What Happens When…

…a 57-year-old Woman is Thrust Into the Job Market Under the Worst Possible Economic Conditions Imaginable

This is a chronicle of what happens when a 57-year woman with outstanding experience and stellar credentials (me) embarks on a job search in a youth-oriented, beauty-obsessed culture with a recruitment process gate-kept by inexperienced, chatty but inarticulate recent grads who are physically attractive but intellectually challenged and socially inept. This is about what happens when all the old-school common courtesies have been edited out of the playbook’s talking points pages as too time-consuming and wasteful; when people who are updating their Facebook pages with Twitter feeds 10 times day with such gems as “Ugh, Mondays” somehow can’t find the time to let you know your appointment has been cancelled or, as in one “true story” instance, to bother to tell three senior executive hiring managers they had an appointment with me.

This is about an environment in which an over-accommodating potential candidate (yes, me) drives 150 miles to meet with a road warrior director during his one-day stopover in a “nearby” Connecticut office and who, upon arrival, is not offered so much as a glass of water.

This is about what happens when all the normal courtesies and common sense go out the window: 4-hour marathon interviews scheduled from 10:30 – 2:30, sustenance be damned; inquisition type settings in which the candidate sits at a conference room table across from a panel of 4 with an additional 6 talking heads participating simultaneously via video conference; 3, 4, and sometimes 5 multi-meeting call-back interviews so that the candidate can be grilled by every carbon-based life form with a perceived stake in the selection from the CEO to the head of lobby security.

This is about what happens when corporate indecisiveness comes face to face with a seemingly infinite pool of qualified candidates; when hiring decisions must be reached by the consensus of a group of perceived stakeholders that numbers in the double digits. What happens is this: searches that typically span 3 to 4 months, and in at least 2 specific personal instances, more than a year; searches that are mysteriously halted, restarted, and halted again; executive recruiters who attempt to muscle in on one another’s  job listings and even those posted directly by hiring firms on their own career sites, who trash talk one another’s candidates, and who send hastily scribbled screeds to job seekers who had the audacity to try and find work on their own.

This is a chronicle of a chaotic, unprofessional, irrational, ageist, discriminatory, ridiculous environment known as “the job market.”

Let us begin.