Job-hunting 2.0

Job-hunting used to be a pretty personal endeavor. And it was all about you - the job applicant. The application process was designed to help you market yourself. Your cover letter and resume were your chance (if you didn't already know someone at the company) to start building a relationship between yourself and your hoped-for new workplace.

The advice from friends, career counselors and loved ones was also pretty consistent - keep your resume short, consistent and to the point. Ensure that your cover letter shows you to be engaging, confident and strong in your desire for the new job. And all of those things made sense.

But something pretty dramatic has happened over the last 10 years. Not only has the economic downturn changed the landscape of job-hunting (so that there are a whole lot more people looking for jobs and far fewer actually finding them), but the technology that powers many recruiting departments has transformed both how you submit your job application and what happens to it after it's been submitted.

The sad fact is that the first person to see your resume or cover letter these days won't commonly be a person at all. It will likely be a resume filtering application. It works like this:

• You submit your resume online (either by attaching a document or cutting and pasting the resume into an online form)
• The resume filter application scans your resume for the existence of certain "keywords" (like those used in Web search) and, if the right keywords - or enough of them - are found, then your resume may actually make it into the hands of a human being
• Presuming that your resume contains the keywords that the company is looking for, then the recruiter may actually start to read the fine words you've carefully composed in order to get their attention and explain how you are different and why the company NEEDS you

And all of that is very, very different advice than the traditional "keep it short, simple and to the point". I won't go into a lot of detail on job-hunting tips, as other blogs have already done a good job of that - such as last year's Underblog post that asked "Would You Pass The Resume-Filter Test?" and the excellent set of tips to which it linked at Iagora - which explains, in considerable detail - how best to create CVs for the New Reality.

This is an area I've been long interested in. A few years back, I interviewed a hiring industry luminary - Dr. David P. Jones - and he provided a great perspective on what were then looming trends in hiring. You can read that article here: http://www.verificationsinc.com/newsletter/01152007/million.html and, I think it's a great illustration of how things that were - not long ago - just 10 minutes into the future can have an impact on your present day life.

I'd welcome any tales and feedback from anyone who's currently job-hunting and how this new Resume Reality is impacting them.

Now turning to the future - Part 1 of many

This blog is called "Ten Minutes into the Future" for a reason. I created it to not only chronicle a life of living with - and using - new technology a little ahead of the pack (and talking about the many interesting people I've had a chance to meet along the way), but also to take a look into the future.

So for the next while (the immediate future), I'm going to focus on where I think various aspects of technology may take us - and how that will impact our lives. I'm going to start my focus by looking at an odd trend that simultaneously increases and decreases the importance of the devices that you use to enjoy or use the information you work with.

Take the basic word-processed document, for example. With online products such as Microsoft's Office Live - which you can access at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/web-apps/ you can work with your spreadsheets, word-processed documents and PowerPoint presentations from any popular browser. You don't need to be using your specific computer pulling information from its hard drive in order to be able to work with your information. It's all stored out in "the cloud" so that you can get it from wherever you happen to be - using whatever computer you have to hand at the time.

I admit there is really nothing radical in this idea. In many fundamental ways, it harkens back to the old days of the 'dumb terminal' when users would log into mainframes and minicomputers to work with their information - and it's certainly in line with the experience than is common to anyone who uses Facebook, Twitter or just about any one Web site that does anything more than provide textual information.

Former Sun Microsystems' former vice-president John Burdette Gage is largely credited with coining the phrase 'the network is the computer' and it really seems to have become true. Any reasonably-powered device (from a phone to a Web-enabled TV or gaming console to a high-powered desktop computer) can do most things on the Web that you would have typically expected that only a 'personal computer' could do 10 years ago.

And that trend is only likely to accelerate over the next 10 years - with huge implications for the entire technology industry and some important impacts for us as consumers. Over the next few posts, we'll look at those implications and impacts - starting with the impact of the cloud and online applications in the delivery of many of the services we use in our day-to-day lives - from how we apply for jobs, how we shop, how we use government services, where we live and how we get there.

Stay tuned!

Videophone: The Bathrobe Effect

For as long as I can remember, the videophone - in one form or another - has been a component of the science fiction of the near future. Whether it was Star Trek, Dick Tracey or The Jetsons, the idea of the videophone has been hugely popular. The desire to be able to look at the person you're talking to is very natural and human.

And the technology to do it is here - and has been for quite a while. And there are a lot of ways now to approximate making a video phone call - including Skype and a myriad of other video calling solutions. In addition, lots of big companies provide video conferencing facilities in their conference rooms - so that people can both see and here what's happening in a meeting that they are 'virtually' attending.

Despite all of this, the videophone as an artifact has really not yet arrived. And I have a theory as to why that is: there's a lot of value in not being seen. Having a telephone conversation without video ensures that the person on the other end - if they're engaged in the dialog at all - has to listen to the words you're saying (and how you're saying them) and doesn't get any of the visual cues about your body language.

You don't have to dress up to make a phone call. Anyone who's ever worked from home knows the value of being able to be professional and businesslike on a conference call, yet still be wearing that ratty old bathrobe that you got for Christmas 10 years ago and haven't been able to part with.

There are, of course, circumstances where you do want to be seen on a call - and there are now lots of options to do that. Those options are growing. When I purchased my latest cellphone last month, I noticed that it had front and back camera lenses for the express purpose of allowing video calls. Apple, of course, has made much of this feature in its latest iPhone.

But no matter how many lenses you put into a phone, I can't think of any circumstance under which I'd want to inflict the sight of me in a bathrobe - first thing in the morning - on the rest of the world. Only those who've built up the tolerance for such a sight should bear the responsibility for witnessing it.

And that, I predict, is why the videophone has been slow to become popular - despite the ability of technology to deliver it.

Ode to the Busy Signal

My favorite blogger recently pointed me to a New York Times Magazine piece on the disappearance of the analog phone (and the land line to which it was attached). It lamented the loss of reliability in telephone communication - and how we collectively seem to be willing to live with dropped calls, conversations in which words cut out and endless beeps and buzzes when texts and "incoming email" beeps cut into a phone conversation.

I must confess that the piece got me to thinking about some of things I miss about land lines. I miss the busy signal. It's something that is so rare now, that when I hear it, I don't hang up right away. I hang on the line for a while, savoring the fast-paced beep that sings the song of my teenage years.

It went like this: there's a girl want to call, but I haven't had the nerve. I finally get the courage to call her. I dial the number with apprehension. I sweat a little. And then..... I get a busy signal.

But it was OK. The busy signal didn't connote rejection. It didn't tell me that I personally was not the one she wanted to talk to. A busy signal might also be the very thing that helped me get the courage to ask her in person if she would go to the dance with me.

If I were a teenager today, I wouldn't get that second chance. She'd either see my number come up on Caller ID and ignore it. Or she might come on the line and say - "I'm on the other line - can I call you back?" Either way, I'd be crushed and rejected. Right then and there, without a moment for cool reflection, a chance for a great comeback - or a thought that perhaps fate was intervening.

The busy signal was also my friend in business. As a reporter, one of my jobs was often to get hold of people who didn't really want to talk to me - or, at the very least, were hard to get hold of. A busy signal told me that they could be gotten. They were not only near the phone. They were on it. So all I had to do was make their phone ring while they were still near the phone. And few people could resist a ringing phone. You never knew who it was going to be - and what message of joy or sadness might be delivered. The call might be Important.

And without Caller ID, the person I wanted to talk to would have no idea I was a reporter. If I heard a busy signal, I knew that there was a pretty good chance that if I keep dialing their number they would eventually finish their call and answer mine.

It strikes me that the beep-beep-beep of the busy signal was very democratic and egalitarian. Making a call was a "first come, first served" kind of thing. So if I called someone first, anyone and everyone else who called that person - no matter who they were - would get a busy signal until my conversation with that person was over.

So I guess I just wanted to say it: I miss the busy signal.

Hanging up now......

Old Tech: When does it stop being useful?

I have a curious technological dinosaur in my living room (and no, I'm not talking about myself). I'm talking about an old reel-to-reel tape deck that my Dad used for many years to record music - as well as the various musings of family members. I have it because I want to move the various bits of old audio he created into a digital form (probably WAV or MP3 files) so that they can be shared with the rest of the family.

But it's also kind of a cool thing to look at - with it's glowing VU meters, slowing rotating tape spindles and giant buttons. It has a real, tactile quality to it that I just don't feel from the digital recording software on my PC or smartphone.

For the purposes of this blog, however, the real question is when it - and other devices like it - stop being useful and make their way from being living room curiosities to items that need to get dropped off at Goodwill? Aside from the aesthetic quality of the device (and the same could be true of an old record player, VCR, cassette deck, 8-track tape player, slide projector or 8 mm movie projector), the real answer may be the use of the media with it is associated.

If I have old tapes, slides and movies, there's an obvious usefulness in keeping the old machines around. It also saves me the trouble of actually doing that "rainy day project" of moving all the pictures, audio tapes and video tapes from their current form to a digital one.

But I'm beginning to think there's more to it than that. There is actually something to the experience of watching slides on a classic projector, hearing the 'thunk' of a VHS tape as it stops in exactly the right place to begin playing an old movie or dropping the record player needle in exactly the right place on an old LP.

So I guess old technology really stops becoming useful when you stop having any feeling for it. Don Draper said it all in the classic Mad Men episode "The Wheel" - when he extols the virtues of Kodak's then new slide carousel with the following words:

"This device isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel, it's called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved."

As long as we want to keep going back to those places where we know we are loved, old technology will always be with us.