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How we used to get jobs: A newspaper classifieds story
- jambalaya8 2mo agoFondly remembering postings for TAL and SNOBOL jobs in the classifieds before the book store near me had books on SQL in the early 90s.
- mikestew 2mo agoIn case the headline makes no sense, the original title before being mangled by the HN headline censor: "How We Used to Get Jobs".
- rzzzt 2mo agoLooking straight into the eyes, strong handshake, exuding confidence?
- ricardonunez 2mo agoThis but after going inside the building without authorization and saying you will not leave without a job.
- II2II 2mo agoI 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.
- Tangurena2 2mo agoThis 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.
- II2II 2mo agoI'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.
- Telaneo 2mo agoI'm waiting for a TV show or Youtube series about people over 50 who go looking for jobs using only these kinds of methods. I remember asking my grandmother what she thought a large number of applicants would be for a job. She said 10. The local grocery store gets 200+. I don't think there's a single vacancy out there which gets a single digit number of applicants any more (they might all be AI, which you can (hopefully) quickly rule out, but still).
- Tangurena2 2mo agoWhen the dot com bubble popped, I was out of work for an extended period. I ended up living with some older friends (about 10 years older than myself and I was about 40 at that time). They gave the "hand out resumes" advice along with thinking that I could get a part time gig at the grocery store (packing groceries). They never understood that most tech recruitment at that time went through recruiters and that all the local grocery stores were unionized and had waiting lists to get rehired. The Mrs had not looked for a job in 20-ish years. I ended up getting one through the bodyshop/agency that the Mr was working at. That city had 3 basic industries: defense, fast food and religion. The defense contractors all wanted current top secret clearances (I had bad debt at that time) and the religious employers all wanted "testimonies of faith" (think SF-86 but aimed at religious beliefs, and required 10+ years of church attendance with names & numbers of the reverend/priest/etc to vouch for you).
- JoshTriplett 2mo ago> This but after going inside the building without authorization That would make you eminently qualified for a position in AI these days.
- jimt1234 2mo ago> ... strong handshake ... 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. :)
- subpixel 2mo agoNot only jobs, but NYC apartments - although in the Voice not the Times.
- georgemcbay 2mo agoAs 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.
- geoduck14 2mo agoWhat about the obituary?
- theturtle 2mo ago[dead]
- busterarm 2mo agoBrokers still gatekeep the best inventory in NYC for the most part. Every craigslist apartment I ever found was sketchy as hell.
- pavel_lishin 2mo agoEvery Craigslist apartment listing I've ever seen turned out to be through a broker as well.
- busterarm 2mo agoThey have/had broker/no-broker categories and I never had the budget for broker. The broker ones are kinda big scammers though, from what I remember.
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- aksss 2mo agoVery 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.
- pudgywalsh 2mo agoHow tech company HR departments game the system for PERM jobs: A newspaper classifieds story
- tayo42 2mo agoIdk if it's true but it seems like life was simpler before the Internet took off. Now that guy is probably competing with tons of people more talented willing to work for less
- whaleofatw2022 2mo agoUsed to flip both ways... 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.
- spicyusername 2mo agoSimplicity and convenience are often inversely correlated. 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.
- DrewADesign 2mo agoI don’t think most people under 40 can wrap their head around what it was like to need to be home or at work for someone to reach you, which required a phone call. And you couldn’t make a phone call unless you were at home or work, or stopped at a pay phone. And what if you called someone that wasn’t home? Or were on the can and couldn’t pick up in a few rings? Sure you could leave a message but they probably had no way to get back in touch with you. You just had to wait and hope they called again. No text. No email. No Caller ID for most people pre-internet. No GPS for most people, and even if they could give you GPS coordinates, wear are you going to with them? Hope you got a really big fucking globe.
- dyauspitr 2mo agoYeah, but none of that really mattered, did it? The expectation everywhere was you couldn’t really reach people that easily so you didn’t and you didn’t miss it. Also going to places involved mapping out your path on a map ahead of time and then struggling a little bit in complicated places where you would ask local people for directions. There was no GPS. We didn’t know what we were missing. It didn’t feel like a real problem at all.
- II2II 2mo agoAnother 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).
- kmoser 2mo agoI 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.
- bigbuppo 2mo agoAnd then it disappeared once "Find out who called you only $50 or subscribe for $35 or we'll add you to our bad public records site" became a business model.
- dn3500 2mo agoIn 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.
- bluedino 2mo agoYou'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...
- froindt 2mo agoA friend is searching for a job right now and was surprised to encounter an online job posting requesting mailed in resumes. Next we need a service that will tailor resumes to job descriptions using LLM's (already easily available) while also having an integrated "mail this resume" function. First class postage on printer paper will be the default, but you can pay more for cardstock, pink paper, and a scent to give it a little something extra.
- danillonunes 2mo agoOf course, there will also be a service targeted for the companies that receives the mailed in resumes, scans and OCR them and maybe even send the results to an LLM to make further filters and classifications. And here's the neat thing: If both services are provided by the same company, they can even save the costs of actually sending the physical paper to themselves!
- CuriouslyC 2mo agoNo need for a service, agents with a resume can retool it to match it a target just fine already (talk to a hiring manager to see how much this is already going on) and there are already physical printing + delivery services the agent can pay to complete the application for you.
- krackers 2mo ago>I’ve just gone through a butt load of resumes Perhaps she said "bulk load of resumes" and you misheard it as the funnier version?
- jagged-chisel 2mo agoBoat load?
- JoshTriplett 2mo agoNope, this is a common expression. 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.
- strictnein 2mo agoRelated to the shit ton and metric shit ton.
- Terr_ 2mo agoAnother quantity is "an ass-load, and I wouldn't be surprised if that came first and then butt-load is the toned-down version. https://xkcd.com/37/ https://xkcd.com/37/
- vharuck 2mo agoWhy, my good poster, there's nothing funny about 48 bushels in my butt (i.e. towed cart). https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/buttload https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/buttload
- andyjohnson0 2mo agoYou still had to do a coding test -- but it was pointing to the bug in the C++ linked-list implementation on a single sheet of line printer paper. Because nobody was going to carry a Sun workstation down to the meeting room just for your interview.
- freedomben 2mo agoI remember a Java job interview like that. "Tell us what you would do to improve this code" with a couple pages of code printed out :-D
- throwway120385 2mo agoI still do that because 75% of the work I oversee involves reading other peoples' code and spotting problems with it.
- QuercusMax 2mo agoI took a paper coding test in 2004 when I was job hunting. It was pretty hilarious to me, really, since it was so incredibly easy (multiple choice data-structures type questions) for anybody who had any skills at all. They finally offered me a job 3 months later after I already had started working somewhere else.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2mo agoThree months! Do you know if that was their standard process or the original candidate fell through?
- QuercusMax 2mo agoWasn't the only company I heard from after that long a time. I assume their hiring process was just very broken and slow. Even Google in 2015 took their sweet time getting back to me after my interviews. At one point the recruiter told me that my offer letter took a week going thru interoffice mail waiting for a signature, and then it took 2 more weeks before they actually sent me the offer.
- yonran 2mo agoThe newspaper does still have job listings e.g. for Amazon, NVIDIA, DoorDash, Tesla, Chewy. I haven’t been having much luck applying to them though...
- Den_VR 2mo agoAh yes, the h1b box checker ads.
- eloisant 2mo agoTo be fair that h1b requirement is stupid.
- loloquwowndueo 2mo agoChewy! Yay
- fragmede 2mo agoAccording too the linked article, you should try faxing your resume to them. Have you tried that?
- calculatte 2mo agoThose jobs aren't meant for you... they post in the classifieds with the hopes nobody responds. All to game the labor market test allowing their visa worker to get a green card.
- profdevloper 2mo agoYes this is a common PERM loophole that companies exploit for cheap labor -- they can't get applicants to respond, so they have to look outside the US
- ogou 2mo agoWe 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.
- loloquwowndueo 2mo agoLaser 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.
- freedomben 2mo agoIndeed, I remember being told to go to kinkos and have it printed there since I didn't have a laser printer
- gorfian_robot 2mo agoI miss 24hr kinkos
- clintmcmahon 2mo agoOr attending a local job fair with a stack of printed resumes.
- Tangurena2 2mo agoI did that when I was younger. Also, the advice was to print your resumes on heavy bond paper so that you looked upper class.
- zippyman55 2mo agoMy 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!
- mustafak99 2mo agoimo 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.
- Terr_ 2mo agoAlmost worse than indiscriminate applications are the fraudulent ones, where the applicant isn't sharing the own answers in interviews, isn't the one in the interview at all, or sometimes never existed.
- bluemoonx 2mo ago[flagged]
- Pawel_SkimmIQ 2mo agoMine 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 ;)
- beepbopboopp 2mo agoUnpopular 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.
- warkdarrior 2mo agoSecond 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.
- Xirdus 2mo agoThird unpopular take: this geographical restriction was a good thing.
- reactordev 2mo agoFourth unpopular take: without it Silicon Valley wouldn’t exist.
- alephnerd 2mo agoSV exists thanks to CA's lack of non-competes and the Stanford and UC Berkeley innovation ecosystem. Otherwise, Boston, NYC, DMV, Seattle, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, and others all could have become the next Silicon Valley.
- paleotrope 2mo agoThat's interesting because it's way more complicated than that. Boston had the 128 loop and Digital. TI in dallas. Simi valley. I think it's more like the end of defense spending in the late 80s early 90s winnowed down the several "SV"s into only one.
- arnonejoe 2mo agoClassified ads for jobs were still a thing up until around Y2K. MonsterBoard (what it used to be called) was one of the first online job platforms and then Dice came along. I used to have good luck finding contract gigs through dice.
- nabbed 2mo agoI responded to an ad in the newspaper for a C programming job way back in mid-1980s. The team that posted the ad was not impressed with my resume, but they sent it on to a different team within the same company. That team hired me and I stayed at that company for 14 years. Unlike the author, I kept the ad in a box for 35 years, at which point I scanned it and threw out the hard copy. Edit: Also, the resume I mailed to them was printed by a print shop.
- thataccount 2mo agoI remember back when the Thrifty Nickle was how you could find all kinds of things up to and including your next vehicle.
- sosodev 2mo agoI had an old coworker who told me he got into software development in the sixties by walking into an IBM office and asking for a job. He had no education beyond high school and no experience with computers. They just had him take an aptitude test and then he worked on mainframes for decades.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- beezlebroxxxxxx 2mo agoWorking on mainframes and with computers was considered secretarial work by almost everyone around that time. The role of computers in work, and the status of working with computers, has changed in incredible ways.
- effnorwood 2mo ago[dead]
- drmpeg 2mo agoIn 1981, my first job in Silicon Valley was obtained by answering a blind (no company name) ad in the Mercury News. It was a kooky company that built burn-in ovens for semiconductors (mostly 2164 memory chips back then). I had a lot of fun there. The purchasing manager was a Scottish guy and he had an after hours drinking club in a small conference room with a wet bar. I was only 24 years old and working crazy hours. I'd get a few beers around 7 pm and then go back to work writing 8080 assembly language code for a few more hours. I also ended up smoking weed with the CEO and CFO a couple of times. The CFO was not a young guy. I'm not sure how old he was, but he had all white hair. The CEO gave me a mason jar full of his homegrown weed as a gift when I finished the project. That company and even the building is long gone. It's now a Google parking garage.
- Ozzie-D 2mo ago[flagged]
- kittikitti 2mo agoI recommend https://www.jobs.now/ https://www.jobs.now/ because corporations use this loophole to block jobs and eliminate bargaining power. As of this comment, here are some of the companies that are still exploiting the system, AT&T Services, Inc. Goldman Sachs Amazon Boston Consulting Group Wal-Mart Crowdstrike JPMorgan Chase & Co. DocuSign I was hoping for a mention about this HR backdoor, but it wasn't covered.
- antod 2mo agoOnly my first job involved newspaper ads (early 90s). My second job pivoting into tech came via USENET, and later jobs from networks or shoulder tapping by recruiters.
- kotaKat 2mo agoMy last job was vaguely classifieds-related: the company posted a local press release into the newspaper bragging about how they'd come to the area to serve a couple local clients and I ended up snooping their careers page to find out that they had an open spot (and the dude that spun the site up was leaving) -- right place, right time? As a teen though (even in the late 2000s): I walked into various places asking for applications and somehow was one of the only teens to go all the way down to the Duty Free to ask if they were hiring (because it's past a tollbooth and inside a big fenced in Customs point of no return). The manager asked if I'd seen his ad in the paper and I hadn't, I said I just figured it was retail that might be hiring. Nailed it.
- ButlerianJihad 2mo agoAfter my burgeoning career cratered and jobs weren't pouring in because my résumé was impressing naïve, desperate managers during the cusp of the dot-com boom, I found myself in a homeless shelter with a newspaper and a phone. And yeah, shelters are harsh. A lot of them turn us all out on the streets during the day, because shelters are exclusively for sleeping and hygiene. So you trudge around town during the day to find food, work, and a purpose in life. So they would have an "employment resource room" with stacks of newspapers and little phone carrels for us to call anyone. And yours truly here had not the slightest clue or inkling how to actually conduct a job search. I didn't know how to design or write a CV, I didn't know how to approach employers, and of course, by the late 1990s, classified help-wanted ads were a really, really shitty way for an "IT Professional" to find anything. But I could do nothing but try. Eventually, I found some scammy call-centers who would hire anyone. And I worked as a scammy caller in a fly-by-night call-center. I worked day labor. And landing these jobs didn't teach or train me in the slightest how to seek jobs, how to market myself, or how to interview. I still don't really know how. ATS and gatekeepers and my lousy, holey work history? It's a lost cause in today's market. I've learned a lot of tips and tricks since then, but in the end, it's about making yourself a good product, offering value to a company, and finding the right fit before you go insane and just apply for SSDI.
- insane_dreamer 2mo agoI wonder if anyone finds jobs on Craigslist anymore
- insane_dreamer 2mo agowhile the personal touch has pretty much disappeared from the hiring process at tech companies, it can still be found. About 5 years ago my daughter applied to a tech company as she was graduating from college (they had a booth at the job fair at her school). within a few days she heard back and they offered to fly her out to their campus (halfway across the country) for an interview. the "interview" consisted of various managers talking to her as they walked around the campus (it's an exceptionally nice campus) -- never sat down in an office, no stupid leetcode, etc. She flew back to college that evening and had an offer in her inbox by the time she arrived. She's worked at the company ever since.