My daughter did an experiment for me two summers ago. She applied to job openings she’d found on a couple of big online job boards. She was a recent college graduate and her resume looked similar to those that cross your desk. It was well done–no typos–and the cover letter was nice too, specifically addressed to each organization’s human resources manager. No photocopied mass mailing for her.
She mailed the applications and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, she got a handful of “no thanks, but we will keep your resume on file” responses. After sending out 100 packages, fewer than five HR departments took the time to reply, or even acknowledge receipt.
What happened?
In the thirty seconds or so of attention that her resume received, each HR person made a snap decision. It seems like 95 of them were so unimpressed that they didn’t even bother to write a “thanks, but no thanks” letter.
Or, maybe, out of the 300 other resumes HR had received that morning, they had already scheduled a requisite number of interviews. Or, maybe HR simply forwarded her resume on to the hiring manager who was supposed to call her for an interview.
Or, maybe they liked her resume, but thought it was fairly generic sounding and they didn’t have time to figure out if she might be a good fit, with the necessary skills, attitude, and desire to do the job. (As her Dad, I’ll tell you that she has always shown the attitude and desire to do great work. But I digress.)
Most likely, the real reason she didn’t warrant an interview was the last one. HR didn’t have time to figure out how she would work in their company.
This happens all the time. I think most job seekers make the crucial mistake of thinking that all they need do is tell the HR department what they have done in the past.
That might be OK for some hiring managers, but most want to know the answer to one question: How can this applicant help us right now? If your resume does not answer that question, or sufficiently tell a story about how you may be able to help, you won’t have a shot at the job in this market.
Before you can answer that question, however, you need to do some research on the company. Find out everything you can about the organization, the department, the people, the products, markets, and the plans for the future.
Information is power, and it is available quite easily. Don’t make HR work to figure out how you might fit into their organization. You figure it out up front. This is the surest way to get the interview.
No user commented in " Why HR Doesn’t Answer When You Apply "
That is excellent advice! And it also fits very nicely with what Seth Godin had to say the other day about Career Fairs. HR has an open piece in the puzzle and if you aren’t shaped exactly like the hole, you get sorted out without any real thought.
Of course, it is part of the reason that corporations can be so moribund sometimes. They don’t have visionaries looking at talent, they have functionaries.
Not all HR people are like this, of course, but most are underpaid and over worked, and really lack the time or energy to get out the recruiting rut they are in. Yet, so many wonder how to make themselves more relevant and more respected. I am thinking they already know the answer.
This strategy definitely seems to have a lot of merit. It would probably be difficult thought to pull off with a target list of 300 companies.
I could see this working by targeting only those openings on job boards that seem especially appealing to you, or to try to network your way into target companies that seem to be a particularly good fit.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Alexandra Levit and 360JobInterview.Com, Celesta Joann Forgy. Celesta Joann Forgy said: Someones HR please reply! I need a job! http://bit.ly/66PYbI [...]
GL–The ‘hiring process’ is really an elimination process. 500 resumes + 1 job = 499 times more eliminating than hiring. We get good at the things we do a lot of, so HR is really good at eliminating people. They often complain about too many applicants and too many unqualified applicants, yet they are complicit in the creation of a system that produces precisely those results.
We advise our clients to spend at least as much time pursuing companies they would like to work for as they do posted jobs. According to the annual Sources of Hire survey from careerxroads.com, you are more than 3 times as likely to find a job through personal contacts as you are through hotmonsterbuilder.com. And I love this nugget from Top 10 Ways to NOT Get a Job in IT, ‘Sending in a aresume and sitting back waiting for the phone to ring is a great way to avoid employment’.
It sounds like the job seeker has the burden of figuring out how to infiltrate a company in order to present themselves for an open position. This process faces the challenge that companies work very hard to protect all but the most generic information about themselves. Job seekers need to learn tactics to evade gate keepers and gain this knowledge to win in the hiring game. However, an open position is not a game but represents a need to be filled the same as if one was purchasing equipment or contracting a service. This means that the company is obliged to know what they want, properly specify it and send the specifications to the right audience. A tight job market is not proper justification for transferring more responsibilities to the candidate. A hire is a business transaction meant to improve the bottom line of the company, not a trophy awarded to the most gifted player in the hiring game.
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by CeLesTaJoAnN: Someones HR please reply! I need a job! http://bit.ly/66PYbI…
[...] Search, Resume If you are looking for a job and sending out resumes, you need to read this post by G.L. Hoffman on the blog “What Would Dad Say.” You have heard it before – [...]