But “back in the day” getting a job at a cruise line, theme park, big hotel chain-- required physically showing up at a job fair in Orlando or Miami or a site near Anaheim which wasn’t accessible by public transportation…
My point is that some elements of the job search are so much easier that folks forget going to a print shop, picking out high quality bond paper, wondering if 100 resumes would be enough, going to buy stamps…
I ordered 50 resumes my senior year of college and wondered “are there even 50 places to apply to?” ha ha ha! By the third reorder, I had figured it out… lots and lots of stamps “back in the day”.
Internet makes job search easier, but at the same time, the easier process may make landing a job harder. There’re generally a lot more applicants for the same job and it’s much harder for a typical applicant to stand out.
Yes, agree, best to build alumni network, use career center,& find alum employers looking for recent grads. Many opportunities not necessarily advertised. Other job openings may be required to be advertised but may have already pool of internal applicants.
Fellow students/recent grads who are employed may be more helpful than blind internet search.
Agree 100% as I’ve posted upthread… Career Center!!!
And a lot of the “AI reading resumes” is a bit of an urban legend (I have used AND been a beta tester for new products). It weeds out the pipefitter applying for a job as an actuary, and screens out the speech therapist applying for multiple jobs at the same company working in the investor relations function. It does NOT screen out a relatively new grad applying for a job for which he is qualified.
It’s great to be supportive of young kids who have not yet found a path. But the trope- 'it’s so hard, AI is screening out your resume" or “it’s so hard, the competition is fierce” is not terribly actionable. Probably more productive to suggest actual next steps than to continually reinforce “it was so much easier back in the day”.
I graduated into TWO recessions (undergrad, and then after working, and then B-school, a second recession) and I don’t think there is anything remotely wonderful or easy about launching “back in the day”. It took shoe leather and travel costs and an enormous amount of ingenuity to find opportunities; the job market was tight even in “recession proof” industries; there were no online courses if you wanted to learn computer programming or managerial accounting or “how to write a grant for a non-profit organization”. If you wanted a career pivot, you had to physically show up at “night school” or grad school.
But back then- as now- if you can’t narrow down what you are interested in doing, it is indeed difficult to land a great job.
He works 40 hours a week at the emt job and another 6 hours a week at the gym job. He’s also driving in L.A. traffic which is time consuming and expensive. He’s saved up several thousand dollars so that he’s ready with first, last, and deposit should he and his friends find a rental. Now that he’s decided law enforcement is not for him, he realizes he’s doing himself no favors working the emt job. There is no room for advancement and it will continue to be high stress and low pay. All of the discussion this week has lit a fire under him. He has some interviews set up, one a few hours away. I think he’s ready to make some big changes so that he can get into an industry he can enjoy and be able to afford to live independently.
The young guy who is working for my daughter did finally moved out of his parents house, he’s paying $1000 for a room with this girl he knew in high school, but no romantic interest. I think the area is near Glendale, he bikes to work even though he could technically work from home. He was living with his parent in Rancho Palos Verdes.
I can’t think of a single employer my kids applied to which did not use AI for screening. Any company getting a million resumes is using it, and it screens for a whole lot more than basic qualifications. Hirevue and Pymetrics must be making a mint. My tip is to get good at understanding it so you can pass the screen to the next round.
$1000 for a room is about the minimum. It would be easier to move in to a single room being rented out in a house than to have 3 or 4 guys trying to rent a house together. I think landlords take one look at them and think nooo.
On the flip side there is a software that enables applicants to apply to hundreds of jobs at a time. So employer use of AI is partly in response to that. I have friends who hire at a BB bank, and they told me they use it.
What do they use it for? It’s not a passive tool. If you are a large hospital system with multiple clinics, satellite offices, full standing hospitals you aren’t using it blindly. You are setting the parameters so that jobs which require an RN screen out anyone without one. You are setting the parameters so that “Board Certified Anesthesiologist” doesn’t end up with 5,000 resumes of dental hygienists.
Don’t spread needless fear of this technology. There are people who will apply to literally any job opening in their desired geography, and AI screens those folks out. It isn’t distinguishing between a kid who played college soccer and one who played viola in the college orchestra. The technology is smart enough to do that- but the people who pay for the technology are not that dumb.
I am not trying to spread fear. I am just saying we need to be mindful that there is a new layer in between the applicant and the HR dept of the company the applicant is interested in. That is just a fact of life. The criteria may be basic, or maybe not basic – i.e., they are tunable. It is up to the company. It helps to pay attention to what goes into your resume in terms of keywords that the job advertisement lists among other things. Let me give you an example. My son was helping a friend apply for an internship. That kid had a 3.3 GPA. My son advised to him to remove that line and put in a 3.7 GPA for his major (electrical engineering) as opposed to the overall 3.3 GPA. The kid got a sophomore internship at Face Book. This is how life works. If it is an AI reading the app with a GPA threshold, you are more likely to get picked up in the second case. In fact the friend was not getting any call backs with the first resume.
We shouldn’t willfully ignore what is happening in the labor market. It will only hurt us.
Not arguing the use of AI and ways to get past it, but much of this is not new. The GPA tweak is advice I would have been given decades ago. Likewise use of relevant keywords. The 3.3 GPA would have been put in the “NO” pile by a human first screener if the company had a cutoff. So some of this applies the same whether it’s a computer or a human reading the resume.
Again, there is zero evidence that the OP’s kid is getting screened out by AI.
And if that was the problem, a meeting with the folks at Career Services at his college would have flagged that in the first “resume draft review” meeting.
I see resumes from new grads all the time that bear the fingerprints of the career services folks- I love it. Kid took “statistics for business majors” and all of a sudden he’s a Big Data/Analytics expert. Student wrote a few articles which ended up on the college newspapers website and voila- a “Digital Content Creator/Strategist” is born.
But back to the OP’s kid since CC is not a debating society, right?
