Unpopular take: This was significantly better for employers and employees.
It worked as both an effort and presentation filter which both reduced the overload of candidates, allowing for more attention, higher variation of skills that didnt often show like traditional resume bonafides and mad companies more likely to invest more in employees as it was a pain to go do again.
For employees it was great too. Much like the world pre-dating apps the business world wasnt all looking for the equivalent of trust fund, 6'5", blue eyes. As well as the points mentioned above.
Second unpopular take: This was better for all involved, but it constrained the job market to geographical boundaries. People did not apply to jobs in other states/countries/continents because they did not see the job postings for other states/countries/continents.
You'd mail your resume in (it was a 'hack' back then to hand-deliver it), then get a call in a couple days or weeks. Then someone who was home during the day (if you already had a job) would answer the phone and take the message from the HR person (or they'd leave one on your answering machine), you'd then have an appointment to go in or return a call to set one up...
Mine is from Poland, early 90s, and even more analog. I worked at a Polish-Italian company. Our accountant used an ERP program, DOS, written in Clipper. There was no internet, so the vendor's consultant had to come to the office in person. The consultant was a young woman. She became my girlfriend and she pulled me into ERP.
The girlfriend left. The ERP stayed for over 30 years ;)
My job interview at this event went like: my name is first last name. I am a professional and I want to work for you. And they responded: we can tell you are a professional and we want you to work for us.
It’s way harder now-a-days!
Another tidbit, based upon finding out which company the phone number belonged to: you could go to the library and access business directories. Think the yellow pages, only they were geared towards businesses rather than towards consumers. Print versions were broken down by industry, but electronic ones (on CD-ROM) were searchable. It was also a tool for looking for unadvertised jobs, since those directories seemed to be geared towards making cold calls (albeit, for people doing sales).
In 2000 you could go to the library and look up the number in the Polk directory. There was one for each borough. There was an alphabetical section, a section by street address, and a section by phone number. You can still go down to the library and use them, for example if you want to know what was at 867 Madison Ave in 1926, or who had the phone number PENnsylvania 5000.
I worked on a project in 1990/1991 (pre-WWW) that involved making the phone book electronically accessible. For development my client purchased CD-ROMs containing the White Pages from the entire NYC tri-state area (NY, NJ, and CT), making it trivial for me to search by name and/or number. Once the web had been around for a few years, reverse-lookup became commonplace.
As someone who lived in NYC for a while circa 1999 the process at the time as I recall it was using a newspaper classified ad to find a broker to find an apartment.
The vast majority of actual apartment listings were all gatekept within the broker system making hiring a broker (with an insane fee) effectively mandatory for actually finding a place to live in a reasonable timeframe.
We were told the quality of paper mattered and that the envelope should have the same high-end watermark that the resume sheet had. Inkjet printed resumes were discouraged because the quality back then was low and the resolution made anti-aliasing on the type come out weird. Laser printed only, please.
Laser printers were expensive AF for poor guys just out of college looking for a job.
My BJ200 ca. 1993 had awesome print quality, comparable to a Laserjet II, if you used slightly glossy paper (so the ink wouldn’t bleed) and you waited a bit for the ink to dry on each sheet.
> Now that guy is probably competing with tons of people more talented willing to work for less
This strikes at the core of it. Life was simpler for those in the know about how the world worked. If you were lucky enough to grow up with the right parents, friends, family members, and class mates to help guide you through how the world worked it was easy. You could count on less competition by knowing where to look, how to present yourself, and what to say. Someone very talented but stuck in a situation where they didn't know how to find these jobs and apply properly was hard. You would lose career advancement at every step of the way relative to peers who had a social network that fed them this information.
If you're one of the people with more talent and hungry for work, life actually got simpler for you in modern times. The advantages of being well-connected and groomed by your parents for success are still there, but they're diminished when everyone can find advice on the internet.
I grew up on the cusp of this change. It's hard to communicate just how hard it was to navigate even simple things like interview prep or even dressing correctly for interviews if you weren't surrounded by people who had up to date info.
EDIT: To be clear, I was raised with a lot of advantages and had a lot of benefits. It was still striking how much of the early job search I had to fumble my way through in ways that would have been so easy to address with the unlimited online resources available today, which many of my peers had handled by their classmates or their parents' friend who had some industry familiarity. A specific example is that I didn't know that there were specific books for learning how to do programming job interviews. At first I just thought you had to learn how to be really good at programming, so I challenged myself to do a lot of tasks like I saw in the first interview I did. These days, it's unthinkable that someone would get all the way through college and into interview loops without knowing what a tech interview would be like and having the opportunity to practice.
> You could count on less competition by knowing where to look, how to present yourself, and what to say. Someone very talented but stuck in a situation where they didn't know how to find these jobs and apply properly was hard.
I'm not sure that is any less true today. If you were looking for a job, people used to go to a job centre or look at the classifieds. Since everyone did it, those were also the jobs with the most competition. Swap job centre and classifieds for online job boards, and you have the situation today. Yes, you have more people applying for the same jobs. On the other hand, that is balanced out by people applying for more jobs. It's hard to claim that applying for more jobs involves more work, though there is certainly a negative psychological impact.
On the other hand, knowing where to look (then or now) cuts out a lot of the competition. Having a social network feeding you that information cuts out even more competition.
It's less true today but the networking is also swizzled together with a huge pile of other resumes. The genuine high quality network opportunities still tend to rise to the top--how I got a gew jobs over the past 20+ years--but the noise is definitely greater, especially if you don't have that network.
Probably cuts out as much entry-level hires as AI does.
When you are comparing online job boards to employment centres and classifieds, they are more accessible and available. Employment centres always involved making a dedicated trip. Newspapers cost money and may involve a dedicated trip to fetch one. Not to mention that plenty of businesses simply didn't advertise jobs in print, particularly entry level jobs. Part of that may have been expectations: people would actually walk into businesses to drop off applications or see if openings are available. Again, it took a lot more effort to find those jobs.
Fun tidbit, I remember visiting Edmonton (Alberta, Canada) in the early 2010's. Boom times for them. It was a bit like walking into a different era with respect to job seeking since many business (again, entry level jobs) were advertising with help wanted signs in their windows.
> Life was simpler for those in the know about how the world worked. If you were lucky enough to grow up with the right parents, friends, family members, and class mates to help guide you through how the world worked it was easy.
This is called Social Capital. It is very much a class thing. Many older people recommended joining fraternal organizations (like frats or freemasons) to get these social connections.
Social capital (networks) help a lot for intros, but even without social connections there is a big difference between someone with access to the right information and someone who doesn't even know where to look for it.
A lot of people I know didn't have the right connections, but they were in the right place at the right time to pick up the information they needed for how to find the right jobs, how to prepare for interviews, and so on.
My university didn't do much job prep. They saw themselves as focused on the academic side, with getting a job as an exercise left to the reader. Many of my friends at other universities, especially the less difficult ones, were given a lot more info about how to prep for interviews and do job market related things.
I find that disgusting, actually: Western societies pretend to be meritocratic, when actually it’s really just nepotism and elitism.
I’m not shedding a single tear for those used to leading a privileged life thanks to their family or money, but have to actually compete with the rest of us now.
I once went through a recruiter to secure an interview for an engineering position. He insisted that I "suit up" so I did despite knowing it was out of touch with reality. I showed up to a non air conditioned building where the head of engineering was wearing ragged cutoff shorts. Last time I ever bothered with a recruiter.
Back in the day, the 4x5 (medium format film) experience requirement would have filtered out a lot of candidates. It was arty, weird and required expensive gear (Hasselblad or equivalent) and even more expensive film (around $1/exposure).
These days everybody can shoot unlimited high-res imagery for free with the phone in their pocket.
Your phone in your pocket is not sniffing medium format film resolution. It also lacks the latitude of really any negative film stock. Color wise slide film is still supreme to this day.
The realistic digital equivalent resolution of 4x5 film is around 40-50 megapixels, which iPhones have supported out of the box for a couple of years now.
Of course there's a lot more to taking good pictures than the raw sensor, but what I'm saying is that the barrier to entry is way lower than it was in the article's day.
I.e. for a time, it became easier for talented people to find a better role.
In the last 5-10 years though, between the race to the bottom and AI/Bot spam (even ignoring the overall decrease in job availability) things frankly suck.
I encountered one corporation where you walked up to security, told them you were there to look for work, and they directed you to an office that contained posting of currently available positions. As far as I know, they didn't advertise job openings anywhere else. If you weren't willing to drop by their offices, they weren't interested in considering you.
Of course, talking to anyone about a job within the building was an entirely different matter.
This is why your grandparents (or parents if you're a greybeard) still recommend going down to corporate offices and trying to hand your resume to a person/recruiter there. Nowadays it is all online resume screening. It is frustrating listening to people who haven't had to job-hunt for several decades.
I'm dreading the day I need/want to look for another job!
That said, there may be contexts where their advice would help. It's likely useless in all organizations that have a human resources department, since they will be dictating policy and may even be doing the initial screening. But smaller businesses? Quite often their handling of applications isn't all that different from my grandparent's day. Replacing that emailed resume with a hand delivered one may be enough to get their attention.
I also wonder how applicable modern approaches would be in towns and smaller cities. Something tells me they would rather only deal with local candidates and not have a bunch of people who apply from out of their area.
Years ago I had an important job interview. Unfortunately, 2 days prior I broke a bone in my right hand during a bicycle wreck. I didn't wanna show up to the interview with a cast on my hand/arm ("this guy is reckless."), so I cut it off. I interviewed with about 10 dudes that day, and they all wanted to give me a "strong handshake". It hurt like hell, but I had to maintain composure. I got the job. And I've been here for almost 25 years. :)
Very self-satisfied, and deservedly so. Like when you use that one piece of scrap wood in the garage you've been saving for this one occasion, or something from that drawer of metric-threaded bolts that just saves the project you're working on. It was all worth it, see? This is why we do it. No different with the author's digital preservation and online tool use. Pleasant read.
imo the job process is totally broken its an AI arms race. You have people doing mass ai apply with slop CVs and then recruitment just doing the inverse with AI ATS. Working on something I think could help solve the issue just need to find recruiters to talk to see if it's any good.
If someone's feeling especially playful, they might ask if it's a metric or imperial buttload. An imperial buttload would be loosely based on the idealized/claimed size of some prominent arse in the past, while a metric buttload implies the existence of a platinum-iridium reference derriere.
It worked as both an effort and presentation filter which both reduced the overload of candidates, allowing for more attention, higher variation of skills that didnt often show like traditional resume bonafides and mad companies more likely to invest more in employees as it was a pain to go do again.
For employees it was great too. Much like the world pre-dating apps the business world wasnt all looking for the equivalent of trust fund, 6'5", blue eyes. As well as the points mentioned above.
Because nobody was going to carry a Sun workstation down to the meeting room just for your interview.
The vast majority of actual apartment listings were all gatekept within the broker system making hiring a broker (with an insane fee) effectively mandatory for actually finding a place to live in a reasonable timeframe.
Every craigslist apartment I ever found was sketchy as hell.
The broker ones are kinda big scammers though, from what I remember.
My BJ200 ca. 1993 had awesome print quality, comparable to a Laserjet II, if you used slightly glossy paper (so the ink wouldn’t bleed) and you waited a bit for the ink to dry on each sheet.
Now that guy is probably competing with tons of people more talented willing to work for less
This strikes at the core of it. Life was simpler for those in the know about how the world worked. If you were lucky enough to grow up with the right parents, friends, family members, and class mates to help guide you through how the world worked it was easy. You could count on less competition by knowing where to look, how to present yourself, and what to say. Someone very talented but stuck in a situation where they didn't know how to find these jobs and apply properly was hard. You would lose career advancement at every step of the way relative to peers who had a social network that fed them this information.
If you're one of the people with more talent and hungry for work, life actually got simpler for you in modern times. The advantages of being well-connected and groomed by your parents for success are still there, but they're diminished when everyone can find advice on the internet.
I grew up on the cusp of this change. It's hard to communicate just how hard it was to navigate even simple things like interview prep or even dressing correctly for interviews if you weren't surrounded by people who had up to date info.
EDIT: To be clear, I was raised with a lot of advantages and had a lot of benefits. It was still striking how much of the early job search I had to fumble my way through in ways that would have been so easy to address with the unlimited online resources available today, which many of my peers had handled by their classmates or their parents' friend who had some industry familiarity. A specific example is that I didn't know that there were specific books for learning how to do programming job interviews. At first I just thought you had to learn how to be really good at programming, so I challenged myself to do a lot of tasks like I saw in the first interview I did. These days, it's unthinkable that someone would get all the way through college and into interview loops without knowing what a tech interview would be like and having the opportunity to practice.
I'm not sure that is any less true today. If you were looking for a job, people used to go to a job centre or look at the classifieds. Since everyone did it, those were also the jobs with the most competition. Swap job centre and classifieds for online job boards, and you have the situation today. Yes, you have more people applying for the same jobs. On the other hand, that is balanced out by people applying for more jobs. It's hard to claim that applying for more jobs involves more work, though there is certainly a negative psychological impact.
On the other hand, knowing where to look (then or now) cuts out a lot of the competition. Having a social network feeding you that information cuts out even more competition.
Probably cuts out as much entry-level hires as AI does.
This implies that more people know where to find the job listings and they've become more accessible and available.
Fun tidbit, I remember visiting Edmonton (Alberta, Canada) in the early 2010's. Boom times for them. It was a bit like walking into a different era with respect to job seeking since many business (again, entry level jobs) were advertising with help wanted signs in their windows.
This is called Social Capital. It is very much a class thing. Many older people recommended joining fraternal organizations (like frats or freemasons) to get these social connections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital
Lauren Rivera wrote a number of publications about this and how it impacts hiring at upper class firms, and who gets into nightclubs.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=tbzjN7QAAAAJ&hl=en
A lot of people I know didn't have the right connections, but they were in the right place at the right time to pick up the information they needed for how to find the right jobs, how to prepare for interviews, and so on.
My university didn't do much job prep. They saw themselves as focused on the academic side, with getting a job as an exercise left to the reader. Many of my friends at other universities, especially the less difficult ones, were given a lot more info about how to prep for interviews and do job market related things.
I’m not shedding a single tear for those used to leading a privileged life thanks to their family or money, but have to actually compete with the rest of us now.
Life was for sure simpler in times gone by, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was better. Definitely different.
I'm sure future posters will look back on these years with fondness for this or that as well.
These days everybody can shoot unlimited high-res imagery for free with the phone in their pocket.
Of course there's a lot more to taking good pictures than the raw sensor, but what I'm saying is that the barrier to entry is way lower than it was in the article's day.
I.e. for a time, it became easier for talented people to find a better role.
In the last 5-10 years though, between the race to the bottom and AI/Bot spam (even ignoring the overall decrease in job availability) things frankly suck.
Of course, talking to anyone about a job within the building was an entirely different matter.
That said, there may be contexts where their advice would help. It's likely useless in all organizations that have a human resources department, since they will be dictating policy and may even be doing the initial screening. But smaller businesses? Quite often their handling of applications isn't all that different from my grandparent's day. Replacing that emailed resume with a hand delivered one may be enough to get their attention.
I also wonder how applicable modern approaches would be in towns and smaller cities. Something tells me they would rather only deal with local candidates and not have a bunch of people who apply from out of their area.
That would make you eminently qualified for a position in AI these days.
Years ago I had an important job interview. Unfortunately, 2 days prior I broke a bone in my right hand during a bicycle wreck. I didn't wanna show up to the interview with a cast on my hand/arm ("this guy is reckless."), so I cut it off. I interviewed with about 10 dudes that day, and they all wanted to give me a "strong handshake". It hurt like hell, but I had to maintain composure. I got the job. And I've been here for almost 25 years. :)
"How We Used to Get Jobs".
Perhaps she said "bulk load of resumes" and you misheard it as the funnier version?
If someone's feeling especially playful, they might ask if it's a metric or imperial buttload. An imperial buttload would be loosely based on the idealized/claimed size of some prominent arse in the past, while a metric buttload implies the existence of a platinum-iridium reference derriere.