Hiring is aimed at the future, depending on the past

The hiring process in America is built to repeat the past.

The number one criteria for finding a job is how much experience you already have doing that job.

This makes getting a job in a newer field a bit mysterious. It feels a bit like saying you want someone with 20 years' experience in social media even though social media has only been around for 15 years.

I look at companies like Purple Strategies and Axios. They're media or media-related companies. I've actually been mistaken from social media as someone who works in media. I do and have done a lot of media kind of things on social media. But I've never done them professionally or gotten paid salary-type money to do them.

When those companies post jobs on Indeed, they look very interesting, but the qualifications list tells me I won't look very interesting to them.

It also doesn't help that I don't speak the industry trade language these folks are looking for, even though if I knew the language, I'm confident I could deliver value quickly.

Maybe someday we'll have a hiring process and recruiting Web sites that are less dependent on the past for how to put people in place for the future.