As a freelancer aka intermittently unemployed person I am a
big user of search.
In the hunt for work I spend a lot of time pounding the
virtual pavement searching for any faint whiff of a potential job. I read a lot
in the advertising trades about search engine optimization and the companies
who make that their business. Optimize away me hearties because my biggest
complaint across all the search engines and sites I have used is the lack of
search precision at giving me accurate answers to my simplest requests. They
really can’t seem to tell shit from shinola. The fact that both words begin
with `sh’ is obviously confusing. This is not generally a complaint I’m leveling
at Google or Bing or Yahoo or AOL, it’s the search engine monkeys who work on
the so-called job sites. I click on one such as Creative Jobs Central, for example,
and enter the keywords `Creative Director’. What I get back are links for senior
software designer or Fashion editor. On another such site I got Registered Nurse.
And another obviously thought the word Director was the most important word and
mined the depth of its garbage cans for anything with that word in. Managing
Director for Plush Toy Company and Financial Director for Internet start-up. I was surprised to see that Stage Director for end of year
school play was missing.I would have applied for that. Here are some other offerings
based upon a search request for Creative Director;-Director of Business
Development, Director of Employment Counsel, and a doozy here - Director of
Compensation Strategy, There was also a Worldwide Director of Emerging Markets
opportunity. And these are not unknown sites. Monster.com is a prime offender
sending me alerts that a job for Director of funeral services is crying out for my
application. Having clicked on a site obviously puts me on a list for adjacent
interest sites. `Jobs near your zip code’ sends me a list of jobs for Warehouse
Manager and Forklift operator at least 5 times a day. In response to Copywriter
I get Art Director jobs. Then there are the advice sites. How to power up your
resumé , how to get the job of your dreams and most worryingly how to apply for
a reverse mortgage. And then there are the people who email to tell me that
they love my resumé and think I would be perfect as their insurance agent or as
a purchaser of franchise. It scares me now in this time of unprecedented government surveillance
that somewhere in Idaho or wherever the big data reviewing machinery is with its bots and drones reading
all our mail and search histories that the same imprecision is at
work. In Terry Gilliam’s movie `Brazil’ a fly getting squashed in the mechanism
of a typewriter sets off a chain of misidentification. We don’t have flies to worry about but
we sure do have a lot of big bugs.
