by Ilana Gershon

Job Application Forms

The military introduced this as a widespread practice starting in 1917, when the Committee on Classification of Personnel in the Army developed forms to standardizing practices for evaluating soldiers.  Initially these forms were called application blanks, and were intended to accompany a cover letter that was supposed to be tailored to that particular company. (Thelen 1998: 64)  Prior to the resume and application blank, cover letters could be more generic, but in the 1920s, authors offering job advice began encouraging applicants to write a letter addressed specifically to that company, and ideally, to a specific named potential employer.

Thelen, Erik. 1998. “The Evolution of the Application Letter in America: 1880-1960.”  Phd Thesis. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Informational Interviews

The first mention of informational interviews that I can find is in 1975 – the first volume of Women’s Work suggests that women conduct informational interviews about the jobs in which they might be interested.

Behavioral Interview Questions

Tom Janz introduces this approach at a conference in 1977, but only addresses it in print in his 1982 article “Initial Comparisons of Patterned Behavior Description Interviews versus Unstructured Interviews.” in the Journal of Applied Psychology 67(5): 577-580.

Structured Interview Responses

In 1986, Tom Janz had published his book, Behavior Description Interviewing in which he recommended that people deploy the SHARE Model to structure their answers when responding to a behavioral interview.   Over time, this has morphed into at least two other acronyms that I have come across during my fieldwork – the STAR model and the PSR model.

The SHARE model:

S Describe a specific Situation.

H Identify Hindrances or challenges.

A Explain the Action that you took

R Discuss the Results or outcome

E Evaluate or summarize what you learned.

PSR Model – I found this more on the West Coast

Problem

Solution

Result

STAR Model – I found this more in the Mid-West and on college campuses

Situation

Task

Action

Result

By Ilana Gershon

Since people weren’t using job ads to find applicants or positions until the mid-1880s, what did they turn to?  They ended up turning to intelligence offices, which managed a number of different tasks, including staffing, finding lost animals, branding animals, providing information about how commodities were doing in the marketplace, or information about commodities that are rare or unusual, and also serving as a pawn shop.  The first ad for an intelligence office I could find is James Hulme announcing in the Pennsylvania Gazette that he has successfully set one up in 1774.  By 1812, people were writing op-eds to New York City newspapers criticizing intelligence offices for placing servants and then luring them to another position by delivering tempting flyers about a new workplace to the servants’ workplace only a few days after they were placed.  From this critique, it seems clear that in 1812, both job seeker and employer paid the same amount (50 cents) to be matched.  The intelligence offices became such a problem that the NY legislature passed a law on February 4, 1822 insisting that intelligence offices required a license in an attempt to regulate them.  Other states soon followed – scurrilous intelligence offices was a concern for state legislatures for many decades, and various states experimented with ways to regulate the private employment offices.  It did take a while, however, for dictionaries to acknowledge this institution.  Webster (in 1884) defined intelligence offices as “an office or place where information may be obtained, particularly respecting servants to be hired.”

By the time the Webster dictionary started defining intelligence offices, employment bureaus which were free to the job-seeker had already been well-established.  In the 1850s, the New York YMCA branch offered services similar to intelligence offices, hoping to help the young men who were boarding at the YMCA find jobs.  In 1866, the Chicago YMCA became concerned that Civil War vets were having trouble finding jobs when they returned home, and hired a man to work full time on job placement, and in 1875, he had placed 4,000 men that year alone (Hopkins 1951).

Starting in perhaps the late 1880s, the widespread distrust of private employment bureaus sparked an interest in having government-run employment bureaus.  The Colorado Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1887-1889 publishes the first official statement advocating for government involvement in labor exchanges (Sautter 1983: 375).  But this attempt did not succeed in the Colorado state legislature.  Instead, the first government agencies were established in Ohio in 1890, in part because the Ohio Labor Commissoner was so impressed by Parisian employment bureaus, and was able to persuade the Ohio legislature to create agencies in the state’s five biggest cities (Sautter 1983: 382).  While in Ohio, the government-run employment agencies were relatively successful, other states found it more difficult to serve a wide range of clients well.  The New York agency closed in 1906, after being open only 10 years, in part because it had devolved into only helping workers in domestic service.   At the time, there were over 800 commercial employment bureaus in the city.  Unions, meanwhile, were suspicious of these charitable and government bureaus, and believed that part of their function was to help employers easily hire strike-breakers.

References

Hopkins, Charles Howard. 1951. History of the Y.M.C.A in North America. New York: Association Press.

Savickas, M. L., & Baker, D. B. 2005. The History of Vocational Psychology: Antecedents, Origin, and Early Development. In W. B. Walsh & M. L. Savickas (Eds.), Contemporary topics in vocational psychology. Handbook of vocational psychology: Theory, research, and practice (pp. 15-50). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Sautter, Udo. 1983. “North American Government Labor Agencies Before World War One: A Cure for Unemployment?” Labor History 24(3): 366-393.

by Ilana Gershon

This is my application to be a member of the Society for the Study of Boring Things.  To write my book, Down and Out in the New Economy, I attended many workshops for job seekers and read many job advice manuals.   I kept wondering how and when these practices ever got started.  Some things are well-known — Mark Granovetter started the trend to favor weak ties when networking through his 1974 study, Getting a Job (which I talk about at length in my own book).   But other aspects I had no idea — where did the resume come from?  What was the first job ad in the United States?   Who first came up with the idea of behavioral interviewing or the informational interview?

In honor of Labor Day, I am posting this week everything I have uncovered about the history of hiring.   Clearly, this is a topic that needs a better and more systematic historian, and if anyone wants to do this, I will happily hand over all my primary sources.

Today — Resumes

Resumes, or curriculum vitae, might have existed in various forms in the 1910s, but were not yet a named genre. For quite a while they were called data sheets, and were not necessarily expected to accompany an application (DeKay 2003). Indeed, the resume was so far from being a widely circulated genre that in 1914, a magazine writer describing how to hire good employees, was forced to explain in detail what type of document an especially desirable applicant submitted, since the writer lacked the handy term “resume.”  He wrote: “With the letter was enclosed an abstract giving a complete history of education and business experience, including all positions held salaries received and names of firms worked for.” (Oliver 1914: 137)  The applicant was not inventing this genre out of whole cloth, 1914 was the same year that the resume as a genre was also first discussed in college business communication courses. (Popken 1999)  Job applications did not regularly contain a separate sheet of paper listing educational and vocational history labeled a resume until the late 1930s. (DeKay 2003)

In my survey of U.S. newspaper classified ads, job ads were not consistently requesting applicants’ resumes until the early 1950s – the first mention in a job ad that I found was 1952.  The mention I found was in a Washington D.C. newspaper, The Evening Star, in an ad for an automobile salesman.  The same classified section had ads for engineers or IBM machine operators, as well as cooks and all sorts of office jobs or blue-collar jobs, but none of these ads asked for a resume.  Even until the mid-1980s, most job ads didn’t request resumes up front – instead they suggested a number to call to arrange for an interview or recommending applying in person.  But by the mid-1980s, almost every ad that discussed office work or a job that might require a BA also mentioned submitting a resume.

Functional Resumes

The first mention of the functional resume can be found in 1952 – first suggested in Carl Naether’s The Business Letter: Its Principles and Problems. By 1955, 50% of the textbooks discussing resumes described functional resumes as a viable option. (DeKay 2003: 370).

References

DeKay, Samuel. 2003. “The Historical Evolution of a Written Genre: The Employment Resume in the United States, 1950-1999.” Phd Dissertation, Fordham University.

Oliver, H. M. 1914. “Finding the Right Man: Efficient Methods of Selecting Men to Fill Important Positions.” Business (March): 136-138.

Popken, Randall. “The Pedagogical Dissemination of a Genre: The Resume in American Business Discourse Textbooks, 1914-1939.” JAC 19 (1999): 91-116.

Thelen, Erik. 1998. “The Evolution of the Application Letter in America: 1880-1960.”  Phd Thesis. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.