Campaign Hiring

We are now less than a week away from nation-wide general elections. If you are like me, you are sick of the ads and just want it to be over at this point. I heard yesterday that some candidate had taken the day off in preparation for the run-up to next Tuesday because she was planning on conducting two 24-hour long blitzes. Where is she going to be at 2:00 in the morning to campaign? Wal-Mart? Joe's Cat House out by the airport? I don't get it.

Aren't you glad regular job searching isn't like political campaigning? Think about it. If you had to conduct your job search like a political campaign we'd be a nation of lie-abouts. First of all, you would have to identify the job you wanted at least six months ahead of time, and maybe even up to two years ahead of time. Then you would have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign expenses - signs, ads, barbeque dinners, etc. - to gain name recognition by the hiring manager.

The background check would be a thing of the past because the press would take care of taking apart your life's history and waving anything derogatory on the front page. Woe be to you if you were indiscreet or just plain stupid during your college days like the rest of us. It would be yanked out and dissected like those frogs from biology class. And it would smell similar, I'm sure.

All the candidates for the position would be doing this so you would have an average of 199 competitors during this period. Then you would get to the first interview (the primary). After the first interview, the field would be narrowed to maybe ten finalists (like a beauty contest) and that's when the real fun would start. You would have three months to remake your case starting almost from scratch while trying not to sound redundant in every sentence.

Finally, the big day comes - election/hiring day. You've done three twenty-four hour blitzes outside the corporate headquarters of the company that you are targeting. You've divested yourself of any competing company's stock. You've put 100K miles on the bus you rented to travel from company branch to company branch to network. It's down to the wire.

Either you will get the job or you won't. But wait! The announcement isn't what you expected! They haven't chosen one from the ten. They've chosen three from the ten and told you there will be another, special election. You have to go through all this even longer! And what if there's a recount? Hanging chads or something?

Not to worry. At the last minute after months of campaigning and schmoozing and networking and stress, they announce that the position was not going to be funded after all and thank you for your interest.

Back to square one.

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