I was looking for work last year and established a couple of auto-search features that are available on most job boards. If you’ve been blessed enough never to have had to used such a service, it’s basically a keyword search of all of the job postings: Rather than visiting the site every day, you tell the search engine what keywords you want to look for in all of the site's postings, and whenever there is a match, the site sends an email notification. I set up a free email account to receive these job notifications, and despite finding employment, I never turned off the search feature, so this electronic crawler continues to relentlessly scour the posts for “writer, copy writer, proofreader, researcher”, the keywords I chose when I started the engine.
I checked that email account today for the first time in months, and while I don’t want to change jobs, I figured I’d see what job opportunities I'd been missing out on. My search terms were “writer, copy writer, proofreader, researcher”. The results? Not one listing for a writer, proofreader, or researcher, but there were a few fascinating "matches" that appeared:
Bank Operations Manager
Oncology Nurse Practitioner
Senior Accountant
Administrative Assistant
Team Hospitalist (question: Does this involve hospitality, or hospitals?)
Associate Director of Transportation and Parking (at a large area hospital)
X-Ray film interpreter
Workman’s Compensation coordinator
I understand that any search by keywords is subject to both the whims of the job poster (perhaps an Administrative Assistant’s position includes research) and the vagaries of artificial intelligence (“interpreter” could be construed as a word-based concept, just as my search terms are), but even as diverse as the subject matter can be in copywriting, this Venn diagram does not seem plausible:
I am fortunate not to be looking for a job, as these notification emails would not encourage my search---I imagine being unemployed, broke, disheartened by prospects, concerned I would ever find a job writing, only to be told, “Perhaps you’d like to consider being an Associate Director of Transportation and Parking at the hospital.” (By the way, “Associate Director”? Associate is an HR term for a department store clerk, while a director is the head of a department. It sounds akin to “Chief Executive Intern.”)
I have friends who are looking for work, and I dread that they’re having similar experiences, search terms of “Marketing, Managing Director” likely yielding results that hit the entire spectrum between “Produce Market Manager” to “Infomercial Production Specialist.” And who knows, perhaps “Senior Accountant” as well, since that seems to come up without any logical correlation.
I pity the person at that accounting firm that has to sift through the resumes received through these search agent matches---if it showed up on a search for writing (arguably the antithesis of accounting), it’s probably showing up on a search for nearly any keywords. What if everyone who received these notifications decided to apply? After a few days, I expect they’d throw up their hands and say, “Forget this, let’s just hire the former Associate Director of Transportation and Parking. Close enough.”
