Chapter 1. The queue is a trap

Part 3 of 15 in How to Find a Job: Stop queuing on portals. Show an employer the value you can add.← Part 2Part 4 →

This chapter discusses the pitfalls of traditional job application methods and why they often lead to disappointment for graduates. It highlights the importance of focusing on solving specific problems for employers rather than relying on job portals.

Every June the same scene repeats. A placement cell puts a notice on the notice board, or on a WhatsApp group with two hundred unread messages. A company is coming. Students who have never spoken to each other suddenly share shirt colours and resume fonts. Those whose colleges are not on the circuit open Naukri, Internshala, LinkedIn and Foundit, and begin the upload. By August the confident ones are quieter. By December someone in the family says, gently or not, that a neighbour’s son has joined TCS, or a bank, or at least a coaching centre as faculty.

The queue feels responsible. It is what the training institute sold. It is what the seniors did. It produces a number you can report at dinner: I applied to forty companies this week. The number is a comfort. It is also, for most graduates, a way of staying busy while the decision is made by someone else, about someone else.

What the queue actually is

An advertised vacancy on a portal is the last step of a hiring process, not the first. By the time a role is written into a job description, several things have often already happened. A manager has complained. An employee has resigned, or is about to. Someone internal has been sounded out. A founder has asked a college friend if they know “a decent person”. Only then does HR, or the founder’s cousin who handles HR, post the role. In a large IT services firm the posting may be real and the volume enormous. In a forty-person company in Peenya, Ichalkaranji, Okhla or Manesar, the posting is often a formality, or a way to collect a backup.

You are then one file in a stack. The stack is sorted by college name, by keyword, and by whether anyone inside the building recognises the sender. A resume that says “team player, hardworking, good communication skills” is not read. It is scanned for a reason to stop. The reason is usually available: wrong college, no internship, a gap, a CGPA below an arbitrary line, or simply fatigue. The person screening is not cruel. They have forty other files and a Monday review.

LinkedIn has made the queue feel social. It is still a queue. “Any referral for a fresher role, please DM” is not a professional request. It asks a stranger to spend their reputation on a person they cannot describe. Most people will not. The few who forward the resume do it without a sentence of advocacy, which is almost the same as not forwarding it. Easy Apply is faster, and it is also how you become indistinguishable from the last two hundred people who clicked the same button.

Neha from Indore

Neha finished a B.Com from a respectable private college in Indore. She was not at the bottom of the class. She was not at the top. She could tally a ledger if you sat with her, and she had spent two summers at her uncle’s hardware shop on the AB Road, because the regular accountant had left for a bank exam. She applied to four hundred roles. Banks, BPOs, retail chains, “accounts executive” posts that wanted two years of experience she did not have. She got six automated rejections and one phone call from a consultancy that wanted money to “guarantee a placement”.

The queue had taught her that she had nothing to offer. The shop had taught her something else, which she had not thought to write down. She knew how a GST mismatch looks when a supplier’s invoice and the portal do not agree. She knew which items the counter staff mis-coded. She knew the owner would pay to stop a notice. None of that was on the resume, because the resume template had no row for it.

This book is about getting Neha out of the queue. Not by magic, and not by pretending Indore has as many graduate roles as Bengaluru. By changing the unit of the search. The unit is not the vacancy. The unit is a problem you can show you have already touched, and a person who owns that problem.

Why the education system feeds the queue

Indian schooling and most Indian degrees are built to rank people, not to produce work. The exam rewards a clean answer to a known question. An employer is paying for a messy answer to a question they have not fully formed. A student can leave a three-year degree having never written a document a stranger would pay to read, never reconciled a number that mattered, never sat with a customer who was angry, and never shipped anything that could break. The marksheet then becomes the only evidence. Employers who have been burnt by marksheets stop trusting them, except as a crude filter. The graduate, who was told the marksheet was the point, is stranded.

Coaching culture makes this worse. It trains people to collect certificates the way they collected test series: more is safer. A page of online course logos does not tell a founder what you will do on a Tuesday. It tells them you are anxious, and that you have not yet decided what work you are offering.

The two scarce things

In this market, two things are scarce. Good judgment about what work is worth doing, and proof that you can do a piece of it. Degrees are not scarce. Resumes are not scarce. Hope is not scarce. A public page that shows a before and an after, with your name on it, is scarce. A short note to a specific manager, about a specific problem in their company, is scarce. Most of your competitors will never produce either, because the queue does not ask them to.

What you will stop doing

• You will stop paying anyone who promises a job in exchange for a fee. A real employer does not charge you to hire you.
• You will stop sending the same resume to two hundred companies in a day. Volume without a target is not effort. It is noise.
• You will stop asking strangers for referrals before you can say what you want the referral to say about you.
• You will stop treating a gap, a Tier-3 college, or a non-engineering degree as a verdict. It is a constraint. Constraints change the route. They do not end the search.

Bolles liked to say that the job hunt most people use is the one with the worst odds, and that they use it because it is the one they have seen. India has its own version of that hunt, with its own temples: the placement cell, the portal, the bank exam, the uncle. Some of those doors are real. None of them is the only door. The rest of this book is the other door, built for the city you actually live in.