Bait and Switch?

My current situation is such that I have no choice but to find a job. My husband thought he had things in place to take care of me as I took care of him for the past several years, but unfortunately, that isn’t how it is working out. So, at a month short of 55 years old, and after nearly a decade I am looking for work. Things have really changed.

I’ve researched “best practices” as regards resume’s and such and it seems that now you almost have to create a resume’ for each firm you ship one off to. This is required because the objective is for a living breathing human to take a look at it and hopefully find you worthy of an in-person meeting. To even have a shot at this viewing of your skills summary by “organic” eyes you are, in many if not most cases going to need to get past the electronic/mechanical “gate keeper” the applicant tracking system. The challenge is to “seed” your resume’ with exactly the right words or phrases that this app tracker has been programmed to “like” so that it will green light you to move on to an actual, living, breathing human being. BUT it doesn’t stop there. Those words or phrases are important, but you have to be careful because those trackers are “smart” they’re also programmed to know when you’ve just put those words/phrases in there to try to get past them and they also will toss you in the electronic circular file if there are too many of the right words because even though they’ve never met you, they just KNOW when you’re lying or even “embellishing” the truth. So, if you send out 100 resume’s that you’ve carefully “personalized” for each job posting you MIGHT get past the tracker gizmos, let’s be optimistic and say half the time. The other half you’ve basically wasted time that, when you’ve got nothing coming in to support yourself, is very valuable.

There is also advice spattered all over the internet telling me NOT to include anything that would disclose my age, ethnicity, or gender along with other things that make up ME that could be considered discriminatory if they happened to influence an employment decision. Okay, so, can’t put my name on there. I don’t know many, well, ANY males named Lori. So there’s a challenge. The ethnicity is pretty easy I guess, but the age thing? Of course I don’t waste valuable resume’ real estate by adding a line stating proudly that I’m an old broad. But when that app tracker, or in best case the human next in line sees the dates of my job experience or if I omit the actual dates, how much job experience I have and surmises that I’ve not had a new job each week, they’re going to have a bit of a clue that I’m not a kid. So short of omitting a bunch of potentially valuable and relevant experience and risking accusations of falsifying my resume’ there is really no way to NOT risk age discrimination.

Of course another thing every source I’ve referenced in my attempt to create a more hospitable environment for my job search tells me is NOT to embellish my resume’ to make it appear I’m more qualified for a position than I am, or worse, qualified when I’m not at all. That actually makes sense to me. Why set myself up for potential failure? So I don’t do that and don’t even submit my resume’ unless I am sure I can succeed at the position in question. Anything else and I’m wasting everyone’s time.

My request, in light of that embellishment thing, is that those posting the open positions call them what they actually are. Don’t “embellish” them or be deceptive in any way about them. I may be unemployed and looking but my time is worth just as much as theirs. Potentially more in that I am the only one currently contributing to that value and unless they are the only entity working at the firm in question, others are making a contribution to their worth however, small it may be. So please, if you are searching for someone to sell life insurance on a commission only based salary structure, then say so. Don’t call it a “Benefits Specialist” and when recruiting tell the prospective recruit that they would be taking INCOMING calls to answer questions about benefits your clients already enjoy. At best that’s deceptive and a bait and switch. In reality, it’s an outright LIE and that “interview” you had me excited about? Yeah, a sales presentation about your company and the joys of signing my life away to you in a room with about 30 other people is NOT an interview it is/was a waste of my, and your time and I’m guessing that of most of the others who were there as I chatted with one other man present on the way out who was as perplexed and irritated about the whole experience as I was.

I cry FOUL!