A Search Is a Search

My job search underway, my inbox forever being filled with emails from head hunters and job boards sites suggesting different "exciting opportunities" for which they just know I'll be a smash, and my resume constantly evolving, I am noticing something.

Admittedly, I may be the last person on the planet to have noticed it, but better late than never.

There are not a lot of differences between searching for the perfect job and searching for the perfect mate.

And I am not just talking about the "needle in a haystack" thing, or the "all the good ones are taken" complaint.

Many of the acts, the people involved, the technology used are remarkably similar between the two searches. (To say nothing of the devastating disappointments...) On any given day, one search, or the other, can be either wildly exciting or crushingly humiliating. Can make you feel validated or insignificant. Worthwhile or not worth a second look.

And frankly, the things that make them different only exist because if a job search were allowed to be more like a search for a mate, there would be a whole lot more discrimination and harassment law suits.

What if they were more the like one another? Just imagine.

Not that I know much about matchmaking sites firsthand, I can see the similarities, having lived vica riously through girlfriends who have used them for years.

Like the Girls Weekend friend who told us, three cocktails into Happy Hour, about the psycho she met on a dating site who appeared normal enough at first blush to warrant a second date.

On that date he asked her (no joke) if she would be so kind as to read his manuscript and plunked the 500 page tome on her lap in the cab.  And then three days later began ritualistically harassing her to hurry up and finish it - leaving increasingly more offensive and foul-mouthed voicemail messages on her machine with artfully articulated suggestions about "what she could do" with her snooty attitude since she had not made the manuscript top priority.

What if things had been different then? What if she had had some of the rights employers have when hiring someone?

What if she had been able to check his references?

"Johnny was an exceptional conversationalist but flunked Anger Management twice and was hospitalized for acute mania following a nude swim in the town fountain after his first book was published."

Next!

But what if?