Job Hunting
On a sunny autumn afternoon men worked on a roof beside a bright orange crane. Shingles filled the skip dangling from its line. Orange safety cones tied together with flagged caution tape delimited the edge of the work area. Each man wore a fluorescent safety vest. Faint calls sounding like “ho” and “wait” reached my ears when the crane moved. The hanging weight could knock any one of the men off the roof to his death, I mused, reducing a frail, hard hat-encased skull to shards. A man could lose his footing, fall and roll down the bumpy shingles, accumulating scrapes and abrasions along the way. Or, under the hot sun, with heat radiating from below, dehydration and heat stress could strike a man, rendering him helpless. In another reality, a man rolled helplessly bleeding down the slope toward the edge, toward certain agony, and maybe death.
I’m sitting at my desk watching, waiting. I click on the “Submit” button to whisk my credentials into the big, black, maw that is the Application Machine. Another notation on my job application log, another application sent to the electronic cloud. If I am lucky, I will see an email pop up in my inbox stating the company received my application and it will be reviewed. Out of the 175 or so applications I’ve sent off, 87 replies were received, a quarter of those from the job agent I sent the application through. Only 28 companies sent a “thank you but no thank you” note indicating no further action was necessary, the job was given to someone else, I was no longer a contender. I’ve had 3 phone interviews, one leading to an in-person, on-site interview. One out of 175 is 0.57%. Quiet rejection.
I am a heavy load, dangling from a crane high, on a roof. Will I make contact with anyone? Or will I settle to the roof and have the contents removed, to be used for something constructive. Some Automated Tracking System bot parses my résumé; an “r” could invalidate me if I wrote “data manager” but the company wants someone with “data management” skills. It’s a knife-edge determination, and I don’t know the rules which change from company to company, application to application.
Potter and vase. © JustHavingFun
I am the potter’s clay. Amorphous, my shape to be determined at her will, I’m a blob on the wheel, circling, spinning, whirling under her fingers. Whom shall I serve? What shape will I be? Where will I end up? What colors will I wear? She pinches and prods, draws me upward, but I don’t know my final configuration, destination, function, reception, toleration, utilization.
Well, it’s time to refill my coffee and get back to the search. As much as it has been fun conjuring images and playing with words this past hour, it is time to point my arrows at some targets. Again. At least I don’t have to beat on doors and get rejected to my face.
Submit has multiple meanings. I submit my résumé, and I wait in submission. I have every confidence that my qualifications will spark interest somewhere and the job hunt will terminate, happily. But until then, some days I feel like I’m at the edge of the roof, avoiding the crane’s load; other days I feel shapeless and unformed.
Today? I have hope.
Just Having Fun 