How qualified are you?

Do you ever get the feeling like the online job-search is a full-time job itself? Taking the time to perfect that résumé, track down potential opportunities, and craft a worthy cover letter can be exhausting. Once you finally hit “send,” you’re casting your professional identity among the sharks.  And in these choppy economic waters, there’s no guarantee that you’re going to get a nibble, much less a bite.  

By all accounts, Erica Newman is a catch. A classics major at Dalhousie University, she was a straight-A student. She spent a summer interning for Entertainment Tonight Canada and Global News, and busted her chops during the school year working part-time at Starbucks and other restaurants. 

Since moving to Toronto from Halifax in June 2011, Newman estimates that she’s applied to at least 100 jobs online. Out of those applications, she’s been offered two jobs: one serving job that she quit after a couple of months, and one receptionist job that she’s stayed in for more than a year. Although she’s thankful to be employed and able to pay the bills, Newman’s desperately searching for something more challenging and creative. Ideally, Newman would like to land an editorial or production assistant position with room to learn and grow. 

But how difficult is it to break into this kind of industry? How competitive is it out there? Is a bachelor’s degree enough to land an entry-level job? Is it even enough to get an interview? 

“I feel anxious right after I've clicked the ‘send’ button,” says Newman, who typically applies to three to five jobs a week, using online platforms such as Craigslist, Kijiji, Workopolis, Work in Culture, Quill and Quire, as well as various company’s online job boards. “I know that I'm now up for... judgement and can't help but take it personally when I don't hear back. My résumé is an outline of my life's achievements for the past 10 years, and when someone takes a look at it and decides that you're not good enough, for whatever reason, it can be a tough blow. No matter how many times you go through it, rejection stings!”

Amen, sister. Having spent the last year doing internship after internship, I know how hard it is to find a permanent entry-level position. For all intents and purposes, internships have become "the principal point of entry for young people into the white-collar world," writes investigative journalist Ross Perlin, the author of Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy. Still, after 12 months of interning at four different organizations, I spent the entire summer applying for jobs for which I truly believed I was qualified. More often than not, I don’t even manage to get an interview. And why should I be surprised? Canada’s unemployment rate for young people is 13.9 percent and the 15-to-24 age group has seen little employment gains in the past several years since the recession. Signs of hope are few and far between.

The Craigslist Experiment's origins

I wanted to find out just what Newman and I were up against. Back in July, I came across a blog post on Thought Catalog called “Get a Job: The Craigslist Experiment,” written by 26-year-old Eric Auld, who just finished his Master’s degree in English. He was having a tough time tracking down a job, so he published a fake job posting on Craigslist to, like Newman and myself, to see what his competition was like. The ad was for a basic administrative assistant position in New York City, which paid $12-13 an hour and included health benefits. Nothing fancy. Auld published the ad at exactly 2:41 p.m. The first response came in at 2:45—just four minutes later. Ten minutes later, there were 10 responses. Twenty minutes later, there were 56. An hour later: 164. Six hours: 431.At 2:41 p.m. the following day, there were 653 responses in his inbox.

I borrowed Auld’s job posting and tweaked it, gearing it towards the Toronto publishing industry. Here’s the final version:

“We require a full-time editorial assistant for our mid-sized magazine. Hours are Monday through Friday, 9:00 - 5:00. Job duties include both administrative duties (filing, invoicing, copying, transcribing) as well as some editorial tasks (copy editing, fact-checking, short book reviews, and research). Previous editorial experience is preferred, but will train the right candidate. This is a full-time position with health benefits. Please e-mail résumé, brief cover letter, and available start-date if interested.”

The posting process

I posted on a Tuesday morning, and tracked the responses for a full week. I had no idea what kind of response we would get. Taking into account that Toronto is much smaller than New York (5.5 million in the Greater Toronto Area, versus the New York City Metropolitan Area’s 19 million) and the position was more specialized in the publishing realm, I hypothesized that the number of applications would be less than Auld’s experiment, yet still dramatic.

After publishing the ad at 11:31 on Tuesday morning, I received my first response at 11:36 – just five minutes later. The applicant had graduated a year ago with a bachelor of mathematics, had less than a year of admin experience, and zero editorial experience.

Here we go. (Read the analysis of the Craigslist Experiment in post two.)