One of the most cherished rituals of employment is the mind-wrenching ceremony called "filling out the application blank." All over the country, in bank after bank of steel files, are millions upon millions of completed application blanks, alt looking much alike, and all containing much the same useless information. Of the labors that went into filling them out, of the hopes and ambitions, of the personalities and real achievements of- the applicants, only a few hints are revealed. Said one employer of his application file, "The Agony Box. They sweat over filling out the forms, and I sweat over reading them, wondering what the people are really like."
The standard application form of 1974, after 40 years of development, is a statistical clerk's masterpiece-it can screen out just about everybody for any type of work. Everyone with whom I have discussed it-employees, personnel men, agency men, and management - have deplored its short-comings, but they all resort to the same answer: "It's all we've got, and we have to use something."
Theoretically, the application blank is a formalized resume of the applicant's employment history. It is supposed to show what a man has done, and presumably can do again on the next job. It makes no allowance for how well he did what he did, and provides no assurance that he will do well on the next job. I call it an obituary, because it so successfully buries a man's real values.
To any success-minded man, the whole idea of applying for another job is to further his program for getting ahead. But the application-resume is designed to disclose only that he is qualified to do much the same work as he has already done.
At the same time it raises a nasty little doubt-maybe he's not so qualified, if he has to hunt for another job. Even an employment history that shows a steady climb from low to high paying positions can raise the same doubts.
All employers are familiar with the glib talker who uses one good job to advance himself to a better two months before his faults catch up to him. Explaining this situation a company president said, "Firing a man is so much trouble he has to make a real mess before we get around to it. We keep hoping he'll go away, and when he gets the drift, he usually does-to a better job. Do we give him a letter of recommendation? of course. Doesn't everybody? The only letters of recommendation that really mean anything to me are from men I know personally."
If this variety of job jumper has one redeeming value, it's that he proves how easy it is to get a job, even with the wrong talents.
The application-resume is concerned with the applicant's past. The applicant is concerned with his future. The company is concerned with its future. So why all this concern with what is already obsolete? Even the old saying, "There's no substitute for experience," has lost its significance. Nor is there any validity anymore in the old and desperate complaint, "You can't get a job without experience, and you can't get experience without a job."
Today, with conditions and products changing with bewildering rapidity, too much experience can actually be a handicap. An auditor with 30 years experience in a wholesale house saw his department turned into what he called an "electronic nightmare" that did everything but collect bills from deadbeats. "Thirty years working my way to top of my department," he told me, "and that's the job I got-trying to collect from deadbeats." Fortunately he was an excellent man with tax figures, and is now a successful tax consultant, a job not likely to be taken over by an impersonal machine.
He is but one of the thousands whose jobs and lives are daily being altered in small or drastic ways. As the move toward decentralization by industry and government picks up speed, thousands are faced with the choice of following the job to various sections of the country or remaining where their roots are and hoping to find another job that may or may not have anything to do with past experience. Even in companies that remain firmly rooted, change is the order of the day. Flexibility and adjustability are qualities that are more important in many fields than experience, a word some employers regard as synonymous with "dated," or "rutted," or "not in tune with the times."
The fault lies not with the experience, but in the manner in which it is used. Conditions have changed, products have changed, and so have the methods of making .those products, but unchanged remains the thinking surrounding the hiring of the men and women.
