By Tara Nykyforiak
Photos by Mark Burnham

Digitized processes deal students and new graduates a losing hand

If you’ve ever possessed a job within the contemporary work in dustry, you can relate to the frus trations involved with the online application process. It is these stressing and impersonal virtual forms that make me pine for a return to a more open and human time of job application.

As a teenager in high school (2005–2009), I can remember a great desire to obtain a part time job and the financial ind pendence it would award me. At that time, Craigslist job postings were becoming a normal mode for young people to respond to open job positions, but the tra ditional printed resume was still very much a part of obtaining a job as a young person. My Career and Personal Planning class even taught students how to craft and physically hand someone the ideal resume.

Throughout high school and the couple years following, I had come to really respect the process of personally establishing a rapport with the manager or supervisor everywhere I applied. I could project a positive image of myself to potential employers via a hand shake and a professional exchange of how I was motivated to work for them in the future despite having little to no work experience.

Applying in-person allows the prospective employee to feel more secure about themselves, and imbues applicants with a positive wellbeing. Be cause of the face-to-face con nection with the employer, any future followup calls can be done with the assurance that their resume did indeed reach the hands of a manager, and that he or she would be able to connect the name on the re sume with their face.

It has become the norm now for young people to apply for jobs online. This is typically done using the company’s online application database, whereby applicants fill in all required fields and have the op tion of uploading a file copy of their resume.

My own experiences with these applications are ones of anxiety, confusion, and bitter ness. For starters, there is the worry that something could go wrong, and that your applica tion does not successfully get uploaded to their database. After all, the webpage could freeze and all your application infor mation could be lost in a mat ter seconds. Another concern is the lack of knowing; did the existence of my job application even pass by the eyes of a hiring manager? Multiple times I have submitted my resume online and later spoke with the store’s man ager inperson only to have them tell me: “I’m sorry, but I have not yet reviewed your application.”

Granted, this could happen with printed resumes as well. There is no guarantee a man ager will read the resume you hand them. However, I can not accept that those hiring at minimum wage retail or fast food jobs can hide behind on line application databases. The point of these jobs is that one need have no previous experi ence. Applicants have little to no opportunity to exchange handshakes and establish real life impressions, which, besides nepotism, is the only possible prerequisite one can have.

Job hunting, especially as an adolescent or twenty something,is both daunting and discouraging. Having a job market that looks only at the experience demonstrated through online applications is unfair, because the mantra being preached is “you can’t land a job without experience.” When reaching out to employers through a medium un conducive to projecting dedica tion and drive, the job market adopts the further disparaging reality of “you can’t get experience without a job,” which is made that much more difficult via online applications.