Do not apply for jobs

Life as the proverbial productive member of a modern industrial, post-industrial, knowledge society means applying for a job.

We won't even talk about the many other applications you and, more so, your parents undergo in the United States. From kindergarten to a good urban high school, to the great college of you or your parents' dreams, these are preludes to applying for a job.

Around here, in the Wirtschaftswonderland of the K-Landers, youngsters start sending out job applications at least one year before they finish school. Teachers generally assist their wards by looking over those initial, insecure, first steps into adulthood.

A positive response will create joy and see a teen go to that first interview or, for a prized government job, an aptitude test. The latter really being an independent verification of what your grade report says the school taught you.

The blogster is not fond of the routine and ritualized system and basically refuses to apply for a job posted and filled by those rules.

The blogster's dirty little secrect is that It (gender neutral form of blogster) did in fact apply for college and indeed for the first "real" job after graduation.

So, the system does work, and the blogster is a silly hypocrite!

Well, life is complicated.

Other than that initial job, not a single worthwhile position held by the blogster since was the result of the typical job application. Typical as is: see job listing in paper or on web site, prepare standard application, get interview, get job.

Well before that first successful application, the blogster worked during the summer break, and all these jobs came by word of mouth. Company A is hiring for summer jobs, I know Person B there, give him a call and say I sent you.

Plum jobs, jobs for the highly talented, even lesser but cushy jobs, generally come to you via the old Oxbridge buddy, the class mate from this or that Ecole Sup, the co-worker who thinks highly of you or who owes you.

There are significant national labor market differences, we cannot discuss them in detail in a blog post. Suffice it to say that the recruiting industry in the US represents a more active pursuit of the "Best of the Best" than the more sedate German Arbeitsagentur which makes you wait for your career profile posting for two weeks until the PIN for your job center account arrives in the mail.

During boom times in certain industries, any warm body will do -- and they do call them warm bodies.

Assuming that a job posting is valid, unlike many in the US where IT companies must post before giving the job to a foreign worker, the two most basic facts can be summarized as follows.

The job may be in a bad company where no sane person wants to work
Around here in Germany, we recently heard some sad stories about a  delivery service company that screws over its workforce.

The company expects most of the respondents to not be a good match
The deck is stacked against you, even if you are a good match, there may be too many just like you. Hence all these tips that are like bad urban myths: how to make your resume stand out.

The fact of the matter is, the good, comfortably paid jobs that we are all conditioned to aim for, they will find you more often than the other way round.

At the end of the day, though, many among us may not have much - or any - choice as to a job.


Like those German delivery service workers.

And the latest government policies of making you go to the job center almost every day? 

Hollow exercises in futility.