applications and CVs and interview presentations stand out from the crowd.
Tip of the day: don’t bother. Employers used to spend their days panning for gold. But ever since people started putting CVs on the internet, hiring managers, struggling to deal with a deluge of applications (both solicited and unsolicited), have become jigsaw puzzlers. Different mental processes are involved.
The jigsaw puzzle approach to recruitment militates against creativity and idiosyncrasy and c-c-c-craziness on the part of the job-seeker. Let's say I’m looking on a job board for a (say) C++ Developer in (say) Wigan and I see the following list:
In theory, any one of these candidates could be the C++ Developer I’m looking for. But I don’t have time to look at all of them. I’ll go straight for Yehudi’s, because he’s bothered to try to match his profile to what a recruiter might be looking for.
That’s how you make yourself stand out in the internet generation: look like you fit in.
Next time: how job hunting is exactly like backgammon.
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