As I’ve been documenting in my repeated rants the last few weeks, recruiting is a nightmare for many reasons, from the craziness of resume spam to the general hate recruiters get. To be in recruiting these days is to face great challenges and irrational situations that border on the surreal. To overcome them . . .
Well, I discussed what we can do to ease the problems recruiters face. I detailed how we can improve our job searching despite the problems. I speculated on ways we geeks can change recruiting or at least do some things to help. It’s my hope all this advice pays off for everyone.
Look, the system is terribly broken, it’s not working, and in a few cases it seems to be working backwards. We’re gonna have to do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t affect us, our friends, and the recruiters we know. No one is going to save us, so we have to save each other.
It’s just not enough, in the end.
The problem isn’t going away I’m afraid. We can raise some individual islands of sanity, but the mess of crazy hiring rules and the challenges recruiters face still surrounds us and affects our friends and family and the world.
At some point we’re all going to have to wake up from the nightmare.
How we’re going to do that I don’t know, frankly (though Roddenberry knows I’ll be speculating on it here). I’m not sure how we’re going to fix a very broken system beyond a few minor starting points. I am very sure that like any nightmare, you need to wake people up and that’s where we start.
Let people know the system is broken, that recruiting is challenging, that hiring really doesn’t work. Wake them up to the fact that things really, objectively, are lousy.
Let people know the solutions I’ve shared and that you found, so they hear about ways to fix things, at least in the small. Wake them up to the fact they can solve at least some things.
Let people know we bloody well we’ve got to fix this. Wake them up to the fact that they’ve got to wake others up.
It’s a start. We’ve also got to fix a fractured world economy. But we might as well do something.
Out of the various people we shake some sense into, people we help, we may find ways to make things better. We may build alliances. We may awaken that one person who can get things moving to unriddle the mess of recruiting and hiring these days.
Hell, that one person might be you and you just didn’t realize it yet . . .
Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach. He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.