Growing up, I had a fascination with traveling fairs, and circus games. I was incapable of seeing the sunwashed, dull blue, lead paint chips flaking off the tattered wood frame on top of which the tilt-a-whirl spun, or the rattling, rusted tracks through which the rollercoaster’s lopsided wheels would pass as we whipped around a curve to head down a steep decline. I was deaf to my parents’ concerns. I would run off toward a machine which in their eyes seemed no safer than a crudely constructed catapult, and in mine held a mystical allure. Their screams trailed behind me, “Ryan, stop!” My attraction to unfairly-designed circus games—hoops too small for the object onto which players were instructed to fling them, or basketball hoops too small for a regulation-sized basketball—was just as fierce and unshakable. Unaware that the odds had not only been stacked against me, but that the probability of landing a hoop was the same as the probability of the earth following a triangular orbit around the sun, I filled attendant’s pockets with enough crumpled dollars to pay for one year’s tuition to medical school. Employers have begun to experiment with these same tactics, it seems, forcing job seekers into a farcically designed game, the parameters of which are designed to create losers, rather than winners.
Wall Street Journal contributor David Wessel asks if employers, tightening their hiring standards while laying off HR personnel, haven’t devised an impossibly hard hiring process, “pil[ing] up so many requirements that they make it nearly impossible to find anyone who fits.” Though, this concern is the corollary of another, more serious concern, related to the “now-ubiquitous use of software to screen applicants.” For fans of Star Trek, the job application process is becoming an impossible test, like the Kobayashi Maru, creating an unbeatable standard managed by an algorithm seemingly incapable of reading between the lines.
Supporting his concerns, Wessel describes an instance in which “a company that drew 25,000 applicants for a standard engineering [position],” while its HR staff found “not one [of the 25,000] was qualified.” While, as Wessel points out, the current job market landscape—and examples like the one above—will likely lead software developers to rethink their source code, in the end, like with the Kobayashi Maru, applicants will eventually learn how to game the algorithm, making employers better off without it. Until then, however, we are left “parroting” key words, trying to get a leg up in what sometimes feels like a game with impossible odds.
Of course, the office of career services is here to improve your odds, and wants to help you be the 1 in 25,000.
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