Finding a job has never been more difficult. Simply applying seems equally challenging.
I’ve been on both sides of the hiring desk – sometimes the applicant and sometimes the employer. And, yes, for some jobs, I gave a test. When I was hiring a research analyst, I would narrow my field of candidates down to the top five or so and then give the finalists a set of data to see what they would do with it. In an hour, could they separate the wheat from the chafe? Could they make sense of the numbers, draw conclusions and express them in well-crafted and thoughtful language?
While I gave this test to only the best of the bunch, not as part of my initial screening criteria, I am hearing from colleagues today that they’re being asked to submit marketing or business plans, develop strategy or design a website from the ground-up – all before even getting the first interview!
Fellow blogger, Matthew E. Berger at Sphere, writes about Hannah Reed, 22, who applied for a part-time administrative position with The New Teacher Project in Oakland, CA. She was asked to answer mock e-mails from potential clients, which required research into the organization, and to create a plan for an educational event. Was she hired? No.
As Berger notes, “Reed’s experience highlights a new fact of life for those on the losing end of a labor market where every ‘help wanted’ ad can draw a flood of interest, and fewer people wait on the other end to read all the resumes. More and more, recruiters and hiring managers are asking prospective employees to complete lengthy assignments before they will even be considered for an interview.”
It’s true such screening techniques illuminate those with poor writing or critical thinking skills and perhaps reduce the number of resumes to a more manageable number. It’s also true that applicants are given the opportunity to showcase their talents and business or scientific acumen.
However, for someone looking for a job and who knows that it will take hundreds of applications to even snag an interview, these prerequisites are undoubtedly daunting. Spend 20 or 30 hours on an assignment and then still not get an interview?
Are these exercises really meant to screen candidates or are they just a repository of free advice? How many of the submitted ideas will become part of the hiring organization’s marketing plan or training curriculum or web content? Makes one wonder.
How Big?
When I was a child, my mother used to laugh because I used the word ‘million” to express everything from how much homework I had (a “million pages”) to how many birds were sitting on a wire. It was a number that meant, “too big to count.”
Recently I’ve been reading I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away (http://tinyurl.com/yaqnuae) by Bill Bryson (author of A Walk in the Woods). Published in 1999, it’s a compilation of a series of articles he wrote for Night & Day magazine, the Sunday supplement to London’s Mail on Sunday.
Bryson says “Imagine you were in a vault filled with dollar bills and that you were told you could keep each one you initialed. Say, too, for the sake of argument that you could initial one dollar bill per second and that you worked straight through without ever stopping. How long do you think it would take to count a trillion dollars?…You would make $1,000 every 17 minutes. After 12 days of nonstop effort you would acquire your first $1 million. Thus it would take you 120 days to accumulate $10 million and 1,200 days – something over three years – to reach $100 million. After 31.7 years you would be a billionaire…But not until after 31,709.8 years would you count your trillionth dollar (and even then you’d be less than one-fourth of the way through the pile of money representing America’s debt.”)
Now, my commentary is not meant to be a political statement. It’s only meant to demonstrate how much a trillion is. Initialing dollar bills as Bryson suggests would take a person more than 120,000 years to get through our national debt. Or, by my calculations 2,000 people could each spend 60 years nonstop.
In fact, a trillion pieces of paper laid end-to-end would stretch from the earth to the sun … and back … with a lot of paper to spare. One trillion seconds is much, much longer than recorded history. A million minutes ago was just under two years. A billion minutes ago was just after the time of Christ.
One trillion is literally a 1 with 12 zeros. Scientists estimate that the Milky Way has somewhere between 100 and 400 billion. Imagine that you could see all of them and then realize how many more a trillion would be!
Talk about being too big to count or wrap your head around!
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