Communication Overload: 3 Rules for Job Search Sanity with your iPhone/Blackberry

This week, Christina and I both took the PDA-plunge and upgraded to Blackberries.

Mind you, I had some serious qualms about getting a Blackberry in the first place, after reading a terrifying Newsweek article a few months ago about how your brain goes into constant partial attention mode as it waits for your PDA to buzz with a message, and you’re rendered unable to complete other simple, mental tasks. Then Stanford came out with a similar study last week about how multitasking is ineffective, if not harmful.

And beyond that, there’s the loss of brainpower and problem-solving. As my friend Ruth noted about getting her first iPhone, “I replaced my own brain with the internet’s brain.” Have you ever been in that situation where your Garmin or GPS loses service and all of a sudden you have absolutely no idea where you are or how to get where you were going?

Being connected is, ultimately, a good thing. I will hopefully get stuck at fewer bus stops late at night now that I can access the real-time schedules online; I can use maps and find local restaurants and buy my Harry Potter movie tickets while hanging out at the Berkeley Kite Festival. At Bright Green Talent, we use a lot of these different channels to reach jobseekers - for all of my grumbling, I am all over LinkedIn and Facebook trying to find people to fill our jobs. I’m all in favor of a device that allows people to respond quickly and not waste time sitting in front of a computer.

So, pushing my fears aside, I went ahead and bought the BlackBerry, and was immediately thrown into a panic attack as the Verizon staff pointed out that on one device, I could now simultaneously make calls, email, send text messages, Google chat, Skype, use Blackberry Messaging, Twitter, Facebook message, and use AIM.

Yikes.

I get worried about the future of human interaction (as well as getting “BlackBerry thumb”). Having all of these other types of interaction at our fingertips can make us lose sight of reality - what’s happening in front of us, the people we’re interacting with in person, and the experiences we have.

Here are three rules to keep you sane and productive as you and your PDA are jobsearching:

1. Have relationships with humans, not machines. As much as I love to talk to Christina (and trust me, we’re pretty chatty), I don’t really need to be connected to her by 17 different media.

With this blog as my soapbox, I’ve urged people pretty frequently to favor quality of interactions over quantity when they’re jobseeking - it will not help you to be a resume spammer, or Tweeting every 6 seconds about how you need a job. Think of all the time you spend Facebooking and LinkedIn-ing and Tweeting and emailing back and forth with people - it definitely adds up to much more time and effort than it would take to just sit down and have coffee with that person for 20 minutes and catch up.

It will help to go out and meet people and have real human interactions that we’re programmed to remember and value.  Those few minutes of human connection can be all it takes to get someone to understand and trust you enough to connect you with a hiring manager or remember you when they hear of an open job.

If you need a reminder of how potentially absurd our reliance on technology for social interaction can be, watch this MeetUp video (yes, I’ve plugged it before and will likely plug it again).

2. Keep healthy distance, and take mental breaks. Jobseeking is really stressful - it can weigh on you deeply, especially if you’re checking your Blackberry/email every 5 minutes to see whether you’ve heard back on any applications. As someone told me recently, a regular job is 9-5; jobseeking is 24/7 occupation. Sometimes, you need to unplug and disconnect. Change the settings on your phone so it’s not beeping, flashing, and buzzing each time a message comes in - this will make you less prone to neurotically checking it.

3. Mind your manners, and know when to turn it off. I remember this NYTimes article on BlackBerries in the board room and how distracting it is when people are blatantly paying attention to their phone and not what’s happening in real life. Being a good listener is a skill that companies really value, and continuously glancing at your phone is a good way to demonstrate that listening is not your strong suit. Turn off your phone while you’re interviewing - it’s not worth jeopardizing your shot at a job.

And so begins my tortured relationship with my BlackBerry…

This entry was posted on Monday, August 31st, 2009 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.