Finding a good job is hard.
Finding people who want you to pay them to help you look for a good job is easy.
Let me be more specific. By “good job,” I mean good by the standards of Twin Cities Business subscribers, something that pays in six figures—a management or executive-level job that could replace the one you just lost or that you fear might soon vanish, like your investment portfolio, into the sucking swamp of this ghastly economy.
And by “easy,” I mean that if you simply post your resumé on any free Internet job board, like Monster or CareerBuilder, you won’t need to look for people who are selling job-hunting services. They’ll find you.
This sets up a curious dynamic. All the world knows that job hunting is one of the most soul-crushing endeavors known to man. If you are desperate enough to engage in it seriously, you are most likely in code-red expense-cutting mode. The last thing you need is a new way to spend money. Yet here, suddenly, is a whole regiment of helpful e-mail correspondents, career experts all, assuring you that you’re nuts if you think the kind of job you’re after will ever appear in some free help-wanted column, on line or otherwise.
What’s more, they say, on the off chance that a six-figure job should turn up on a free employment board, what are you going to do about it? Send in your resumé? Your advisors hate to say it, but your resumé almost certainly stinks. It presents you in the wrong light. It lacks the “action vocabulary” or “power phrases” that grab recruiters and hiring managers by their shirtfronts and let them know you’re a force to be reckoned with. Hell, your resumé lacks even the right embedded keywords to sneak past the computer- scanning systems that employers use to ensure that no human eye will ever see it.
But suppose that, by some miracle, you get called in for an interview. Alas, even if you happen to be a marketing mastodon who could sell snow blowers in South Florida, you don’t know how to sell yourself in a job interview. Are you even aware that interviewing is an art as intricate and arcane as a Japanese tea ceremony? Do you know the correct responses to the “10 Most Toxic Questions Interviewers Ask”? (Answer: No, you don’t.) So while you’re paying hundreds of dollars to have your resumé professionally rewritten, you’d better pony up hundreds more for some interview-skills training.
Oh, and one more thing. Regardless of whether you pay to see elite job listings or to have your resumé blasted to every executive recruiter in the known universe, nobody gets the kind of job you want merely by sending resumés to strangers. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Your advisors can help you with that, too, for a fee. It’s all about networking.
Here’s the haunting part: Much of what your new e-mail buddies tell you is probably true.
