Recently, one jobseeker’s foot traveled directly to her mouth. Click on this link only if you’re OK with reading foul language. A jarring illustration of frustration, brought on by obsession boiling into a toxic brew of self-inflicted defeat, her story went viral. The angles to and dynamics of her plight would probably keep smart human resource industry observers and a bevy of psychoanalysts busy for a long time, but this is the #CareerGravity blog, so let’s focus on the #CareerGravity.
Don’t Get Mad. Get #CareerGravity
Persevering through countless anonymous email rejections, I continued to submit my resume despite never even being granted the courtesy of a face-to-face interview.
Thus wrote Taylor Grey Meyer to the employer that rejected her application for work for the 30th time, as reported by Mashable.
My question to Meyer is the following: At what point, before the 30th attempt, did you start to think that perhaps you were wasting your time? To fixate on one employer’s open positions, at the expense of all other potential employers and their open positions, is an exercise in futility. When all a jobseeker has to work with is a traditional resumé, however, the temptation and her tendency are to beat that traditional resume against one brick wall, repeatedly, every time hoping for a result other than rejection. An indefatigable approach to the job search is admirable, but taken to obsessive levels—especially sans a multidimensional profile online—the jobseeker can end up frustrated. And frustration has been known to lead to foot-in-mouth disease. See above. The actions are results of a jobseeker insisting on living in the dark ages, those days long ago that predated #CareerGravity, the renaissance.
Dark Ages vs. Renaissance
What can we infer, rightly or wrongly, from Meyer’s note? She was replying to an email-based rejection letter, apparently—and for the 30th time, it seems. And it also seems that she may have submitted her resumé via email. That assumption may be inaccurate, but for now, let’s run with it, because email is part of the dark ages, which you can use #CareerGravity to escape.
Let’s say you’re looking for a job. In the dark ages of job seeking, the traditional resumé was your one and only tool for finding a job and advancing your career. Limited leeway and few options led to frustration and all that comes with that sort of thing.
For these reasons (and others), a large percentage of professionals stayed in the same jobs year after year. Today, the circumstances are much different, and #CareerGravity helps you to keep your options open and keep your cool. With a dynamic, large digital footprint, you rely less on any one component or reflection of your work history (i.e., the traditional resumé), and doing so at once frees you to seek career advancement and new work more often.
The brick wall is a metaphor for an offline job market that no longer exists on its own. With that evolution comes less frustration, though not the elimination of it. These are the conditions that enable jobseekers to stop job-seeking as if the year were still 1995. Whether or not some persist in, even insist on, job-seeking as they would have 15+ years ago is up to them.
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