I suspect the famous children’s author, Dr. Suess, would have thought that hunting for jobs on LinkedIn is a little bit like fishing in McElligot’s Pool. By way of refresher the main plot of the book is set with a young boy named Marco, who is fishing in a small trash-filled pond named McElligot’s Pool. An older gentleman tells Marco, “You’re sort of a fool! You will never catch fish in McElligot’s Pool!”
Marco goes on to imagine that if he is just patient enough, his Pool, this small stream, might lead to a spring that leads to the sea in which all kinds of fish can be caught. Nowadays, when we throw our bait – or resume – into the LinkedIn Sea the model is different.
I suppose there must have been a time when getting your resume out the door would have been enough to be looked at by a corporation. You might at least get a nibble. Today things are different. You must rise above a cacophony of noise. And you are not just competing on paper; you are competing on other platforms and mediums as well. It’s not just digital copy, it is video, it is in film, and of course there is now a lot of eye-catching artificial intelligence generated content. You must go after everything with gusto or you risk being passed over by the invisible Cabal, the algorithm or Big Al as I call him. Big Al sometimes works with his cousin the application tracking system (ATS), or “ATS” as some refer to him. He’s efficient at sorting – better, even, than the sorting hat of Harry Potter’s world because according to Big Al, he is much faster.
Now, to be fair, I don’t blame the defensive gatekeepers who work in human resources. Their days fill up before they even start. For them it is a matter of keeping up with the process. They are wedded to the systems of thought and methodologies that they work in. They grind against the barriers of legal, finance, and a dictated speed of growth given to them from on high. Regardless of the human pace, Big Al never stops, and his cousin feeds resumes stuffed with keywords to recruiters at a breakneck pace.
After some research (and by research, I mean a Google search), I found that there are roughly 1.1 billion members on LinkedIn. Members are spread out over different countries; some are active while others are not. A smaller percentage pay for premium accounts to get their bait into better waters. The irony, of course, is that the ones out of work need to be chumming in better waters but cannot afford premium bait.
In the end Marco ends up winning over the skeptical farmer with his imagination. So where does this leave those of us fishing with cane poles? I guess we are left with a choice of moving to better waters or continuing to fish with our small worms – you never know what you might catch.
