Dear ASELSAN, Please Hire Me

There is a particular language used in job advertisements.

You know the language.

Team player.

Analytical thinker.

Flexible.

Responsible.

Adaptable.

Able to work under pressure.

Excellent communication skills.

Fast learner.

Results-oriented.

At some point, every candidate begins to suspect that companies are not actually looking for employees.

They are looking for mythological creatures.

In July 2010, I wrote a very short entry about ASELSAN.

The company had apparently moved to flexible working hours.

My response was not to discuss the policy in any serious way.

It was basically:

Good for them.

But before wishing the same for other companies, take me too.

I work well in teams.

I can work flexibly.

I think extremely analytically.

And I love you.

What else do you want?

That was the whole application.

Not an official application, of course.

More like a public love letter from a young engineer to a company he wanted to work for.

And I still like it because it captures something very specific about the early years of a career.

You are trying to become employable and human at the same time.

The process makes this surprisingly difficult.

You have just graduated, or you are close to it.

You have courses.

Projects.

Technical interests.

Some practical experience.

A résumé that still contains things you will later remove without mercy.

And now you are supposed to explain why a company should choose you.

This sounds reasonable.

Then you open a job posting.

The company wants someone who already knows everything.

Several programming languages.

Several operating systems.

Several tools.

Years of experience.

Leadership.

Teamwork.

Independence.

Excellent communication.

The ability to work under pressure.

The ability to manage time.

The ability to travel.

The ability to adapt.

The ability to solve problems.

Probably the ability to repair the office coffee machine if required.

You read the list and think:

Yes.

Sure.

I can be all of those things.

Please just let me inside.

This is one of the strange psychological effects of job searching.

A normal person becomes a product description.

You begin translating yourself into corporate keywords.

“I get along with people” becomes:

Strong team collaboration skills.

“I can usually figure things out” becomes:

Highly analytical problem-solving ability.

“I do not immediately panic when plans change” becomes:

Adaptable to dynamic environments.

“I will come to work when you tell me to” becomes:

Flexible.

The language becomes so polished that the person nearly disappears.

Maybe that is why my old ASELSAN entry ended with:

And I love you.

It breaks the format.

No résumé asks for love.

No recruitment portal has a checkbox for it.

But enthusiasm is often what the candidate is actually trying to communicate.

I want to be there.

I care about the work.

This place matters to me.

Please notice that.

The problem is that enthusiasm is hard to prove.

Anybody can write:

I am highly motivated.

The phrase has been used so many times that it no longer contains motivation.

“Passionate” suffers from the same problem.

Every company wants passionate employees.

Every applicant therefore becomes passionate.

Passionate about embedded systems.

Passionate about enterprise software.

Passionate about logistics platforms.

Passionate about database migration.

Sometimes I imagine recruiters reading these sentences and wondering how civilization produced so many people with intense emotional relationships to middleware.

The truth is usually simpler.

You want a good job.

You want to learn.

You want to work on interesting things.

You want decent colleagues.

You want to earn enough money.

You want the company to choose you.

There is no shame in any of that.

But recruitment language encourages theater.

Both sides perform.

The company describes itself as an exceptional environment.

The applicant describes himself as an exceptional candidate.

Then everyone meets in a room and tries to determine how much of the description was marketing.

I experienced that uncertainty many times.

You go to an interview.

People are friendly.

The conversation goes well.

The environment looks good.

You begin imagining yourself there before anyone has offered anything.

Where would I sit?

How would I leave my current job?

How soon could I start?

Would this be better?

You construct an alternate life during a forty-minute conversation.

Then nothing happens.

No call.

No email.

Silence.

The imagination was faster than the recruitment process.

That is why job searching can feel so personal even when the process is mostly administrative.

A company is evaluating skills.

The candidate often feels as if the company is evaluating the entire person.

Rejected from the position becomes:

Rejected.

That interpretation is usually wrong.

But knowing that intellectually does not remove the feeling.

Especially early in a career.

You have not yet accumulated enough evidence that one employer’s decision is not a referendum on your value.

Later, the process becomes easier to separate.

Not easy.

Just clearer.

Maybe they needed a different skill.

Maybe they hired internally.

Maybe the project disappeared.

Maybe the budget changed.

Maybe another candidate simply fit better.

Maybe the interview went badly.

Maybe nobody knows.

Organizations are not perfect decision machines.

They are groups of people operating under constraints.

Young applicants rarely see those constraints.

We see a gate.

Open or closed.

That is one reason famous technical companies gain such power in the imagination.

They become more than employers.

They become validation.

If I work there, then I must be good.

This is dangerous.

A respected company can be a great place to work.

Getting hired there can be a meaningful achievement.

But a company name is still not a personality.

It cannot permanently prove your intelligence.

And not getting hired cannot permanently disprove it.

I understood this better later.

In 2010, however, the emotional logic was simpler.

ASELSAN was important.

The work looked serious.

The company was associated with defense technology and engineering at a scale that appealed to a young engineer.

So when I heard about flexible working hours, my reaction was almost romantic.

Do not merely improve your working conditions.

Hire me so I can enjoy them too.

I am compatible with teams.

I am flexible.

I am analytical.

I love you.

What else could possibly be missing?

Experience, perhaps.

That inconvenient category.

Entry-level job descriptions often create one of the great comedy loops of professional life.

To get experience, you need a job.

To get the job, you need experience.

The candidate looks at the requirement and thinks:

Perhaps enthusiasm can substitute for two years.

Sometimes it can.

Usually not on the form.

This is where the first few career years become so important.

Eventually your résumé changes.

You stop describing potential and start describing evidence.

Built this.

Fixed that.

Worked on this system.

Delivered that project.

Used this tool.

Solved this failure.

The language becomes more concrete.

And something psychologically useful happens:

You need fewer adjectives.

Early résumé:

Analytical, motivated, adaptable, hardworking.

Later résumé:

Reduced X.

Implemented Y.

Integrated Z.

The work begins speaking.

That transition is satisfying.

Not because experience removes insecurity.

It gives insecurity better data.

You no longer need to say you can learn.

You have examples of learning.

You no longer need to say you solve problems.

You have problems you solved.

The corporate keywords become less important.

Maybe this is why old career entries are funny to read.

They preserve the period before professional identity solidified.

You were still trying on the language.

Team player.

Analytical.

Flexible.

Yes, yes, yes.

Tell me what the magic words are.

I will say them.

There is innocence in that.

And ambition.

The good kind.

The kind that says:

Give me a chance.

I can do this.

You do not yet know exactly what “this” will involve.

Nobody does at the beginning.

University prepares you for technical concepts.

Work prepares you for work.

Meetings.

Deadlines.

Requirements.

Legacy code.

People.

Documentation.

Miscommunication.

Dependencies.

Managers.

Unexpected failures.

Things that looked easy in the specification and became difficult in reality.

The first company that hires you is taking a risk.

So are you.

That is another thing job postings hide.

Employment is not only the company choosing a candidate.

The candidate is choosing an environment that may shape years of life.

What will I learn here?

Who will I become around these people?

Will the work make me better?

Will it make me miserable?

Will I still care about the field after three years?

These questions are harder than:

Do you know C++?

But young candidates often feel they have no right to ask them.

First get accepted.

Then think.

That makes sense when choices are limited.

It can also create bad decisions.

A prestigious name can distract from an ordinary truth:

You still have to spend your days there.

The brand is seen from outside.

The job is lived from inside.

Flexible working hours are a perfect example.

On paper, they sound like a benefit.

In practice, culture determines whether flexibility is real.

Can you actually arrive later?

Can you leave earlier?

Does everyone unofficially work long hours anyway?

Does flexibility mean autonomy?

Or does it mean the company is flexible about when your twelve-hour day begins?

Policies are not experiences.

Culture turns them into experiences.

I did not know any of that from one short note in 2010.

I simply saw something attractive and said:

Fine.

Hire me.

That version of myself makes me smile.

He was not sophisticated about recruitment strategy.

He did not have a carefully constructed personal brand.

He did not write a networking post about being humbled to announce anything.

He had a simpler pitch.

I can work with people.

I can work flexibly.

I think analytically.

I like what you do.

What else do you need?

There is something refreshing about it.

Perhaps job applications could use a little more of that directness.

Not literally “I love you.”

That may create HR complications.

But something human.

I want this job because the work interests me.

Here is what I can do.

Here is what I want to learn.

Here is where I can contribute.

No mythology.

No claim to be passionate about every bullet point.

No pretending to have spent childhood dreaming of enterprise resource planning.

Just fit.

Interest.

Evidence.

Potential.

Those are enough.

The strange thing is that after years of experience, the basic question remains almost the same.

A company asks:

Why should we hire you?

The answer becomes more detailed.

But underneath it is still:

I can do useful work here.

And I want to.

My 2010 version just added one more line.

I love you.

Maybe not suitable for LinkedIn.

But memorable.