As in, do you have any? And if you do, please contact me directly.
I found myself out of a long-term gig, recently. The customer did away with all of their contractors. This one felt almost personal to me because I’d been on it for a long time, relatively speaking, and I had a role far removed from a simple hired hand. But shit happens. I was in fact a hired hand. Tougher times.
So I’ve been looking, lately, I went on LinkedIn, where I pay for Premium membership which supposedly gives me an edge. I honestly don’t think it does, because their AI algorithms border on painful and so the top jobs you are suggested appear to be basic string matches. Not the relevant strings, mind, but your job titles. If your resume says you are a CEO (because I am; I’ve run my business for 30 years now), your top jobs will be CEO work. Which is ridiculous. My career is about XML technologies. I do XML, XSLT, XQuery, XProc, not to mention XML vocabularies like DITA, S1000D, and DocBook. And, of course, SGML, the ISO standard that led to XML.
None of the CEO jobs had anything to do with markup technology.
I contacted LinkedIn support. They said it’s all about refining your searches and filtering so the AI can learn, but since that’s what I’d already been doing, I thanked them while remaining doubtful. That very same day, my top job matches (the ones thinking I am a CEO so I must be looking for CEO work) magically disappeared.
Coincidence? I’m sure it was.
The other job suggestions I get are “architect” jobs. Again, this borders on the simple-minded. My CV lists a few job titles stating I am a “content architect”, sure, but unless you are very, very literal about it, you won’t haul me in for a rebuild for a property in Manchester. Right? In a string match, I’d sort of get that. But I’ve been suggested any number of “architect” roles where the only common denominator is that string. “Architect”. Integration, enterprise, more buildings, etc. They focus on “architect” but are not able to read the context, not even to match keywords that are actually there (and, for that matter, exclude those that are not).
It’s more of the same if you do text-based search yourself. Looking for “SGML XML” results in anything but. “XML XSLT” rarely gets anything useful. Etc. None of the buzzwords in my field yields a meaningful result, just more of the same nonsense.
Five years ago, though, adding keywords is how I found the long-term gig that eventually prompted this post.
Now, I get nothing of the sort. I cannot do a text-based search. I have no way to look for jobs that match my expertise. The filters offered by LinkedIn are geared towards jobs and roles they know about. I wanted to say “understand” but I think that’s stretching it.
LinkedIn is filled to the brim with AI these days. They base much of their business on it. Everyone is posting about it. Action figures, images, fake posts, tweaked articles, vibe programming, you name it. It’s everywhere.
But if this is the extent of its usefulness, count me out.
