Yeah, so

We have realized that employees come in "active" and "passive" types. I intend no shade to either type as people, and we have great employees, who are great people, who come in both varieties. But they are very different from a hiring perspective.

Passive employees will do the task in front of them, and if they don't know how to do the task, they will stop. they will tell you they cannot do it. And they will wait for instruction. They can be lovely people, they can have incredible empathy for those around them, they can be witty conversationalists with impeccable skill at whatever it is you hired them for, but they will error out the minute they are faced with something unexpected.

Active employees can be given a general lay of the land and left to run. They will encounter hardships and they will google their way around them. They will come to a place they're not comfortable making decisions and they will give you the relevant information so that you can. They will march their way through an issue until a solution is beyond their ability to puzzle their way out and in the meantime they will focus on some other problem from some other direction.

We welcome passive employees but they can be exasperating. They will do Their Job and any deviance from Their Job causes a run-time error. We've had passive employees sit stunned for half an hour over their inability to unclog a toilet. We've had passive employees panic that the computer went down the minute they unplugged the router to plug in their space heater. We've had passive employees lock up over not receiving instructions on the difference between Google Docs and Microsoft Word.

We welcome active employees but we also know we only have them until they find something better to do. But as long as we have them they open horizons. They broaden possibilities. They solve problems we didn't know we had because we aren't doing their jobs. And we definitely favor active employees over passive ones because fuckin' hell we didn't get into this to boss people around, we just needed the physical office in order to increase reimbursement.

In my opinion, anyway, demonstrating that you are active rather than passive is the first, biggest thing you can do to interest me in finding you a position. And that definitely starts with coming at me in a way other than clicking "quick apply" on Indeed.

Also, if you're IT: get certs even if you have a degree. It's harder to flunk a college class than it is to pass most exams.

Even if you're NOT. My wife ended up being a software architect in charge of benefits programs for 10,000-person companies because her accountant resume mentioned she'd taken a course in MS Access at Egghead Software one Sunday afternoon. It was a three hour overview but it was enough for the department head of a completely different department to bring her in for a job she didn't apply for. If I saw a 3CX certification on a receptionist applicant I would hire her sight unseen because then I wouldn't have to deal with fucking 3CX. And the only reason I deal with fucking 3CX is there's nobody else to do it.