Finding a job can be a tough endeavor.
It seems that, even though you’re qualified for a job, sometimes you don’t even make it past the first round of screening. Sometimes you have to stop and think to yourself, “Who are these companies actually hiring if they aren’t interviewing all the qualified candidates?”
But when you stop and think about it, go back to your time at just about anywhere you worked and think of all the people you’ve met where you thought to yourself, “How the hell does this person even have a job?” or “How did this person get hired?” and it will all start to make sense.
You see, companies don’t actually hire the best candidates, or even good candidates, nor do they care to do so. Their screening process has literally blinded them to hiring quality candidates and favoring non-genuine candidates who stack their resumes and keywords to pass a screen without really having any legitimate backing to the experience.
It’s kind of like when the original search engine ranking system was put into place for web searches. Website owners would stack keywords into articles and titles just to show up high in the results while the quality of the actual content was garbage.
The resumes these companies are screening through may look good, but the quality of the actual candidate can also be straight garbage. But when the screening system they have in place is automated or a third-party recruiter screening for words, they create a pile of garbage, and have to pick the best piece of garbage from that bag.
I hope this perfectly explains all of those employees at your workplace that you always wondered about.
We’ve become so lazy in the hiring process now that somewhere along the way someone convinced us that an auto screening system that scans for keywords would be a good idea even though that system clearly failed on web page searches many many years ago to the extent that the entire algorithm was changed away from keywords and density.
But hey, let’s make that same mistake on hiring candidates for our business. No one is going to figure out that we’re interviewing candidates that have the right keywords in their resumes, therefore, no one is going to intentionally stack keywords in their resumes whether they have that skill or not…right?
Well that experiment failed, yet more and more companies are now using screeners and third party recruiters that don’t really understand the job and may not even know what half the stuff actually is that they are looking for on these resumes.
Another time tested failed scheme.
Let’s pay a recruiting agency a commission on candidates they send us, as if they really care about the candidates they are sending. Nope, just like any commission based job, you get noticed from the number of candidates you can refer and how quickly you can fill positions, not on how well the candidate performs after they are hired.
Once they are hired, the checks cut, and the recruiter may only need them to stay on for a year or less to keep that money. Doesn’t sound like a moral hazard at all right?
Wouldn’t it make sense to have your own human resources department personally scan each candidate and take full responsibility for their performance after they are hired?
“You know Frank, this candidate you hired has cost the company a lot of money in mistakes so far, we’re going to have to dock your pay this year.”
Wouldn’t this mentality immediately result in better qualified candidates getting the position?
So where does that leave you?
It leaves you sitting there with your perfectly honest and legitimate resume that tells your actual experiences, puts emphasis on the things you are strong at, and doesn’t fluff up or exaggerate anything just to get a job interview.
It also probably leaves you jobless and hopeless as you apply for job after job that you are more than qualified for without even receiving a single interview.
Where Sally just got an interview because she used the phrase “Project Management” exactly one more time on her resume than you but has never actually managed a project, as it turns out, your resume was never placed in front of an actual human being.
This leaves you with two options.
- Everytime you go to apply for a job, rewrite your resume in a way that uses keywords and phrases from the actual job title, duties, and description. This requires a partial rewrite of your resume everytime you apply for a slightly different position. Having a general resume loaded with all of the possible keywords for your industry will only dilute your keyword density and may not get you passed automatic screeners or recruiters.
- Keep your resume the same, pray, and cry yourself to sleep at night.
Cover letters, follow ups, and making contacts within the company.
There are a few things you can do to stand out or get noticed that are a little extra. Just as a side note, if a company is letting you apply without a cover letter option, that’s probably a good indicator your resume is about to go through some automatic scanning system so in that case you will have to pad your resume with the right keywords.
Cover Letters
Cover letters may actually be seen by a real person and that real person may actually expect to read or see a cover letter BEFORE they will even consider a resume. They may make a stack of resumes that have cover letters just to read the cover letters, and they may only continue on to the stack of resumes without cover letters only if there are not enough qualified candidates in the first stack.
What’s this mean?
It means that if you don’t include a cover letter, you may not be in the first round of considerations for a potential candidate, basically eliminating yourself from the hiring process almost entirely.
A cover letter allows you to keep the integrity of your resume by giving you a unique section to tell the employer why you’d make a good fit for the job and what skills and abilities you possess that are a match or desired for that position.
You can use a cover letter in lieu of a resume rewrite and not have to pad your resume with keywords everytime you apply.
This saves you from having 30 different resumes.
Follow Ups
The purpose of a follow up is to show interest in a job or it was back in the old days. The real purpose of a follow up in today’s world is basically to remind an actual person that you applied for a job and submitted a resume.
What you hope to achieve with a follow up, is for someone to go get your resume out of the trash can that it ended up in after failing the auto screener, and actually look at it.
Someone might actually take the time to see if you’re on the interview list, and then actually go find your application to see why you didn’t make it, and sometimes you can find yourself on the interview list from doing a follow up.
And yes, most of the time the person getting your follow up will have to dig your resume out of the trash.
Internal Contacts
This strategy is kind of like the old fashioned “name dropping”. Do you know so and so, oh yeah we go way back, he’s a good friend of mine.
The idea here is after your resume is thrown in the trash from the auto screener, and the person you contacted via follow up is too lazy to go get it out of the trash, the internal contact can simply stop by HR or send them an email and say, “I had my buddy apply for this job or someone I think is a well qualified candidate applied for this job — just wondering if you had time to review their application yet.”
It really doesn’t matter what the internal contact says as long as they let HR know that they approve of you or they referred you, it is a last chance for your resume to get taken out of the trash and if the recommendation is strong enough it could also influence the decision to hire you.
It can also be used against you if the internal contact is one of those people that padded their resume with keywords, cost the company money, and probably shouldn’t have gotten the job. So do your due diligence.
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