Thank you for your interest in the Video Editor role at the Duluth Daily. After hasty consideration of an array of “impressive” candidates, of which you were probably one, I decided to delete your application.

I also deleted your application for Ham Today. And the one for Kitchens, Wow. And the one for the World of Waterslides.

Yeah, one person sees all of the applications you submit here. And that same person deletes them. That person is me.

I don’t do it because you’re not qualified. You're probably too qualified. You probably contain every quality these institutions could or would require. But no one really knows what they want when they’re hiring, and that’s why there’s me. To get rid of people like you. Quality people.

Why do I do it? It’s a job, dude. Do I like doing it? Not really. But do you know how much things cost? Everyone wants money for things these days. It’s insane. It’s like no one’s heard of doing you a solid and letting you have a case of Fresca on the house. You have to find a way to get money from someone and then give that money to another person (who already has a job) so they’ll let you leave the store with the thing you’re holding.

I’m losing money by taking the time to tell you this, rather than spending time deleting applications like yours.

I’m sure you put a lot of time into your applications. Filling in all the details they asked for, that already appear in the resume you uploaded in the first step of the application. And then mulling over questions that seem entirely too personal for something you’re blindly submitting online. But time is money. And it’s my job to convert the time that it would take to read your application back into money by deleting what you submitted.

It’s business. The time-money not being spent on you, can go back into the candidate search to fill the company’s open position at a below-market rate. There are a bunch of YouTube videos about how this all works. You should check them out; I know you have time to.

You might do better if you knew someone at the places you applied to. It’d be even better if you were related. Maybe you can make that happen. Create a new uncle or something. They can do a lot of things with science now, beyond just adding citrus to soda. It’d be way more realistic than expecting anyone to cold read your resume. No hiring manager is sitting around rubbing their hands together saying, “Oh boy, I can’t wait to read the application of a perfect stranger.”

I didn’t even read it. That’s not my job. I’m paid to delete. That’s the difference between me and you, getting paid to do things.

The other difference is you’ve probably never been asked to leave a CiCi’s Pizza for getting too upset about the limited soda selection there. You’d never know that from looking at my resume though. That never made the final cut. A lot of things don’t go in my resume. Even things I’m proud of, like my puppetry and how far I can throw a kettlebell.

All I put in my resume was the college I went to (not telling you that) and “can delet” under my skills. That wasn’t a typo. I wanted to show that I could. It didn’t really matter though, Rick didn’t make me apply for this job. He basically handed it to me one night when we were knocking back Frescas and tossing kettlebells into the yard.

I met him in a Dress Barn parking lot in Dallas. He was parked next to me. He said there was something musical about the way I syphoned gas. I still don’t know what that means. But, the next thing I know I’m driving him (his tank was empty) to pick up a case of Frescas and a couple of kettlebells on the way back to his place.

He told me he owned a website that connected job candidates to jobs. The only problem was there were too many people and too few jobs. So, I burped up my solution: delete the people, keep the jobs. Now my fridge is full of Fresca basically five days a week, if there aren’t too many people looking for work.

What I’m saying is, getting a job is all about putting yourself out there. You’ve got to pound the pavement. Really pummel the hell out of it with both hands, until there’s blood and bone scattered on the concrete. Screaming would probably compliment that really well too.

You could end up in a video that makes the rounds online, which would be great exposure. A hiring manager would be way more likely to read your application if they’d seen you on Ridiculousness.

Anything’s better than what you’ve been doing.

I wish you continued success in your online job search.