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You'd mail your resume in (it was a 'hack' back then to hand-deliver it), then get a call in a couple days or weeks. Then someone who was home during the day (if you already had a job) would answer the phone and take the message from the HR person (or they'd leave one on your answering machine), you'd then have an appointment to go in or return a call to set one up...
A friend is searching for a job right now and was surprised to encounter an online job posting requesting mailed in resumes.

Next we need a service that will tailor resumes to job descriptions using LLM's (already easily available) while also having an integrated "mail this resume" function.

First class postage on printer paper will be the default, but you can pay more for cardstock, pink paper, and a scent to give it a little something extra.

I had an old coworker who told me he got into software development in the sixties by walking into an IBM office and asking for a job. He had no education beyond high school and no experience with computers. They just had him take an aptitude test and then he worked on mainframes for decades.
Working on mainframes and with computers was considered secretarial work by almost everyone around that time. The role of computers in work, and the status of working with computers, has changed in incredible ways.
You still had to do a coding test -- but it was pointing to the bug in the C++ linked-list implementation on a single sheet of line printer paper.

Because nobody was going to carry a Sun workstation down to the meeting room just for your interview.

I remember a Java job interview like that. "Tell us what you would do to improve this code" with a couple pages of code printed out :-D
My first full time programmer job I got in early 2003. I had only 1 year left in University and a friend of mine was working in this "hotel reservation website" company owned by some gringos (this was in La Paz, BCS back in the day).

My friend told me he will talk with the boss there and see if they wanted to have me. They were a "Microsoft" shop, mainly doing Visual Basic. This was early .NET days. Because I was a student with all time in my hands, I taught myself C#.

Anyways, they invited me to the small office, I arrived, my friend introduced me to the "boss" (a guy who had got out of University maybe 4 years before) and he gave me a programming challenge. Basically to implement a CRUD in C# for some random domain that I have forgotten. This was in a PC that they lent me (Laptops were not common in Mexico in those days)

It took me about an hour to finish it and handle it in. They then thanked me and told me they will be in touch later.

Apparently, they had scheduled around 4 or 5 hours for the problem and I blazed through it (humble bragging I know hehe). After a couple of days, I asked my friend about the job, and he told me to call to the boss, as it will show interest. I called later that week, apparently exactly at the moment they were having a meeting about me and the position. They basically told my friend I will be his "protege", so he would be my boss.

In hindsight it was a nice place. We were like 8 people max in the team (including devs and designers, doing Flash, and the accountant lady that also sold us Burritos for breakfast). Golden years now that I think of it (the office was just by the broadwalk, so we would go out to the beach).

But yeah, the interview process was completely personal and down to earth. Not the crazy stuff that you see nowadays. It marked me, as every time I have to hire people I try to replicate the feeling I had at that time. I was hell nervous, but excited to show what I knew.

Sorry for the long Abe Simpson story-rant, it's cool to remember.

I took a paper coding test in 2004 when I was job hunting. It was pretty hilarious to me, really, since it was so incredibly easy (multiple choice data-structures type questions) for anybody who had any skills at all.

They finally offered me a job 3 months later after I already had started working somewhere else.

Or coding on a white board. God I hated it.
Unpopular take: This was significantly better for employers and employees.

It worked as both an effort and presentation filter which both reduced the overload of candidates, allowing for more attention, higher variation of skills that didnt often show like traditional resume bonafides and mad companies more likely to invest more in employees as it was a pain to go do again.

For employees it was great too. Much like the world pre-dating apps the business world wasnt all looking for the equivalent of trust fund, 6'5", blue eyes. As well as the points mentioned above.

The older I get the more I think the internet is a massive net negative due to effects like this.

Another example is used car sales. Before the internet it was local and required work to find cars for sale. Now thanks to the internet we have "hustlers" who scour FB marketplace and craigslist and buy up all the deals to flip for profit.

Second unpopular take: This was better for all involved, but it constrained the job market to geographical boundaries. People did not apply to jobs in other states/countries/continents because they did not see the job postings for other states/countries/continents.
I responded to an ad in the newspaper for a C programming job way back in mid-1980s. The team that posted the ad was not impressed with my resume, but they sent it on to a different team within the same company. That team hired me and I stayed at that company for 14 years.

Unlike the author, I kept the ad in a box for 35 years, at which point I scanned it and threw out the hard copy.

Edit: Also, the resume I mailed to them was printed by a print shop.

The newspaper does still have job listings e.g. for Amazon, NVIDIA, DoorDash, Tesla, Chewy. I haven’t been having much luck applying to them though...
Those jobs aren't meant for you... they post in the classifieds with the hopes nobody responds. All to game the labor market test allowing their visa worker to get a green card.
According too the linked article, you should try faxing your resume to them. Have you tried that?
Ah yes, the h1b box checker ads.
Chewy! Yay
Mine is from Poland, early 90s, and even more analog. I worked at a Polish-Italian company. Our accountant used an ERP program, DOS, written in Clipper. There was no internet, so the vendor's consultant had to come to the office in person. The consultant was a young woman. She became my girlfriend and she pulled me into ERP. The girlfriend left. The ERP stayed for over 30 years ;)
Idk if it's true but it seems like life was simpler before the Internet took off.

Now that guy is probably competing with tons of people more talented willing to work for less

> Now that guy is probably competing with tons of people more talented willing to work for less

This strikes at the core of it. Life was simpler for those in the know about how the world worked. If you were lucky enough to grow up with the right parents, friends, family members, and class mates to help guide you through how the world worked it was easy. You could count on less competition by knowing where to look, how to present yourself, and what to say. Someone very talented but stuck in a situation where they didn't know how to find these jobs and apply properly was hard. You would lose career advancement at every step of the way relative to peers who had a social network that fed them this information.

If you're one of the people with more talent and hungry for work, life actually got simpler for you in modern times. The advantages of being well-connected and groomed by your parents for success are still there, but they're diminished when everyone can find advice on the internet.

I grew up on the cusp of this change. It's hard to communicate just how hard it was to navigate even simple things like interview prep or even dressing correctly for interviews if you weren't surrounded by people who had up to date info.

EDIT: To be clear, I was raised with a lot of advantages and had a lot of benefits. It was still striking how much of the early job search I had to fumble my way through in ways that would have been so easy to address with the unlimited online resources available today, which many of my peers had handled by their classmates or their parents' friend who had some industry familiarity. A specific example is that I didn't know that there were specific books for learning how to do programming job interviews. At first I just thought you had to learn how to be really good at programming, so I challenged myself to do a lot of tasks like I saw in the first interview I did. These days, it's unthinkable that someone would get all the way through college and into interview loops without knowing what a tech interview would be like and having the opportunity to practice.

Simplicity and convenience are often inversely correlated.

Life was for sure simpler in times gone by, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was better. Definitely different.

I'm sure future posters will look back on these years with fondness for this or that as well.

Used to flip both ways...

I.e. for a time, it became easier for talented people to find a better role.

In the last 5-10 years though, between the race to the bottom and AI/Bot spam (even ignoring the overall decrease in job availability) things frankly suck.

Back in the day, the 4x5 (medium format film) experience requirement would have filtered out a lot of candidates. It was arty, weird and required expensive gear (Hasselblad or equivalent) and even more expensive film (around $1/exposure).

These days everybody can shoot unlimited high-res imagery for free with the phone in their pocket.

In 1981, my first job in Silicon Valley was obtained by answering a blind (no company name) ad in the Mercury News. It was a kooky company that built burn-in ovens for semiconductors (mostly 2164 memory chips back then).

I had a lot of fun there. The purchasing manager was a Scottish guy and he had an after hours drinking club in a small conference room with a wet bar. I was only 24 years old and working crazy hours. I'd get a few beers around 7 pm and then go back to work writing 8080 assembly language code for a few more hours.

I also ended up smoking weed with the CEO and CFO a couple of times. The CFO was not a young guy. I'm not sure how old he was, but he had all white hair. The CEO gave me a mason jar full of his homegrown weed as a gift when I finished the project.

That company and even the building is long gone. It's now a Google parking garage.

Very self-satisfied, and deservedly so. Like when you use that one piece of scrap wood in the garage you've been saving for this one occasion, or something from that drawer of metric-threaded bolts that just saves the project you're working on. It was all worth it, see? This is why we do it. No different with the author's digital preservation and online tool use. Pleasant read.
How tech company HR departments game the system for PERM jobs: A newspaper classifieds story
After my burgeoning career cratered and jobs weren't pouring in because my résumé was impressing naïve, desperate managers during the cusp of the dot-com boom, I found myself in a homeless shelter with a newspaper and a phone.

And yeah, shelters are harsh. A lot of them turn us all out on the streets during the day, because shelters are exclusively for sleeping and hygiene. So you trudge around town during the day to find food, work, and a purpose in life.

So they would have an "employment resource room" with stacks of newspapers and little phone carrels for us to call anyone. And yours truly here had not the slightest clue or inkling how to actually conduct a job search. I didn't know how to design or write a CV, I didn't know how to approach employers, and of course, by the late 1990s, classified help-wanted ads were a really, really shitty way for an "IT Professional" to find anything.

But I could do nothing but try. Eventually, I found some scammy call-centers who would hire anyone. And I worked as a scammy caller in a fly-by-night call-center. I worked day labor. And landing these jobs didn't teach or train me in the slightest how to seek jobs, how to market myself, or how to interview.

I still don't really know how. ATS and gatekeepers and my lousy, holey work history? It's a lost cause in today's market. I've learned a lot of tips and tricks since then, but in the end, it's about making yourself a good product, offering value to a company, and finding the right fit before you go insane and just apply for SSDI.

while the personal touch has pretty much disappeared from the hiring process at tech companies, it can still be found. About 5 years ago my daughter applied to a tech company as she was graduating from college (they had a booth at the job fair at her school). within a few days she heard back and they offered to fly her out to their campus (halfway across the country) for an interview. the "interview" consisted of various managers talking to her as they walked around the campus (it's an exceptionally nice campus) -- never sat down in an office, no stupid leetcode, etc. She flew back to college that evening and had an offer in her inbox by the time she arrived. She's worked at the company ever since.
My last job was vaguely classifieds-related: the company posted a local press release into the newspaper bragging about how they'd come to the area to serve a couple local clients and I ended up snooping their careers page to find out that they had an open spot (and the dude that spun the site up was leaving) -- right place, right time?

As a teen though (even in the late 2000s): I walked into various places asking for applications and somehow was one of the only teens to go all the way down to the Duty Free to ask if they were hiring (because it's past a tollbooth and inside a big fenced in Customs point of no return). The manager asked if I'd seen his ad in the paper and I hadn't, I said I just figured it was retail that might be hiring. Nailed it.

Or attending a local job fair with a stack of printed resumes.
Another tidbit, based upon finding out which company the phone number belonged to: you could go to the library and access business directories. Think the yellow pages, only they were geared towards businesses rather than towards consumers. Print versions were broken down by industry, but electronic ones (on CD-ROM) were searchable. It was also a tool for looking for unadvertised jobs, since those directories seemed to be geared towards making cold calls (albeit, for people doing sales).
Not only jobs, but NYC apartments - although in the Voice not the Times.
Only my first job involved newspaper ads (early 90s). My second job pivoting into tech came via USENET, and later jobs from networks or shoulder tapping by recruiters.
I recommend https://www.jobs.now/ because corporations use this loophole to block jobs and eliminate bargaining power. As of this comment, here are some of the companies that are still exploiting the system,

AT&T Services, Inc. Goldman Sachs Amazon Boston Consulting Group Wal-Mart Crowdstrike JPMorgan Chase & Co. DocuSign

I was hoping for a mention about this HR backdoor, but it wasn't covered.

Fondly remembering postings for TAL and SNOBOL jobs in the classifieds before the book store near me had books on SQL in the early 90s.
We were told the quality of paper mattered and that the envelope should have the same high-end watermark that the resume sheet had. Inkjet printed resumes were discouraged because the quality back then was low and the resolution made anti-aliasing on the type come out weird. Laser printed only, please.
I remember back when the Thrifty Nickle was how you could find all kinds of things up to and including your next vehicle.
I wonder if anyone finds jobs on Craigslist anymore
Classified ads for jobs were still a thing up until around Y2K. MonsterBoard (what it used to be called) was one of the first online job platforms and then Dice came along. I used to have good luck finding contract gigs through dice.
Looking straight into the eyes, strong handshake, exuding confidence?
imo the job process is totally broken its an AI arms race. You have people doing mass ai apply with slop CVs and then recruitment just doing the inverse with AI ATS. Working on something I think could help solve the issue just need to find recruiters to talk to see if it's any good.
The IBM anecdote in the comments captures something important. The old system had a lot of problems, but it did one thing well: it forced a much faster path from "can this person do the work" to actually finding out. You walked in, they gave you an aptitude test, and the test result was the decision.

We've somehow ended up with a hiring process that's simultaneously more information-rich and worse at answering the basic question. You can see someone's entire LinkedIn history, their GitHub, their blog posts, their conference talks, and still have no idea whether they'll be effective in the role. The signal-to-noise ratio went the wrong direction.

In case the headline makes no sense, the original title before being mangled by the HN headline censor:

"How We Used to Get Jobs".

>I’ve just gone through a butt load of resumes

Perhaps she said "bulk load of resumes" and you misheard it as the funnier version?