Tuesday, August 05, 2003
 
Leave the Metaphors to the Professionals, Son

A post on TechRepublic.com, entitled " Job seekers beware: These five myths may derail your search efforts", purportedly gives five myths about Internet job searching. But who can comprehend what the gestalt of the article when trying to reconcile the rapidly flashing discordant metaphors that almost sent me into an epileptic fit?

Let's hit some of them in rapid succession:
  • Myth one: The Internet is a Mecca for finding jobs.
    The holiest city of Islam, to which Muslims should make one pilgrimmage in their lifetimes if they can.

  • Internet job boards can become a Delta Triangle for resumes to disappear into....
    Delta Triangle? Do you mean Devil's Triangle, a superset of the Bermuda Triangle, into which nothing has mysteriously disappeared recently?

  • Debbie Harper, a veteran executive IT recruiter at Harper Hewes, Inc., likened posting your resume online to posting it on a sandwich board that reads "I need a job" and walking up and down Fifth Avenue with it hoisted over your shoulder.
    But you don't hoist a sandwich board over your shoulder like a picket sign....you wear it over your torso.

  • ...soft skills—like communication—are also important.
    These "soft" skills seem to be too hard for many people in IT, including the employed ones.

Wow, that's enough to leave a man comatose from metaphor overdose, except that those metaphors break down quicker than a high mileage 1983 Mustang GT you buy used.

 
To say Noggle, one first must be able to say the "Nah."