Too Many Choices

Some years ago my father had need of an additional clerical worker for his business, and decided to place an ad in one of the online job systems, since that is a cheap and effective way of gaining many choices of people to interview, and because one of the duties of the new position was going to be Internet research anyway. In the event, this strategy worked much too well for comfort, in the sense that within minutes of posting the ad there were over 900 responses, from as far away as Maine and Argentina, and including people from all of the professions and every conceivable walk of life. In this group of replies were an amazing number of people with no clerical skills at all, who were not actually interested in the position in the first place, but had just set up their computer to apply for every job meeting certain parameters – which appeared to be any job offered within an English-speaking country. As the minutes went by the numbers continued to rise, albeit at a slower rate, until the office manager decided they’d had enough and closed the listing…

Now, back in the days before there were Internet job sites, none of these issues would ever have come up. People had to write cover letters, or at least address them, address and envelope, and invest in a stamp. And while stamps were cheaper back then, if you were sending out dozens or hundreds of resumes each day, they would still have added up after a while. In addition, if you were going to write an actual cover letter addressed to a person’s name and addressing the specific requirements mentioned in a job ad, there was a hard limit to how many applications you could mail in one day, especially since you were writing these letters on a typewriter and couldn’t just change the headers in your Word document. Then you had the issue of finding that many ads to respond to in the first place, since the local newspaper would only have so many of them on any given day, and inevitably, the vast majority would be for jobs outside your qualifications. Assuming, of course, that you had any qualifications in the first place…

Even worse, though, if you were a human resources specialist or a hiring manager in those days, was placing an ad with a telephone number. With no need to invest money or time, dozens or hundreds of people would call the phone number, and at least half of them would be people who knew they had no hope of landing the job and were either desperate or bored. I always suspected that a large percentage of those people were actually on unemployment and/or welfare, and were using the telephone calls as “proof” that they were looking for a job, so their case manager would disburse that week’s benefits, but from a functional standpoint it didn’t make a lot of difference. Whatever their reason for wasting my time might have been, it still kept me away from both my actual job and taking with legitimate candidates. I had no idea that within a few years things were going to get much, much worse…

The basic concept of information overload is probably the single largest problem in our new information age. No matter how extensive or detailed your data might be, if you can’t access it or process it – if you can’t find the one relevant fact that will solve your problem or accomplish your purpose – then you might as well be sitting at a government-surplus desk with a typewriter and a large stack of badly-written letters and resumes to read through. So when you find that dream job, that suits you perfectly and for which you are perfectly suited, and wonder why you never get a call back, just remember that somewhere some poor human resources specialist or hiring manager is probably looking at an inbox with thousands (if not tens of thousands) of applicants, and seriously considering changing careers to go into poultry farming – or any other occupation where information overload isn’t part of their daily routine…