Get On the Internet and Get A Job, You Lazy Bum!

Ah, the good ol' days. We met job recruiters in sterile office settings and even shook hands with women. Back in the olden days, if you were looking for a new job you'd find a company that does business in a field you were passionate about, like debt collection or blimp repair. You'd head over to the company's headquarters, which were real and actually existed in time and space, and submit a resume. If you looked half as good as your resume claimed you were you'd be called in for an interview.

You'd sit there face to face with a human being who detests you and tries to find reasons not to hire your desperate ass. After the brief interview, a criminal background check and a loyalty oath, you'd have a shiny new job and all the bullshit that comes with it.

Well, I'm here to say that nothing has changed and I can stop writing this article and go back to watching the three good episodes of The Critic on DVD over and over again.

I wish.

What happened is that companies started putting job postings on the Internet. Pyramid schemes, multi level marketing scams, technical support positions, sites like CareerBuilder and HotJobs have it all.

I went into one Internet job thinking I was going to assist in some marketing or some other nonsense and they ended up telling me to trespass into this office building and try to sell everyone Major League Baseball tickets. I ran for the hills.

Well, that's like marketing, but not exactly what I was looking for.

But it wasn't enough to send your awful resume which contained roughly six different fonts and was in full-color to a bunch of companies over the Internet and seeing what sticks. Now the passive applicant can fill out brief questionnaires and watch the job offers come rolling in, resulting in 67% less clicking for the average job seeker, with the Internet startup Jobfox!

Jobfox is the inspiration of Rob McGovern, one of the nation's foremost career experts.

We've built a revolutionary new job fit engine that's smart as a fox: it knows how to match people and jobs on The 10 Dimensions of a Good Job Fit (sm).

Where the hell do these generic pictures come from? These people look pretty damn scary, like they are about to sue me out of my land or something.The gist of it is that the site asks you a bunch of questions about your job experience and education and spits out a bunch of "matches" for you. Companies are then supposed to contact you and tell you that it's a match made in heaven and all your dreams have come true.

This eHarmony-like approach to job hunting concerns me. Filling out surveys and taking questionnaires for something as unimportant as finding your soul mate is one thing, but we're talking about people's careers here. You expect people to put their lives in the hands of a fox? The fox is the most untrustworthy critter of them all!

In the interest of fairness and to make a mockery of everything these good people have created and worked for, I decided to give Jobfox a try. According to their privacy policy, users are recommended to use a pseudonym because of privacy concerns. The one I decided to use was "Hassan Mikal".

First, I had to enter some employment info.