We live in an era obsessed with efficiency. We can track and measure every aspect of our lives and careers and seek to optimize them for maximum efficiency. In the morning, we can count our steps; at night, we can count our minutes of deep sleep. It was only a matter of time before we began to apply this computational mindset to our professional lives. And so we have. We are no longer just building careers; we are optimizing them like algorithms.
Many of us, when looking for jobs, read job postings as lists of information that can be read by a computer program to determine whether or not the candidate is qualified to move on to the next round of the hiring process. When trying to network with other professionals, many of us treat each connection as if it were an attempt to convert that person into another resource that we can utilize in the future in order to advance our careers. When we consider taking on a new project or endeavor, we consider the potential return on investment in terms of how it will look on our professional resume, and make decisions based on the amount of data that supports the notion that it will increase our chances for professional success in the future. I recently spent hours building a professional online profile in order to make sure that people can find me when searching for people with my skills, and I often find myself wondering if the people who find me through such a search will even be able to tell that the person behind the profile is a real, human being.
But what happens when the system wins?
By turning ourselves into perfectly optimized professional products, we are stripping the messy, unpredictable, and very human aspects of our work of all value.
The Rise of the Algorithmic Career
Efficiency has long been the holy grail of growth. As a society, we have come to measure ourselves by how much we can accomplish in the shortest span of time. It has only been recently that this drive to succeed has begun to manifest itself in how we manage our careers. As the job market continues to expand, companies are able to receive applications in hours from thousands of qualified candidates. In order to sift through this sea of talent, many employers rely on applicant tracking systems to sort through resumes and online profiles for keywords and phrases. By using an algorithm to determine whether or not a candidate is worth an interview, many jobs are decided by a faceless computer before a human eye ever lays eyes on the applicants’ work.
People also started to view their skills in a new light. In the end, skills are nothing more than variables that can be put into a system. Thus, professional identities have been molded to better fit what a computer program wants to see.
And it works.
Of course, this is all incredibly efficient. In fact, it’s arguably the most efficient way to get a job. But are we winning? As a culture, we have somehow convinced ourselves that if we can’t quantify something, it can’t be valuable. But that’s a flawed premise, and I think it’s one that’s holding us back. We’re so focused on playing the game that we’ve forgotten that the game is likely to be stacked against us.
The Search for the Flawless Input
There is now a plethora of tools that aid in career management and can make certain tasks easier and more efficient. While searching for jobs, the process of creating a resume is just as important as finding the right job, and there are many resume builders and scanners that can match your skills with potential jobs. These types of tools can also be very useful in creating the perfect online presence by refining your online profiles, such as your LinkedIn page, and writing the perfect headline for a job post.
It takes a very specific set of skills to make professional development effective in today’s employment landscape. Most professional tools, from MyPerfectResume AI resume builder and online profile builders to networking software and job matching platforms, aim to enhance professional life by providing a structure that can help professionals and their careers become more machine-readable.
But at what point does optimization equal conformity?
But perhaps most importantly, by attempting to tailor our careers and lives to reach peak professional optimization, we are sacrificing individuality and risking losing our inherent humanity. Perhaps, by sticking to a very predetermined blueprint of career development and professionalism, we end up becoming commodities of sorts.
What Gets Filtered Out
Efficiency can stifle serendipity. A new job or project often comes from following a totally unrelated career path for a while. Taking on a job or project for no reason other than because you wanted to leads to your greatest career achievements. Meeting new people, taking on new projects, and traveling can lead to new and unexpected career opportunities. A purely efficient approach to a career means never leaving the straight and narrow, never taking a risk on something that seems irrelevant at first. And in the long run, that’s a failed career.
A non-linear career path is seen by the algorithm as an anomaly in the data. The career is seen as needing correction in order to become more efficient. So the person is steered back onto the paved career path where there is a guaranteed return on investment, measurable and quantifiable.
So we stay safe.
Furthermore, an overemphasis on a hyper-optimized career also takes away from a person’s sense of purpose. For example, instead of being able to say that you are motivated to go to work because you are making a difference in the lives of others, you will be motivated by external validation and by how your work will look on your professional online profiles. The internal drive to create and innovate will be replaced by a never-ending need to climb the ranks, in order to get a higher score.
Reclaiming the Human Element
I’m not saying we can abandon the use of modern tools and dive back into the complete unknown of the pre-tech job market. And I’m not saying that we have to become completely adept at being able to find and apply for the best jobs using the most up-to-date methods of digital gatekeeping. No, the best approach to finding a fulfilling career is to make the most of the tools that are available to us in order to find the best entry point to a new career, and then to work to integrate all of the tools at our disposal in order to achieve success in that career.
There are many aspects of ourselves and our work that cannot be put into to data and therefore are better left out of the tracking and filtering systems that now dominate the way we hire. A good resume or profile page is merely the means by which we get a chance to bring our whole selves to our work. Once we are in, we can be our full, non-optimizable selves.
When all of the things that make a career successful are quantifiable, there is little room for the unquantifiable aspects of a human career. In order to have a career that is not only successful but also sustainable for the soul, one must make room for the unoptimizable. Take the occasional inefficient meeting. Learn a new skill that interests you. Build a career path that is non-linear and “inefficient” at times. These are the markers of a life fully lived.
Ultimately, a career is a human story — in a state of constant evolution. These are the lines of a story that will evolve in real time as the story of your life unfolds, and will have mistakes, unexpected turns, and the many twists and turns that characterize life. The computers can handle the data. You handle the authorship of the human story that is your career.
