The Laid-Off Life: Submission Impossible

“Desired Position: Reclining. Ha! Company’s President or Vice President. But seriously, whatever’s available. If I were in a position to be picky, I wouldn’t be applying here in the first place.” – anonymous job applicant

I hate online job applications. Well, hate is a very strong word. What I mean to say is I really, really, really hate online job applications.

Granted, in the olden days, back when ‘poking’ someone had entirely different meanings, ‘texting’ wasn’t recognized by my SpellChecker,and ‘Facebook’ was as foreign a word as ‘Bookface’, finding a job was a horridly difficult process. It involved scanning classifieds in the newspaper (remember those?) and actually getting in your car and going to a place of business to fill out an application. By hand! In pen! Who has time for all that nonsense?

Now, it’s a breeze. A simple process that you can do from home. Click ‘Submit!’ and you’re done. Submit! We have received your application and you are in our system. Do not reply to this message, this email address is not monitored! And aggregation sites like CareerBuilder and Monster and HotJobs made it even simpler. All you had to do was sign in, pick a job that sounded fascinating and Submit! They did the work so you didn’t have to, like so many Scrubbing Bubbles.

But simple isn’t always good. When you had to actually make an effort to apply to a job, that company knew that you were a serious candidate, or at the very least that you were seriously interested in the job. It’s human nature; the more difficult the task, the greater the reward must be for us to bother with it. If, say, some huge Delaware Valley company like McNeil or Merck or duPont or Vanguard posts a job on the MegaSites for a great position, can you imagine how many applications they receive when all it requires from you is Submit!? You, my friend, The Most Qualified Person Ever, are one of thousands of applications in a database. Good luck with that.

But I mean I’m not stupid. Or at least not that stupid. I’m a fan of progress. I have a Wii to go along with my ColecoVision. Obviously there are benefits to such ease. I mean, Submit! is a great alternative to driving from West Chester to Center City to Bensalem to Woodbury and back to tender applications by hand. Not that Bensalem isn’t beautiful this time of year. But even in the Internet age, the MegaSites keep you from having to fill out dozens of online applications from scratch by regurgitating your stored information for you. I mean without that, you can develop carpel tunnel from filling out your work history and skills a milliongazillion times.

‘Submit’ has alternate meanings too, like ‘to yield oneself to the authority of another’, as in submit to my will or I shall smite thee! Companies have gotten wise, or at least selfish. Sure, they list themselves on sites like the MegaSites and PhillyJobs.com, but a growing percentage of them require you to come to their websites and fill out their own personal application pages. They’re special. And now we’re back to copy-and-paste carpel tunnel.

I am sure you’ve seen these sites that make you fill out the same information that you’ve filled out a milliongazillion times before, nearly verbatim but with their own special changes here and there. Geez, they are annoying. Fill out all your personal information again. Fill out your education information again. Fill out your work history again. That’s the most infuriating part, the prior employment information. Different and difficult ways to enter, sort, format, and list your work history. Drop-down menus galore. Choose the month-and-day-and-year you started and finished. Choose from a list of ‘job categories’ your position best fits. Mine never fit a category. List your supervisor’s name, email address, phone number, dog’s name, zodiac sign. Don’t have or feel comfortable giving out that information? Sorry, it’s a required field. And my personal favorite: list your most-recent salary. None of their business (which it’s not)? Too bad, that’s required too. Oh, and don’t get fooled by ‘upload your résumé and we’ll auto-fill your information’. That never works right.

After filling out all that info, most of which is just repeated from your résumé (which they don’t read, see here), some sites, especially the big boys, have other ‘special’ pages on their application. Please list five words that describe yourself or describe your work history or please list all the categories of jobs you’d be interested in, how far you’re willing to relocate (geez, I’m applying for a specific job; I know where it is), and are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party.

And, just when you think you’re done three hours later, there are often pages (and pages and pages) of self-evaluation. Seriously. I mean, go fill out an application for Comcast sometime. Literally 28 screens of ‘qualification’ questions, a dozen questions per page: rate yourself on interpersonal skills, what’s your proficiency at team-building, what are your strengths in ‘thought development’, what is your ‘drive execution’ in ‘results leadership’. Those are just four of nearly 300 questions, no joke, no exaggeration. Those are the actual questions. Are they hiring bomb squad techs and CIA agents?

As I’ve talked about before, out of all that information, they’re searching out maybe a dozen matching keywords. My theory is that they don’t care about any of this extraneous information. After so many Submit! résumés, and the thousands of applicants thereof, they got tired of applications so simple that everyone applies. My guess is they believe that if you’re willing to spend half your day filling out their application, you must be pretty serious about wanting the job, wanting to work for them. It’s the Internet age equivalent to running around filling out by-hand applications. If it’s not worth it to you to jump through flaming hoops, you’re not a serious candidate. And I suppose I don’t blame them. But maybe I’m wrong, and these endless applications are some high-level Rorschach test, their Willy Wonka punishment for bad children sorting out who’ll be heir to the chocolate factory.

Normally, I have a piece of sage advice at this point in the column to solve the week’s dilemma, but not today. All I can say is if you want the job as race dog, you must jump through all the hoops they put in front of you. And so, good luck to those of you holding Golden Tickets. When filling out these endless applications, try not to get sucked up the pipe to the Fudge Room before getting to Submit! It won’t stop my hatred of online job applications, but that’s progress for you in the Laid-Off Life.

Just don’t blame me if I sell Slugworth the Everlasting Gobstopper for revenge.


Michael Hochman
LaidOffLife@yahoo.com ◙ Laid-Off Life on Twitter ◙ Laid-Off Life on Facebook

Michael is a Copywriter, Creative Marketer, and Broadcasting Professional still in search of full-time employment after 11 months of full-time job hunting, thanks to an “involuntary career sabbatical”. A Philly native and Syracuse graduate, Michael will gladly accept any job offer you may have for him. Any. Really. Please give me a job??

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"Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called everybody, and they meet at the bar." - Drew Carey