It was a solid night and following morning adding CyberCoders.com to the job search engines. Resume up, resume mangled (from their internal interpretation), resume corrected. Afterward, apply, apply, apply, …, apply.

With each submission, there are typically a couple of questions with free-form text response fields. “Tell me why you’re perfect for this job!” “Tell me about a time when…” “Describe your current tech stack.” Three or four per application seems about the mean. And as I was filling them out with some care, I remembered: It doesn’t seem to matter.

What does that mean? Statistics. If you enter the game with the overwhelming sense that you’ve got to stand out, you’ve probably lost. The days of the right weight and brightness of the paper stock, the font, and so forth? Those days are gone. That exercise in pounding your uploaded resume into a standard template with standard presentation has removed most of “you” from you. No guarantee here, but if on the other side the hiring folks are getting swamped, you might better spend your time pumping out two or three times as many submissions and hitting one who’s carefully looking for you. Hitting apply gets you a phone call or it doesn’t. If you get no calls, adjust.

I was suprised a week or so ago that I’d gotten a call for an interview so quickly. The half-hour scheduled easily went into an hour. “I’ll send you a link to a screening thing. Do that as the next step.” That screening was trivial. The work would have been idea. I got my hopes up ~ it was surely a shoe-in. “It was a pleasure chatting with you. I completed the work. Please acknowledge receipt and let me know the next steps.”

Crickets. Within a week, I saw the position closed and then reopened, this time with more details. The new stuff? I told them I was interested in working their commercial projects, but I would be very reluctant to go back into serving government projects. They ignored my up-front warning and scheduled me anyway. They wasted my time. I became invested in the outcome. They blew me off and changed tact.

Honestly, I knew better too. I actually should have insisted on holding the call to the scheduled 30 minutes, and the entire process should have been “shoot & forget.” A good reminder. This phase of life is well into the “This is me; take it or leave it” stage. I don’t want to accidentally find myself anywhere near the people pleasing, fully accomodating nonsense again.

Shoot and forget. Next target. Adjust fire if necessary. It’ll work out or it wont – no regrets either way.