All posts by Michael Burge

Journalist, author, artist
Day Jobs, My Story

Keywords don’t tell my story, and scans fail me

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SCANNING NOW But not by a person.
SCANNING NOW But not by a person.

A Writer’s encounter with unemployment.

FOR three months I’d been applying for jobs like a mad thing, sending my details to agencies, job sites, networks, and written whole novels responding to advertisements. Yet in 70 applications I’d completely failed to secure a job.

Advice columns advised: “Don’t take it personally”, but that was getting harder to cop as I endured a shame spiral. I was a highly employable, qualified, and experienced media worker, with a resume spanning 16 years and three continents. I couldn’t see what made me so unattractive to employers.

Counselling from a fellow jobseeker gave me a clue. I was under the illusion that I was communicating with the gatekeepers of the land of the employed – agents, human resources staff – people, basically. But my friend enlightened me about the software used to scan many job applications.

I felt complete shock. All that time I’d been blocked by a computer? What did they want? Keywords, apparently. Like passwords in fairy tales, they hang in the air magically bestowing access to an income – if only I could name them.

I did some footwork and found whole websites devoted to keywords and sample resumes which made sample applicants sound like Orwellian robots.

The software had been around since my career began. A decade ago it was the tool of Fortune 500 companies wanting to filter top applicants from time wasters. Now no one is keen to admit how prevalent its use is.

Sympathetic friends suggested I cold-call companies. It became apparent that this once tried-and-true technique is now used by agencies seeking jobs for their clients and commissions from employers. Human resources departments don’t take calls or give out contact details much anymore. They don’t need to if their agency is seeking candidates for them.

The online resume forms for employment agencies smacked of the software, so I tried a few keywords I’d seen suggested in advice columns. Mirroring the vocabulary of the selection criteria, I just regurgitated the kind of words found in annual reports and mission statements. I was dumbing myself down to a degree I’d never experienced.

FILL THE FORM If there's a form to fill, that is.
FILL THE FORM If there’s a form to fill, that is.

I yearned for the good old days, when a job application letter and resume was acknowledged with at least a written response.

Now the average job application takes days to complete and months for companies to process. By the time you’ve responded to all the ‘essential’ criteria, the ‘desirable’ criteria loom on the horizon like the second half of a marathon. If you still apply knowing you don’t possess all these wish-list skills (could any candidate on earth match them all?) you must then relate a demonstrated ability or some proven skills in all of them, and keep the application short. It still baffles me how it’s possible to demonstrate or prove anything using words alone and remain succinct.

If you’re lucky you’ll hear the outcome of all this work. Invariably you’ll hear nothing.

One of the few replies I received was a rejection letter for a job I didn’t even apply for. Wonderful to open a letter from a real person, but pitiful they were letting me know the outcome of my non-application and my non-addressing of the selection criteria.

I have no problem admitting there are a few challenged in employing me. I live a two-hour commute from the city. I have some anomalies in my resume resulting from a bereavement period and a temporary illness. I have a mainstream career pathway in media, but also worked in sales, hospitality and aged care at times to get by.

Does this not exhibit tenacity, lateral thinking and honesty? If the software didn’t value such keywords, then I was going to need a bit of self-help.

I started doing Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Working through much anger to unearth what I enjoy doing, I realised that in all those job applications, I was seeking validation, an answer to that most judgmental of social questions – “so, what do you do Mike?”. When I can’t answer that, I feel a deep sense of shame.

Not securing that validation this time around could be the best thing that ever happened to me. I have dusted off my writing and illustrating skills, converted the shed into a studio, downsized my finances, applied for local jobs, and started telling people I’m using skills which I love.

It feels frightening at times, but I am forging ahead regardless.

I don’t want my epiphany to let employers off the hook. A wish list of what is required in an employee deserves to be met, and the candidates thrown up by the software might meet all the criteria and more, but isn’t that just a system being cleverly played?

Whatever – you won’t ever know me if you just scan me.

Published in the Weekend Australian 2008.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.

My Story

Me and my crazy

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HERE'S JOHNNY! Crazymakers are skilled break-in-artists.
HERE’S JOHNNY! Crazymakers are skilled break-in-artists.

IF Writers got medals for creative courage, I’d have received one this week, for surviving my summer with a crazymaker.

It was the author of The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron, who introduced me to the playful poison of crazymakers.

These are the chaotic spirits who swan into town and demand three nights on your sofa bed, just as you’re starting that dream job and need calm nights at home with your loved ones to be at your best.

Or the drama queens who recruit you into their grand schemes, but won’t answer the call to action when you suggest they lead the way.

My latest crazymaker arrived on the scene just as I was ascending the Everest of playwriting – executing the latest draft of a ten-year project.

It had been years since I’d had a crazy around my neck, and I didn’t see it coming. Time for a reminder about how to spot ’em.

Crazymaking clue: If someone asks for too much information at first meeting, they’re a crazymaker.

We met through writing, theirs so beautifully expressed that I decided the person behind it was worth meeting. Apart from the slightest scent of networking at our first meeting on neutral territory, and their propensity for over-apologetic texts, all seemed well.

We staffed the same project from different territories, me and my latest crazymaker. I’d started a lot earlier, enjoyed the exploration and the calm group achievement, but when they began, so too did the turbulence.

Crazymaking writers can present as brilliant communicators, until they meet their equals.

Then, despite a lifetime working with words, they profess a sudden inability to interpret emails when they just don’t like their contents.

Next, they command that phone calls and meetings are the only way to have dealings with them, yet they’ll rarely pick up the phone and instigate a conversation.

Prolific use of “I did this” manifests in their expression of group projects, leaving others to amend to the truth of: “We”.

They have no time for a project’s first draft, but want to change everything once it’s done.

And they demand to be paid, even when everyone else is volunteering.

My role was suddenly called off. It was the crazymaker who informed me. They’d swung the drama in another direction which benefited them.

Crazymaking clue: If someone on equal footing tells you what the status quo of your contribution is, they’re a crazymaker.

I write to a very strict schedule, every weekday. The world of my characters and their stories is my solace when turbulence hits in the ‘real world’ of group projects, day jobs and financial survival.

I have one foot in the economy, and one foot in art, so it’s a delight to dive into my creative space: an old desk on a breezy enclosed verandah, down a quiet street at one end of an invisible island.

Here, I can lose myself in a world I have spent many years making. Through loss, difficult choices, honesty with loved ones, ignoring bad advice and relying on my gut feelings, I have earned my creative space. Creative cards very close to my chest, I use my space wisely, and I protect it well.

Crazymaking clue: If they follow you into your creative space, they’re a crazymaker.

POOR PUSS Wants in, but don't be fooled!
POOR PUSS Wants in, but don’t be fooled!

Retreating into your creative space can trigger a crazymaker’s attack.

Like a cat at the door, my crazymaker yowled for creative shelter and soul food, and worked on my sympathy buttons with well-rehearsed moves.

But I kept my head down and wrote, despite the storm brewing outside.

With sudden, pesky emails, harping on about work already done, the crazy cat tried to claw a hole through. I stomped and boarded up the breach.

A few days later, it returned and professed angrily that a phrase I had published caused the world pain, and, caring fool that I am, I bought the lie.

I hit ‘pause’ on my climb, and opened the door. Like a bear woken from hibernation, I growled: “Show me, where is this pain of yours?”

The cat mewed that it had none. I cross-examined it for signs of suffering, but there were no wounds offered for healing, and no grievances uttered for salvation.

Puss dodged solutions to its imaginary issues left and right, and made a crazy offer: now that it had disturbed me, this crazymaker wanted us to work together, and they would take care of everything.

Call me crazy, but I said: “Yes, I’ll collaborate with you, pussycat.”

My lie bought me peace.

Thank you.

I returned to the summit. I’ve walked that country so often I could get there blindfolded. At base camp, I was concerned the conditions up on the mountain were not as good as they had been before I came down, but I bravely set off.

I declined that easy, feline yowl of failure that I had at my disposal if I too were tempted to self destruct, and on a beautiful island day, later than planned, I reached the summit.

Crazymaking clue: If they start your association with an apologetic tone, which is gradually replaced by a suggestion that you need to apologise, they’re a crazymaker.

I deserve my medal because I’ve fought-off crazymakers before, but it’s taken years to have the strength of character to name one and hold it to account so speedily.

Far from my island, the crazymaker went silent (as they do); built boundaries of their own (about time); broke them with high drama (go figure); told the world that I’d destroyed them (so schoolyard); and sent me an email as though nothing had ever happened (seriously?).

Crazymaking clue: If you come to realise you’ve allowed a crazymaker into your life, you’ve been a bit crazy too.

I’ve grown.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.

Writers

Mary Moody – growing like Topsy

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MARY'S Mary Moody with some of Glenray Park's geese.
MARY’S WAY Mary Moody with some of Glenray Park’s geese.

Another encounter with a great gardener.

MARY Moody told her friends she’d never dig another perennial garden bed.

After a decade presenting the ABC’s popular Gardening Australia series, the penning of respected gardening titles, and with horticultural credentials ranking amongst the country’s greenest, it seemed as though Mary didn’t have time to garden anymore.

Geography had a lot to do with it.

Mary had fallen in love with the way of life in south-west France, and relocated there for a good portion of every year.

Her family also moved its Australian base from the Blue Mountains to Yetholme (nestled in the ranges east of Bathurst) and took-on the degraded Glenray Park farm.

But, it seems, you can’t keep a good gardener down … this article was published in Blue Mountains Life (Sep-Jan 2012).

The constant gardener

Mary Moody’s been letting her garden grow … again.

“The garden in Leura had become a millstone around my neck,” Mary remembers. “I’d created what I’d call a collector’s garden, and I was absolutely besotted with alpine perennials. It was a constant job just keeping on top of everything, not to mention expensive.”

Glenray Park attracted Mary with its century-old homestead, complete with great bones for a classic Australian home yard, but, on moving in, Mary’s love of gardening had to be left fallow. With her writing expanding into best-selling memoirs; her media appearances focussing more on Mary’s life than her gardening pursuits; and time in France and Nepal leading tour groups, the verdant lawns of Glenray Park got mown, and veggies were grown, but that was about it.

When asked if there was a tipping-point that got her back into her ‘nice’ gardening gloves, Mary laughs: “It was insidious. I created a small garden bed off our verandah, for a few of my favourite plants, and they just started to self-seed. It grew like topsy, and eventually I needed to create wider beds to accommodate everything”.

“I have to admit that nothing I’ve done since in the garden was very difficult – it just can’t be. I mulched the beds very deeply to keep the weeds down while I was away, and when I came home I returned to my weeding duties quite naturally.”

THE GROWING KIND Gardener and writer Mary Moody with some of her grandkids.
THE GROWING KIND Gardener and writer Mary Moody with some of her grandkids.

In the lead-up to Bathurst’s annual Spring Spectacular, a weekend of the district’s finest show gardens, Mary leads me though the gate near her now much-expanded ‘new’ garden.

Covered by the fallen pink petals of a flowering cherry, the plantings occupy a sunny strip between the house replete with euphorbias, cat mint, bulbs and classic country favourites like pansies and Dutch irises, and plenty of dominant roses.

“I did have a moment when I thought ‘you are mad, you’re going to have 1000 people look at your gardening mess’.

“But there’s nothing like a deadline. My son Ethan has been helping me one day a week, and we’re almost ready,” Mary says.

Mary’s ‘new’ garden is a natural extension of the house itself, with a beautiful, uncomplicated structure, and everywhere you look you’re reminded that Glenray Park is a working farm.

Fences and gates give way to fields and enclosures for chickens, goats, geese and alpaca, meaning that Mary’s garden is a home yard indeed – if it extended any further most of it would end up as feed for the animals.

A new project – a classic potager – has been developed with garden designer Nicole Clout and is situated behind a sturdy fence in sight of the chickens. Mary is hosting gardening workshops for kids this weekend, and her garden has already been tested by regular visits from her swag of grandchildren.

This part of her ‘new’ garden is a clue to what got Mary into gardening in the first place – creating organic produce for the family table. It’s been just over three decades since Mary and her filmmaker husband David Hannay took their young family away from the city, enough time for her gardening fame to bury the basic truth that gardening was always a means to a gourmet end for Mary.

GREAT GARDEN BONES Glenray Park, Yetholme, a home yard with garden potential.
GREAT GARDEN BONES Glenray Park, Yetholme, a home yard with garden potential.

But at Glenray Park, Mary has plans reaching way beyond her farm garden.

“I’m starting to plan something we’re calling ‘Sustainable Bathurst’ as a working title,” Mary reveals.

“This region was one of the first food producing districts in modern Australia, but over time crop  and stock production has become predominant. We are hoping to bring the market gardens back.”

And Mary’s decade in France has inspired the creation of a network of ferme auberge (‘farm restaurants’). “The whole idea of eating local food in season, grown here and prepared in the home, is very inspiring. I recently had a go at making sheep milk brie and goat feta.”

With a network of four other local farms already on board, the gourmet potential of Glenray Park seems about to burst. But this new direction has been built on solid organic principles, and not just in the garden.

“When we arrived, the farm was overgrown. After years of stock getting into the waterways, everything was fairly degraded. Ethan’s worked hard on the environmental farm management of Glenray Park, with the creation of a wildlife corridor and contained stock fields. He’s my back-up for the farm.

“Our creek is called Frying Pan Creek, because travellers from Lithgow would stop here for the night where a frying pan was literally nailed to a tree for everyone to use. Over time willows were planted, and they sucked the creek dry, but we have removed it all. There were once platypus here and we hope to have them back one day.

“Ethan reminds me that the ornamental garden must not enroach on the natural environment beyond the fence,” Mary says. “As long as the plants don’t jump the fence, everything will be in balance.”

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.