I was astounded by the results. I quickly had to remove the ad, too. The messages were heart wrenching to read. One man was unemployed after being discharged from the military. Another man had been doing senior level work for 10 years. Another didn't have an ounce of experience in this field. And finally a couple were recent graduates -- these were the only ones I was interested in. I left mine up for a couple days. I realized the deceitfulness of this experiment. I genuinely felt remorse despite my animalistic nature to size up the competition. Then I reflected on myself and thought about the few times I'd read a job post and quickly turn to my wife "This one sounds perfect! I really hope I get it!" and be grinning from ear to ear for the next half an hour only to be hit with sadness for a day or two. Then I wondered, if it was this easy for me, who is to say others wouldn't be doing the same?
I changed my rules for applying to job posts after that. They had to actually state their recruiting firm in the post. Bonus points for disclosing their client. They also had to post an email or website -- some way to validate the poster. Again, bonus points for phone numbers. I would also search various strings in the post to see if they're listed anywhere else. I became a lot more cautious in my search, which was a good thing as I wasn't slapping my name, email, address and phone number all over to who knows where.
After my experiment I reached a conclusion-- I had broad competition and shouldn't try to gauge myself on others. This made me much calmer in the interviews. I felt reassured knowing it wasn't "what I knew", and instead "who I was." I decided to be more of myself and not give canned answers that I thought they wanted to hear. My skillset was expendable and I needed to realize that. I lost my sense of entitlement. I used to think my $100,000 piece of paper meant something.
Then I realized it did.