To call or not to call?

This is a new dilemma for job seekers. Back in the day when I was fresh out of college and desperately seeking any job that would get me the hell out of Greenville, Mississippi, I would call editors all day long trying to get a job — making sure they got my resumes, seeing if they needed anything else, just checking in, etc. That was part of the game. That was part of the job, to be honest, so part of getting the job was to prove you would be relentless in the pursuit of the job to thus prove you'd be relentless in the pursuit of the story.

But now we're in the age of e-mail and Facebook and LinkedIn...and Twittering, I guess. And job listings are all: NO CALLS. I saw one editor who was blogging about the process of hiring an assistant editor who wrote, "The quickest way to get your resume tossed in garbage is to call when the job clearly says, 'No calls.'"

Also, now that I've worked as an editor, I know how annoying those calls are, especially when you're trying to get all your daily work done and get the paper out. The last thing you want to do is spend even 10 minutes on the phone with a job seeker. I think this has probably also changed since I graduated from college. When I graduated I was mostly talking to people whose primary job was handling job seekers. Not H.R. people, mind you, but editors whose job it was to seek out and develop talent for their newsrooms. But with 10 years of layoffs between now and then, I don't think those people exist any more — except maybe at the highest echelons of newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post). And where they do exist, they have about 200 more duties than they used to. So they're busy writing editorials or overseeing the paper's social media endeavors.

I've been pondering all of this over the last few days as I've wrestled with whether to call or not to call regarding a job at the Chicago RedEye that I applied for. I've applied for quite a few jobs since my position was eliminated, but this is the one I've actually wanted. It's a job I have the experience to do, it's in the city I want to live and it seems like a fun place to work — if any print media place can be fun to work at in these trying times.

Last night my boyfriend brought it up. He's squarely on the side of calling. His thinking is, if you don't call you're mostly like not going to get it anyway. How many hundreds of resumes do you think they got for this job? So how's it going to hurt if you DO call. At least you'll stick out in their minds and not everyone is going to consider calling when a job says not to call a reason to toss a resume in a garbage. Most of the time that stuff is posted by H.R. anyway, and the real managers don't mind a call — not to that degree. So what do you have to lose?

After pondering the questions today, I came to the conclusion that I should call. But I'm going to call on Friday. RedEye publishes Monday through Friday, so they're unlikely to be terribly busy on Friday. Of course, they may not even be in the office on Friday. (a.m. NewYork — a similar local product that I interviewed at last year only staffs Sunday through Thursday.) But if no one's there on Friday, I figure I can either leave a message or call back on Monday. The BF is right. What do I have to lose?