“You need documented experience with MadCap, CSX, and CMS-…”
“Oh yeah?”, I wonder, “What the fuck are all those things?”
The job position struts around, playing coy and unwilling to extrapolate on its desires. If you know you know, y’know. If you can’t parse the requirements, pleb, you have no business applying for the job.
The job opening seemed to suggest that I wasn’t in its league. So I call it on its bluff and google what the hell it was talking about.
CSX turned out to be a fancy name for the Adobe-suite. Y’know, the service that used to be a software set, a staple for editing and design which pretty much every media school teaches. A software set which, since turning into a subscription service, has been surpassed by a plethora of free alternatives. Like InkScape, for example…
CSM is a popular term recruiters like to banty about, and it means absolutely fuck-all. A “Content Management System” can be anything from a wiki to a WordPress. A simple YouTube page or a Twitch channel is a CMS. But “CMS” sounds fancy so of course recruiters use it enigmatically.
MadCap, however, is an actual software. What kinda software you ask? It’s a digital, interactive post-it note system. Basically. It’s intended for people to juggle their many projects, filling in each step on their way to completion. Handy when working with a team – redundant on your own, better accomplished with a simple spreadsheet.
So what.
Instead of saying that the position requires “layout and project management experience” the recruiters instead opt to use opaque key words that don’t translate to skills, but habits. The capacity, the ability, the experience of the applicant do not matter as much as that they’ve collected the correct key buzz words, like badges at a Poké gym.
The only thing advertised with these “requirements” is the recruiters’ lack of insight into what exactly they’re looking for. Because they exhibit that they cannot generalize skills. It doesn’t matter whether or not you can manage a project or fifteen, but whether or not you’ve used a software which helps you do so. What layout you’ve worked on doesn’t matter if you haven’t used a specific generation of software.
To them, the skills don’t matter without the buzz words.
Why? Because they don’t care? Because they don’t know enough about the position they’re hiring for? Don’t know. Doesn’t matter. Because the truth of the matter is that they don’t NEED to know. Supplicants will come crawling anyway.
I can only wonder if the actual employers are ever happy with the results…
/Sebastian Lindberg 9/1-2024
WastedWords 