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Comments (120)

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  beepbopboopp
  Unpopular take: This was significantly better for employers and employees.It worked as both an effort and presentation filter which both reduced the overload of candidates, allowing for more attention, higher variation of skills that didnt often show like traditional resume bonafides and mad companies more likely to invest more in employees as it was a pain to go do again.For employees it was great too. Much like the world pre-dating apps the business world wasnt all looking for the equivalent of trust fund, 6'5", blue eyes. As well as the points mentioned above.
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  bluedino
  You'd mail your resume in (it was a 'hack' back then to hand-deliver it), then get a call in a couple days or weeks. Then someone who was home during the day (if you already had a job) would answer the phone and take the message from the HR person (or they'd leave one on your answering machine), you'd then have an appointment to go in or return a call to set one up...
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  sosodev
  I had an old coworker who told me he got into software development in the sixties by walking into an IBM office and asking for a job. He had no education beyond high school and no experience with computers. They just had him take an aptitude test and then he worked on mainframes for decades.
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  andyjohnson0
  You still had to do a coding test -- but it was pointing to the bug in the C++ linked-list implementation on a single sheet of line printer paper.Because nobody was going to carry a Sun workstation down to the meeting room just for your interview.
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  yonran
  The newspaper does still have job listings e.g. for Amazon, NVIDIA, DoorDash, Tesla, Chewy. I haven’t been having much luck applying to them though...
• Pawel_SkimmIQ
  Mine is from Poland, early 90s, and even more analog. I worked at a Polish-Italian company. Our accountant used an ERP program, DOS, written in Clipper. There was no internet, so the vendor's consultant had to come to the office in person. The consultant was a young woman. She became my girlfriend and she pulled me into ERP. The girlfriend left. The ERP stayed for over 30 years ;)
• nabbed
  I responded to an ad in the newspaper for a C programming job way back in mid-1980s. The team that posted the ad was not impressed with my resume, but they sent it on to a different team within the same company. That team hired me and I stayed at that company for 14 years.Unlike the author, I kept the ad in a box for 35 years, at which point I scanned it and threw out the hard copy.Edit: Also, the resume I mailed to them was printed by a print shop.
• jambalaya8
  Fondly remembering postings for TAL and SNOBOL jobs in the classifieds before the book store near me had books on SQL in the early 90s.
• drmpeg
  In 1981, my first job in Silicon Valley was obtained by answering a blind (no company name) ad in the Mercury News. It was a kooky company that built burn-in ovens for semiconductors (mostly 2164 memory chips back then).I had a lot of fun there. The purchasing manager was a Scottish guy and he had an after hours drinking club in a small conference room with a wet bar. I was only 24 years old and working crazy hours. I'd get a few beers around 7 pm and then go back to work writing 8080 assembly language code for a few more hours.I also ended up smoking weed with the CEO and CFO a couple of times. The CFO was not a young guy. I'm not sure how old he was, but he had all white hair. The CEO gave me a mason jar full of his homegrown weed as a gift when I finished the project.That company and even the building is long gone. It's now a Google parking garage.
• pudgywalsh
  How tech company HR departments game the system for PERM jobs: A newspaper classifieds story
• antod
  Only my first job involved newspaper ads (early 90s). My second job pivoting into tech came via USENET, and later jobs from networks or shoulder tapping by recruiters.
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  clintmcmahon
  Or attending a local job fair with a stack of printed resumes.
• thataccount
  I remember back when the Thrifty Nickle was how you could find all kinds of things up to and including your next vehicle.
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  subpixel
  Not only jobs, but NYC apartments - although in the Voice not the Times.
• ButlerianJihad
  After my burgeoning career cratered and jobs weren't pouring in because my résumé was impressing naïve, desperate managers during the cusp of the dot-com boom, I found myself in a homeless shelter with a newspaper and a phone.And yeah, shelters are harsh. A lot of them turn us all out on the streets during the day, because shelters are exclusively for sleeping and hygiene. So you trudge around town during the day to find food, work, and a purpose in life.So they would have an "employment resource room" with stacks of newspapers and little phone carrels for us to call anyone. And yours truly here had not the slightest clue or inkling how to actually conduct a job search. I didn't know how to design or write a CV, I didn't know how to approach employers, and of course, by the late 1990s, classified help-wanted ads were a really, really shitty way for an "IT Professional" to find anything.But I could do nothing but try. Eventually, I found some scammy call-centers who would hire anyone. And I worked as a scammy caller in a fly-by-night call-center. I worked day labor. And landing these jobs didn't teach or train me in the slightest how to seek jobs, how to market myself, or how to interview.I still don't really know how. ATS and gatekeepers and my lousy, holey work history? It's a lost cause in today's market. I've learned a lot of tips and tricks since then, but in the end, it's about making yourself a good product, offering value to a company, and finding the right fit before you go insane and just apply for SSDI.
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  tayo42
  Idk if it's true but it seems like life was simpler before the Internet took off.Now that guy is probably competing with tons of people more talented willing to work for less
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  II2II
  Another tidbit, based upon finding out which company the phone number belonged to: you could go to the library and access business directories. Think the yellow pages, only they were geared towards businesses rather than towards consumers. Print versions were broken down by industry, but electronic ones (on CD-ROM) were searchable. It was also a tool for looking for unadvertised jobs, since those directories seemed to be geared towards making cold calls (albeit, for people doing sales).
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  ogou
  We were told the quality of paper mattered and that the envelope should have the same high-end watermark that the resume sheet had. Inkjet printed resumes were discouraged because the quality back then was low and the resolution made anti-aliasing on the type come out weird. Laser printed only, please.
• kotaKat
  My last job was vaguely classifieds-related: the company posted a local press release into the newspaper bragging about how they'd come to the area to serve a couple local clients and I ended up snooping their careers page to find out that they had an open spot (and the dude that spun the site up was leaving) -- right place, right time?As a teen though (even in the late 2000s): I walked into various places asking for applications and somehow was one of the only teens to go all the way down to the Duty Free to ask if they were hiring (because it's past a tollbooth and inside a big fenced in Customs point of no return). The manager asked if I'd seen his ad in the paper and I hadn't, I said I just figured it was retail that might be hiring. Nailed it.
• aksss
  Very self-satisfied, and deservedly so. Like when you use that one piece of scrap wood in the garage you've been saving for this one occasion, or something from that drawer of metric-threaded bolts that just saves the project you're working on. It was all worth it, see? This is why we do it. No different with the author's digital preservation and online tool use. Pleasant read.
• arnonejoe
  Classified ads for jobs were still a thing up until around Y2K. MonsterBoard (what it used to be called) was one of the first online job platforms and then Dice came along. I used to have good luck finding contract gigs through dice.
• kittikitti
  I recommend https://www.jobs.now/ because corporations use this loophole to block jobs and eliminate bargaining power. As of this comment, here are some of the companies that are still exploiting the system,AT&T Services, Inc. Goldman Sachs Amazon Boston Consulting Group Wal-Mart Crowdstrike JPMorgan Chase & Co. DocuSignI was hoping for a mention about this HR backdoor, but it wasn't covered.
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  rzzzt
  Looking straight into the eyes, strong handshake, exuding confidence?
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  mustafak99
  imo the job process is totally broken its an AI arms race. You have people doing mass ai apply with slop CVs and then recruitment just doing the inverse with AI ATS. Working on something I think could help solve the issue just need to find recruiters to talk to see if it's any good.
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  mikestew
  In case the headline makes no sense, the original title before being mangled by the HN headline censor:"How We Used to Get Jobs".
• Ozzie-D
  The IBM anecdote in the comments captures something important. The old system had a lot of problems, but it did one thing well: it forced a much faster path from "can this person do the work" to actually finding out. You walked in, they gave you an aptitude test, and the test result was the decision.We've somehow ended up with a hiring process that's simultaneously more information-rich and worse at answering the basic question. You can see someone's entire LinkedIn history, their GitHub, their blog posts, their conference talks, and still have no idea whether they'll be effective in the role. The signal-to-noise ratio went the wrong direction.
• effnorwood
  [dead]
• anon
  undefined
• bluemoonx
  [flagged]
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  krackers
  >I’ve just gone through a butt load of resumesPerhaps she said "bulk load of resumes" and you misheard it as the funnier version?