jobs now offline

The grand American experiment in shifting to the Internet the system for finding, evaluating, and hiring employees seems to have failed. According to an ABC news report, 80% of all available jobs in America are to be had only for that special person-in-the-know, not merely to the first schlub with an Internet connection. This author is not the least bit surprised to hear that companies have stopped hiring off the Web; each job at which I have worked in the last decade I got through a personal contact, a temporary-employment agency, a physical visit, or a similarly old-fashioned method, and only a few of the hundreds of resumes and job-specific cover letters I have ever emailed, posted, or uploaded garnered even a brief response.

Thousands of templates exist on dozens of sites that job-seekers can use to craft for themselves slick-looking resumes, and the World-Wide-Web abounds with page upon page of detailed instructions on how to puff up or expand one's job-history, on how to use bullet-points to the greatest effect, on what the placement of those bullet-points says about the applicant's character, on the varying importance of a snail-mailed thank-you note, and on just the right thing to say in the subject line in order to catch a downtrodden recruiter's eye; I can only imagine the difficulty of doing the job of a human-resources officer sifting through mountains of documents that all look the same, that all sound the same, that all employ the same tricks. The Online resume, it seems, has faded into oblivion almost as quickly as it hurtled to the forefront of our commonly-shared dream of finally doing something satisfying or worthwhile with our lives. (Whether or not we are misguided fools for seeking fulfillment and reward outside of ourselves – in stilted and stifling job-environments – rather than within the crowded recesses of our own souls, is not in question here, although it probably should be.)

Some of us still have a bit of spunk left in our gullets, however, such as the young man who posted a fake hiring-bulletin on craigslist.com in order to spy on his competition for personal-assistant jobs, receiving over four hundred responses before the end of the first day. (He now has the names and addresses of hundreds of different people, data he can sell – to advertisers, political campaigns, or Kenyan scammers – for good money.) One idea is to get all of the people looking for jobs to come together at a physical location where they can network and figure out which businesses to start with each other, or get paid to assemble widgets, thingamajigs, or whatnots – for a few hours a day while getting paid the federal minimum wage. (With just a sliver of the hundreds of billions of dollars that the United States of America spends waging war on foreign peoples, we could employ every single job-seeking man, woman, and teenager in this country for a whole decade, in the spirit of the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps.) Another idea is to pay these unemployed masses to stand out in the streets to watch the watchers, to keep an eye on corruption-prone and law-breaking police officers. Our ultimate purpose as a nation, however, is to create methods by which our citizens can discover their true passions and abilities, so that they might Pursue their Happiness independent of outside pressure, outside influence, and outside coercion rather than sitting around all day staring at television screens and computer monitors and eating junk food; but, with our state and federal governments filled with persons who have sold their souls to corporate scumbags from agribusiness (Monsanto) and to banks awash with debt-payments (BofA, TD Ameritrade, etc.), we, the American people, will keep on suffering, all the good jobs having been shifted to South-East Asia. But, hey, someone has to restock these t-shirts, and man the deep-fryers. Mahalo.

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