This article originally appeared on VICE UK.
You should have received a memo regarding the fact that we're all about to become redundant. If not, check your junk, it might be the algorithms. This relentless march toward automation is great news, of course, because without jobs we'll finally be able to get on with charcoal drawing, basket weaving, and writing pastoral poetry, like we always wanted.
One of the sweetest ironies is that HR and recruitment—those most meta of jobs—are among those becoming automated fastest. Even back in 2016, a survey found that 40 percent of employers were using technology to pre-screen applications. Given that this technology's now available for free, even prospective paper boys will soon be unlikely to escape automated screening.
In the long-term, this trend will indeed be sweet. It'll remove those interminable silences when you ask someone at a party what they do and they reply: "Oh, I work in HR." Instead, they'll just show you one of their lovely charcoal drawings, or read you a few lines of pastoral poetry, written on scraps of paper they produce from a handwoven basket. In the short-term, though, it's annoying. Because one of the few shreds of comfort left in tapping out another shit cover letter is the belief that someone may have suffered as much reading it as you did writing it.
An Application Tracking System can't suffer. No more could it suffer than a Parser—those algorithms that mercilessly strip away all your lovely adjectives and adverbs and leave you staring at the picked over bones of your pitiful existence. Those seeking to defend such tools argue that they free up time for HR departments' charcoal drawing classes and—as an afterthought—that they eliminate human bias and create a more meritocratic system. Nevertheless, the overwhelming reaction from applicants seems to be one of unease at the idea of a non-sentient being dictating their career prospects, frustration at the fact that their elegant prose and careful font choice (of Garamond) can produce no effect on a digital reader, and anger at how much better their HR executive friends' charcoal drawings are than their own, what with all that newly liberated time for classes.
One logical solution, then, would be for HR departments to revert to the old methods, hire more staff and take the time to appreciate the lovely serifs and cadences of your cover letter. You know, and I know, however, that the minute they start to see a dip in the quality of their charcoal drawings that'll all go up in smoke. So, wouldn't a much better option be to level the recruitment playing-field?
I'm proposing that applicants make use of the algorithmic resources available to us as well, for such resources do exist. If you're looking to set up a fully automated job scraper and applier for Indeed, for example, then you need only search for it on AskJeeves or Yahoo, or wherever. You'll basically need a coding qualification to use it, though, and if you have one of those, you don't need help applying for a job.
For the rest of us—those of us who had to lie about Microsoft Office competency on our unread cover letters—there is another option: Botnik, "a community of writers, artists, and developers using machines to create things on and off the internet." The lazy person's solution to semi-automated writing.
Here's how it's going to work:
Treat yourself to a fresh Word doc. and drop in a previous cover letter—an early draft, before you moved the paragraphs around too much and overcomplicated things. Tie a rope securely around your waist and descend into the depths of Indeed. Find an ad for a job that you wouldn't be embarrassed to mention between sips of a Doombar outside a pub at 6ish on a Thursday. I, for example, have found a desirable role at the seemingly prestigious Mongoose Gray—a company that either witnessed the branding success of comparethemarket.com and thought: What other large small mammals are there? or believed that their management consultancy would be the perfect tribute to Rikki Tikki Tavi.
Here's their actual genuine ad:
Sitting down to Snickers pie that evening, I had no fewer than seven tasty job leads, and I wasn’t even a real human being.
So, look, what can we take from all this?
What's clear is that sub-optimal applicants need all the help we can get. Be that from your employed friend who promises to read your application, but who—when you send it to them the night before it's due—is holding a Doombar outside a pub; or from a robot, who arguably cares about your long-term prospects just as much..
And you may be saying: You're never going to succeed in a job you couldn't get legitimately.
But all you need is a foot in the door. A foot in the door and some sturdy shoes to withstand all the slamming on your foot that’s going to occur over the 30 to 40 years of your career.
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