Dear Hiring Manager:

This message is for the brave few of you who may have made it through my 5 pages of portfolio to my lonely blog page. Congratulations for cutting through the artificial intelligence that tends to screen out any applications that may not include all qualifications in a job posting, and digging deeper into my resume to find the real golden value of my experience.

As you may already be aware, career pivoting is not so easy in the middle of a pandemic. For those like myself who were unfortunate enough to have invested years in industries that have been devastated financially by the affects of COVID-19, it has been a tough road of re-education, re-experience, and re-wiring of the brain cells to be frank. As I was a hiring manager myself for close to a decade, I can respect the high level of detail in your job descriptions, but one needs to take the opportunity to review resumes with his/her own eyes with a mind to find the best fit for hire, and that may not necessarily entail the meeting of every single qualification in a description (besides the fact that most candidates would not be able to possess every qualification, even among the current high population of job searchers). Considering my specialized industry of experiential marketing for live events, I often was not even privileged the luxury of selecting candidates native to my field, and had to expand my sights toward other translatable skill sets. I found my highest successes in talent selection rested upon my intuition about the candidate’s skills, portfolio quality and attitude once my human recruiting screener started sending applications my way.

That said, I don’t feel that I really need to explain my frustration when having to apply for job posting upon job posting only to have most applications either rejected by a form email or receiving no response at all. If the posting is not active, why let it spin continuously until a safer time for hiring comes along? If the posting is active, why wait for the AI screener to produce the perfect candidate on paper when that person may well turn out to be falsifying their qualifications or lacking some key qualities (such as diversification and upward mobility within their experience). When push comes to shove, those with management experience should really be given a second look regardless of their industry, as management by definition usually indicates a certain degree of universality. The rest is a matter of orientation and self-education. I’ve seen so many management level openings circulating in the creative fields since December, and most of them have been in constant spin for the past three months.

I’ll get off my soapbox now. I know it must not be easy to be in a hiring mode during a global pandemic. The situation is causing a lot of frustration on both sides, but that ever-evasive career pivot could become more of a reality for job searchers out there if a bit more human interaction was employed in the process. It’s not all just about practical experience. It’s about intelligence, potential and versatility!