The Jobs Report, by SheetsResume.com - Newsletter 02
Should we call this the “Jobs Report”?
I mean, somebody needs to publish one…
Colin here, founder of SheetsResume.com (and now, serial newsletter author).
Now, I know it’s been two weeks since our first newsletter. I’m a busy guy, so I decided not to self-impose a weekly schedule. I think this newsletter will be an irregular thing; every 1-3 weeks feels good to me, when there’s stuff to say. No need to blast your inbox with irrelevant or forced content.
So once again, here’s Issue #2 of your no-AI “Jobs Report” newsletter (I swear I write every word – I just love parentheticals… and other sparsely used punctuation, like dashes, ellipses, Oxford Commas & ampersands).
As a reminder, we'll bring you the following 4 things every 1-3 weeks that we feel you'll enjoy:
- 1 breaking job market news story
- 1 new job search tip or tool
- 1 success story or review
- 1 funny thing
- a 5th thing, maybe
1. Breaking Job Market News: Trump sacks BLS Chief; America’ national bird is now the noble Ostrich.
Full story: after the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised May and June jobs numbers down from the initial estimates by 258,000 jobs – confirming what you already know, that this current hiring market sucks – Donald Trump fired the BLS Chief (Erika McEntarfer) on Friday.
He claimed – without evidence, obviously – that Erika was manipulating the jobs numbers to make him look bad. Nevermind that in August 2024, the BLS underneath Erika had revealed that job growth from April 2023 through March 2024 had been overstated by a massive 818,000 positions, which – to the intellectually consistent observer – would have made the Biden administration “look bad” during the 2024 election vs Trump.
Additionally, between February and July 2024, multiple monthly jobs reports – including Dec. 2023 and Jan., April, and May 2024 – were all revised downward. Maybe Biden should have fired her then for such obvious partisan hackery…?
Nevermind that companies are in the middle of a historic AI-fueled hiring freeze. Nevermind that 200,000+ government employees were just suddenly cast into the private jobs market willy-nilly. Nevermind that $30T of global trade has been thrown into upheaval via a useless and haphazard trade war. Nevermind that farms and construction sites are being raided and workers arrested by the thousands. Nevermind that Erika McEntarfer was confirmed by a bipartisan Senate vote, including votes from JD Vance and Marco Rubio.
Nevermind all that – Mrs. McEntarfer is clearly a partisan hack, because EVERY NUMBER must be BEST NUMBER under Dear Leader President Trump.
Even Trump’s former appointee for BLS Chief, Bill Beach, weighed in. Bill said the move “undermines credibility” in the economic numbers the government puts out, predicting (probably correctly) that now everyone will assume the numbers coming out of our institutions are politically manipulated.
Sure hope that governments and markets don’t rely on accurate and unbiased economic data to allocate resources and make major investment decisions, or whatever.
If you want a 2-minute mental download of everything that’s wrong with the job market right now – free of bias and gaslighting – I break it down on YouTube in this video rant. Watching it might make you feel more sane.
2. New Job Search Tool of the Week: AI Job Matching
We’ll automatically discover new jobs that fit your resume (if you upload one), and you can tailor your resume, write a cover letter, and practice interviewing for each job right from the results page.
3. SheetsResume.com Review of the Week:
“I love your resume builder, easy to use and very helpful for young people. –– Jay, a teacher at Coderminds, which teaches 2,000 technical students every year.
4. Funny Thing of the Week:
Maybe less funny, and more interesting: a recruiter has taken to Reddit to complain about the volume of applications they have to sort through in the wake of AI. Basically, they can’t trust the ATS system to not filter out great people, so they have to manually review every single resume… all 5,000 of them!
This completely reaffirms our approach at SheetsResume.com to focus on impressing the human screener, not the ATS, and it aligns almost verbatim what I’ve said on the Sheets Resume Advice page long before this trend became apparent:
We try to explain to our clients that the ATS isn't the "great filter" when it comes to your interview prospects: the human screener is. This is because every ATS has the incentive to never block qualified candidates, so it errs on the side of inclusion . A human screener, on the other hand, has the incentive not to get yelled at by their boss for scheduling interviews with unqualified idiots (to use boss speak), so they err on the side of exclusion and are extremely harsh when judging resumes.
So yeah, that’s highly validating.
5. Our Favorite Job Application Right Now: oh sheet, a new category!
I figured I should also use this email list for some good and promote some companies that I love, while helping you find cool new jobs to apply for. Who knows?!
I want to share Intelligems, a Techstars 2021 company that I mentored at the time. They’ve since raised a $9M Series A and are doubling their headcount YoY (one of the rare startups that’s still hiring humans!). Their price testing software is completely changing how companies think about price elasticity across all product categories (and not always in an upwards direction – I actually lowered prices at my other company thanks to the data from their software!).
They’re hiring for Operations, Account Managers, Customer Care, and Engineering. Check out their open roles, and tell them Colin (aka “the sheets guy”) sent you if you do apply!
Ok, that’s it for now! As always, if you’re in a pinch and could benefit from free temporary access to our resume builder, please just email me and let me know.
Best,
Colin at SheetsResume.com
PS - Don’t forget to share our resume builder with your friends using our 50-50 referral program!