I Found the Classified Ad That Got Me My Dream Job in 2000
How We Used To Get Jobs: A Newspaper Classifieds Story
In 2000, David Friedman landed a staff photography job at Polo Ralph Lauren through a classified ad in the New York Times. Decades later, he dug through his digital archives and the Times Machine to find the exact listing, reflecting on how job hunting has changed and questioning his own memories of the process.
But looking back, one of the most interesting things about it was how I found this dream job, through a relic of an earlier time: a classified listing in the newspaper.
- 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.
- 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...
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.