Formalisms and Formalities

[I'd like to use this post to introduce a new feature on this website: Apture.  You may notice that there are no links at all in this post.  That is because Apture allows easy lookup of words and phrases: simply highlight any word or phrase on this page and move the cursor over to "learn more".  A pop-up window from Wikipedia or Google or some other source should appear...]

The Japanese are often stereotyped as being excessively formal.  This stereotype I think is true for the Japanese (although necessarily oversimplified and commonly misused); but America is full of formalism too.  Our formalism is qualitatively different than that of the Japanese, but in my experience formalism has a quantitatively equal role in each country.  In Japan, formalism is often associated with the most mature expressions of traditional arts: kata in karate; shodo; even the infamous Japanese bureaucracy has its roots in the formal rigors codified in Confucianism.  Formalism lies at the received base of the culture (especially with Shinto), and this is difficult for the American in Japan to grasp.

American formalism on the other hand is a modern invention, unrefined, and even wild: Taylorism and scientific management; organizational theory and Edward Bernays; the elaborate dance sequences associated with modern finance and commercial banking security protocols; outsourcing and automated customer services; the grand and complex American healthcare system; and finally (corporate) job applications.  This kind of formalism is as American as apple pie.

Now that I am back in the United States, I am looking for a full-time job for the first time since college.  I recently applied for a position at a high-profile private university where I would really love to work.  It took me two days to formalize my existing resume and draft a cover letter in accordance with (in places nonsensical) standards specifically delineated on the university's website.  I then submitted my excessively formatted and formalized resume and cover letter electronically in accordance with specific and detailed guidelines.  

Exactly ten days later, I called the school's human resources department to inquire about the status of my application.  The woman who answered told me that the position had been in the end stages of the interview process for quite some time now, the school was waiting for a favored interviewee to accept the position, and my resume and cover letter had not been looked at and probably wouldn't be.  This bothered me, since I had been on the phone with the university's human resources office throughout the process to make sure everything was carefully done on my end.  All I had received apparently had been official pleasantries.  Even though I had gone through the dehumanizing process of running my application through the school's human resources assembly line, the powers in charge had lacked the common courtesy to tell me that the position was no longer available (nor did they update their website accordingly). 

As a friend who helped me with my cover letter replied afterwards: welcome to job search.  

Fair enough.  These things take time, and there are a lot of false starts along the way; I just think it's interesting that here we have a clear example of information technologies leading to inefficiencies: institutions have nothing to lose by taking the human element out of job placement.  But those who are looking for jobs tend to waste a lot of time pursuing positions that were never open to them in the first place - and this at a time when our biggest economic problem is unemployment, specifically that the skill set of the unemployed does not seem to match the skill set demanded by employers.  Far from assisting the coordination of information, information technologies in this case seem to lead to a coordination problem.