And also: are you joking?
Is this happening because HR-types are now using AI to write job descriptions and to screen resumés, so they need to come up with ever more inventive ways to torture jobseekers while justifying their own healthy pay packets?
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Or is there an assumption that we jobseekers are using AI, so you, the employer, think, ahh let’s make them do a video so they can’t just ask ChatGPT why they are qualified to stack shelves or make coffees or answer phones.
Instead, let’s get have them spend their period of forced unemployment developing deep fakes of themselves explaining how their impactful attitude has resulted in a 30 per cent increase in talking complete nonsense. This is surely better for them than worrying about how they are going to pay their mortgages.
It doesn’t stop there either because most of us desperate jobseekers also go to that terrible place where all of life’s events can be miraculously boiled down into three easy lessons which teach us the secrets of enduring professional and business success.
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I am, of course, talking about the special kind of purgatory that is LinkedIn. While there is an abundance of evidence to suggest that some strange people enjoy sharing their fake authentic selves on this platform, I refuse to believe anyone is there for any other reason than they have been convinced it is the only way to find a job or build a business.
So we dutifully update our LinkedIn profiles, we post three times a day, we craft clever answers to stupid key selection criteria that take an ungodly amount of time, all the while grappling with the fact that everyone else is using AI, but we just can’t make ourselves because it feels like cheating and we don’t cheat. And even if we did use it, we know that it isn’t the promised solution because we will still be writing … or AI will be writing … another application tomorrow.
We do all the things, and we wait. And then the HR people take forever, they ghost us, they reject us.
It’s all so stupid and such a painful, long and unnecessary process.
There has to be a better way. In LinkedIn talk, we need to disrupt the get-a-job industry! Where is the Uber or the Netflix or the Airbnb that is going to revolutionise and streamline and monetise the gaining of employment? A process that requires less work, not more.
Someone needs to develop that and the sooner, the better.
Of course, I have no idea how to do this. If I did, I’d probably have a job.
Tania Cammarano is a Melbourne writer.