rainy, rainy monday

Here I go again... blogging when I should be job searching! I never realized how everything seems to come down to "optimization" these days... in other words, it's not just for search engines any more. Now our resumes all need to be "optimized" for specific, job-related keywords. I learned this when I applied for a new business development position (for which I am the perfect candidate, by the way!) and was told I didn't have enough experience in business development (or selling new accounts) to qualify for an interview. Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather when I heard that... anyone who looked at my resume would have clearly seen that this is not only a huge part of my background, it is my "forte"! But the recruiter said I needed to "incorporate specific keywords into my resume" in order to PROVE this to the hiring company. Apparently, no one even reads your resume anymore... they just scan it for specific keywords, same way Google scans gazillions of pages of web content to find the most relevant pages for your search. If the keywords aren't in there - in significant numbers - your resume just gets overlooked. After learning this new little tidbit of job-searching wisdom, I'm tempted to create a resume that makes absolutely no sense, has no complete sentence structure, and relates nothing about my 20+ years of experience... rather, I will simply repeat the relevant keywords throughout every paragraph and bullet point, and see if that will land me an interview. Should be an interesting experiment...

Meanwhile, a word of advice to all "traditional media" people (newspaper veterans, radio and broadcast, even outdoor advertising sales reps): Be aggressive... B-E- AGRESSIVE! Before long, you will be fighting for your life in an even larger pool of potential employees in already oversaturated job market. With just about every major newspaper and traditional media company about to go belly-up, there will be a huge (and I mean huge!) influx of unemployed media people out there with you looking to "break in" to the digital space... so be sure to "optimize" your resume with all the really cool interactive buzzwords that they haven't learned about yet. It will be the only way to compete in what promises to be dog-eat-dog job market.

Enough said.