What Color Is Your Parachute?

that you can get good at reducing the amount that depends on luck, to as small a proportion as possible.

CONCLUSION

Job-hunting skills are defined as advanced when they take seriously the world of the employer, and try to enter into the mind of the employer. And understand why they do what they do.

As shown in the diagram at the beginning of this chapter, employers came to their preferences out of hard experience, measured by their desire, same as you, to conserve their energy. Their basic concern was and is, “How many applications will I have to run through, before finding someone to hire?” (The number of interviews they need to do to find a hire, once they’ve sifted through the applications, stays constant, around 5.4.) Okay, so with that background, this is their experience:[15]

If employers post their vacancy on a job-board such as CareerBuilder.com or Monster.com, they have to look through 219 applications from job-hunters who respond, before they find someone to hire.

If employers consider applications from job-hunters who come through social media sites, such as LinkedIn or Facebook, they have to look through 116 applications, before they find someone to hire.

If employers post their vacancy on their own website, they have to look through 33 applications from job-hunters who respond, before they find someone to hire.

If the job-hunter takes the initiative to find a very specific job, rather than waiting to find a vacancy, and does this, say, by typing the name of that job into a search engine, then sending resumes to companies they turn up that way whether or not they are known to have a vacancy, employers only have to look through 32 applications, before they find someone to hire.

And if the job-hunter takes even more initiative, chooses a company where they’d like to work, and gets a referral (i.e., gets some employee within that company to recommend them), employers have to look through only 10 such applications, before they find someone to hire.

Now you understand.

Discussion

Job-hunter: Since the information in this chapter is so crucial for our survival in today’s world, why do you think this stuff isn’t taught in high schools and colleges?

Career-counselor: Well, it certainly should be! The reasons why it’s not, make up a very long list. You can choose between: because the teachers don’t know these facts, because the teachers haven’t had to job-hunt recently themselves, because they think the function of a school is to teach ideas, not practical manuals like how to fix a car, or how to run their job-hunt successfully, or how to find an appropriate friend or (eventually) a mate, and so on.

Job-hunter: I think inertia enters in, too. “This is the way we’ve always done it, and we don’t see any reason to change.”

Career-counselor: Yes, and don’t forget budgets. Education is the victim of a lot of belt-tightening these days, and of course the first staff to be let go are the ones who are experts on how to relate education to the world of work. That’s often regarded as “nice but not necessary” information.

Job-hunter: What’s the remedy for this missing part of our education?

Career-counselor: Learn it on your own; and then go teach at least one other person.

He or she who gets hired is not necessarily the one who can do that job best; but, the one who knows the most about how to get hired.

RICHARD LATHROP in his classic Who’s Hiring Who?

Chapter 6. Do I Really Need a Resume?

In “the old days” before the Internet became popular with job-hunters, the only way an employer could learn much about you was from a piece of paper that you yourself wrote—with maybe a little help from your friends—called your resume, or C.V., which is an academic term meaning “curriculum vitae.” On that paper was a summary of where you had been and all you had done. From that piece of paper, the employer was supposed to guess what kind of person you are and what kind of employee you’d be.

The good thing about all this, from your point of view, was that you had control over what went on that piece of paper; you could omit anything that was embarrassing, or anything from your past that you have long since regretted. Short of their hiring a private detective, or talking to your previous employers, employers couldn’t find out much else. You had absolute control over how much they could know about you. That was nice. But now those days are gone forever.

IN THIS TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: GOOGLE IS YOUR NEW RESUME

There is a new resume in town, and it’s called Google. All any employer has to do is type your name into a search engine like Google, and bamo! If you’ve been anywhere near the Internet (and 82 percent of us in the U.S. have)—if you’ve posted anything on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, or if you have your own website or webcasts or photo album or blog, or if you’ve been on anyone else’s Facebook page, every aspect of you may be revealed. You no longer control how you come across to an employer. So naturally, a vast majority of employers now Google your name—yes, Google has become both noun and verb—before they’ll consider hiring you.

So, if they do that with your name, what will they see? They’ll see those impressive achievements you’ve done, where you far exceeded people’s expectations—they’re there. But, depending on your privacy settings, they may also see those playful photos you’ve allowed your friends to post on your Facebook page, or theirs, that make you look like an idiot. They’re there, too. And the indiscreet comments you made when you were upset about this or that. And more. All these things, together, comprise your new resume, a richer body of data about you than your old classic resume ever aspired to be. And from this, now, prospective employers can better guess what kind of person you are and what kind of employee you’d be.

Or at least they think they can. Heaven help you if you Google yourself and recoil with horror at the distorted picture of you that emerges en toto. There’s your new resume, using the word resume loosely. Bye, bye, control.

Is there anything you can do about this new Google resume of yours? Well, yes, actually there are four things you can do. They are: edit, fill in, expand, and add. Let’s see what these mean.

Edit. First of all, think of how you would like to come across, when you are being considered for a job. Make a list of adjectives you’d like the employer to think of, when they consider hiring you. For example, how about: professional? experienced? inventive? hard-working? disciplined? honest? trustworthy? kind? What else? Make a list.

Then Google yourself and read over everything the search engine pulls up about you. Weigh what this or that suggests. Go over any pages you have put up on social sites like Facebook, MySpace, or YouTube, and remove anything you posted there, or allowed others to post, that contradicts the impression you would like to make,