7 ms·

Recruiter and resume-writer-on-the-side here, and it's become so easy to apply for jobs that most people put zero effort into anything but pressing send and sho

• edgyswingset 11y ago
  As a recent college grad who went to a community college and then a run-of-the-mill state school, my experience and general impression from my peers was that unless you shotgun as many job applications as possible, you're probably not going to hear back from anyone. My own hypothesis is that most companies are so obsessed with a potential "false positive" hire that they're perfectly okay with not investing in a new graduate. Thus, we have to send out 10+ job applications per week, otherwise we end up as yet another one of the millions of unemployed, college-educated young adults. It's not totally awful (I found a great job as a result of my career fair), but unless a company is specifically recruiting from your university it's pretty much a given that you won't be offered an interview, let alone a job.
  • ghaff 11y ago
    There's certainly a tradeoff between shotgunning and carefully crafting an individualized approach. I'm not sure it's really all that different from what it's always been though. Way back in the day when I was graduating from engineering school, I sent out a lot of minimally customized cover letters with a standard resume to many companies in what seemed like possibly interesting industries. In fact, I got a number of interviews from those shotgunned resumes and ended up working at one of the companies. It was a pretty good job and one that I'd have never stumbled onto with a more tailored approach. OTOH, my most recent three jobs--including my current one--were all basically through people that I knew.
  • tracker1 11y ago
    You don't necessarily need to completely customize everything... In many cases, however it's more important to have good structure and information. Start off with a basic introduction paragraph or two of what type(s) of positions you are looking for. Followed by a brief summary of the keywords related to the technologies you've used, or are experienced with. Follow this by either eductaion or work history next, whichever is more recent/relevant (if you're still in school, or haven't had a job out of school, education first)... Point out each role, accomplishment and related technology used. In work history, give a brief paragraph for any major roles/projects again, with any related technologies used. Also include aliases and related technologies. By doing this, you give up front what you're looking for... what you can use, and then back it up again. Have others who are great with your language proof read and give feedback on verbiage. Half the battle is getting through the H.R. and recruiter types that hold the gates to the decision makers. The other half is following through with actual relatable experience that you understand, know or can easily learn what you need for the job in question. Be honest to a fault in terms of what you know, what you don't and what you feel you can learn quickly. That's my advice to anyone looking for a job in a technical field... You don't necessarily need to customize, but at least have a great resume, that will go a long way getting your foot in the door.
  • eitally 11y ago
    I don't think that's true at all, although I can see where the stereotype comes from. The fact is, the more effort a potential applicant puts in before applying, the more likely they will be to get a job at the company they're targeting. That's not to say they'll get the job that's their first choice, but they may get another just that's equally good, or perhaps just a foot in the door. It always pays dividends to invest in your human network. That applies equally well to college grads as to experienced workers.
    • ju-st 11y ago
      I'm not convinced that more effort equals more success in this context. Actually I think the less effort you have to invest in getting a job the better the job will be.
      • eitally 11y ago
        The effort mostly lies in figuring out who has the authority to make a hiring decision about you and convincing them to do so. This is really tough for young professionals who don't yet have a professional network. For a lot of folks in the mid-30s and older, getting a new job is as easy as sending an email or picking up the phone (especially in tech, but also in many other industries).
  • caskance 11y ago
    What you're seeing is actually the opposite problem. That candidates aren't obsessed enough with a potential "false positive" hire where they end up working somewhere they don't actually want to work. You can't tell me that someone applying for 40 positions a week truly wants to work at all 40 of those places. Primarily, the candidate just wants any job he/she can get because of the fear of unemployment.
    • cryoshon 11y ago
      "Fear of unemployment" is a necessary abstraction, but consider what unemployment actually means. Let's say you are unemployed, and living with your parents-- a very common situation for this generation. You're getting bled each month by your student loans, even if you no other bills, which you probably do. The candidate wants to work at any one of those 40 places, because otherwise they go into default and ruin their credit and probably their parents' credit too. If you don't live at home, the stakes are losing your apartment or car. This isn't some unreasonable fear; bills need to get paid, and there's an entire generation that is struggling to do so because their largest bill just won't go away.
      • caskance 11y ago
        I'm not saying that people aren't justified in fearing unemployment. I'm just saying that fear pressures them into making suboptimal decisions. It's even worse because 99% of those people immediately stop looking for work, often with a huge sigh of relief, after they've found a stable job.
        • tomp 11y ago
          > immediately stop looking for work [...] after they've found a stable job As opposed to what?! Any potential employer will ask you in an interview, "Why are you looking to leave your job so soon?". What are you going to say? "Oh, I'm just trying to find something better." - a surefire way to instill trust in your interviewer and get hired /sarcasm.
          • 11y ago
• 6stringmerc 11y ago
  Flip side: After spending a lot of time in the process, realizing that prospective employers give an extremely low effort to respond to candidates - no matter how much effort put into a cover letter, resume grooming, or discussion of why the role might be a fit - it's disheartening. Auto-declines are the norm. Posting jobs for legal reasons when there's already an internal candidate in mind is also undisclosed. Between having to sign up for proprietary job application systems, seemingly advance to the next stage but never getting a call back like a bad one night stand, or taking months to make a decision, the power dynamic is quite unfavorable. I think employers are finally discovering that applicants are, for lack of a better perspective, using the same kind of attitude as they have been receiving for years. Note: I am fond of saying the phrase "Good help is hard to find" because it is, and considering the US has had absolutely appalling wage growth metrics - disgusting even - what motivation is really out there?
  • cryoshon 11y ago
    The dreaded internal candidate situation is a waste of everyone's time. They already know who is going to be hired, yet collectively everyone has to come together to interview you anyway. Then there's the rejection, if they even send one.
    • 6stringmerc 11y ago
      Oh absolutely, and I think that maybe, just maybe, there should be a legally mandated annotation on such a posting that an internal candidate has been identified and you are competing with them. In my experience, even worse than a rejection was being offered a salary not commensurate with my experience, and in the neighborhood of $5,000 less than what I was already making in a nearly identical role. I've had that happen on at least three occasions, where the employer was either being dishonest about the salary range or withheld that information until very late in the process; even if for innocuous reasons, it functionally seemed like attempting to put me in a difficult position (stay where you are or leave for us for less and no written/promised path for advancement of position or salary).
      • 11y ago
• Kalium 11y ago
  > Job seekers are much better served spending an hour sending 10 focused applications than spending that same hour to send 100 sanitized applications. This is the theory, yes. In practice, that 10x level of effort is not matched by a 10x increase in the number of interested responses or a 10x increase in response rate. Diminishing returns sets in quickly. You wind up with more interested responses by shutgunning your resume all over the place - assuming you have a good resume.
  • lfowles 11y ago
    An hour for 10 focused applications is a little ambitious as well. I easily spent a day on each focused application back when I was applying for jobs. And very few of the targeted companies got back to me. I now work at a place that got my generic career fair resume and had a pretty plain "I hear you know how to program?" interview...... Fantastic place though, wouldn't trade it for a 5x pay increase. :)
  • tracker1 11y ago
    That's part of the problem... you need a good resume to start with... many don't even take the time to work on that.
    • ghaff 11y ago
      Yep. Even though it's true that people will mostly end up just skimming the resume, errors or just general slapdash are huge red flags. I'm not even a particular believer in customizing resumes (unless you're looking at genuinely different types of jobs) so it's really worth the time to get it just right.
    • Kalium 11y ago
      When I said "good resume", I did not mean "An aesthetically pleasing resume" or anything of that sort. I mean "A history containing the traits the would-be employer seeks".
      • tracker1 11y ago
• NotAPerson 11y ago
  > Job seekers are much better served spending an hour sending 10 focused applications than spending that same hour to send 100 sanitized applications. Let's assume that you have a 1 in 20 chance on the focused applications, and a 1 in 200 chance on the sanitized ones. Then the odds that you are offered at least one job, is 40.13% for the focused ones, and 39.42% for the sanitized ones. I'm not sure the emotional investment is enough to justify the difference in likelihood of landing a job.
  • cableshaft 11y ago
    You're doing a cost-benefit analysis on a completely arbitrary guess and then using that as the basis for your conclusion? That doesn't work, sorry. For example, what if in actuality, all other things being equal, they had a 1 in 10 chance focused vs. 1 in 300 chance sanitized, then the results would be 100% chance for the focused versus 33% chance of a response with the sanitized ones. I just used the same thing you did to make the numbers work the other direction. For the record, based on what I've seen and read, I do think there might be a case for the shotgunned approach, and I personally have had poor luck with the focused approach. But your numbers don't help prove it, sorry.
    • ghaff 11y ago
      I think it really depends. I suspect that, for a lot of people, the best strategy is to focus time and energy on companies that they're particularly interested in, have some in with, have unusual qualifications that are a particularly good match for, etc. But, perhaps in parallel, cast a wider net with a more shotgun approach that doesn't devote a lot of time to any single company pre-interview.
    • logfromblammo 11y ago
      That's not how probability works. 10 trials with a 10% success rate yields a 65.13% chance for at least one success. 100 trials with a 0.33% success rate yields a 28.39% chance for at least one success. You have to use the binomial probability theorem to determine any particular number of hits. trials! / ( successes! * failures! ) * P_success ^ successes * P_failure ^ failures
• jbHawk 11y ago
  To add to this: Applicant's who do spend time authoring a well formatted application are seemingly under served by the website-submission process that completely garbles and incorrectly re-formats their applicant documents. Very frustrating and demotivating for the next submitted app. Moreover, they may not even discover that the website ruins their document. I think there's a disruption opportunity here to provide a HR Applicant Service that doesn't force consumes to blindly copy-paste blobs of text into large free text fields. Just consume and index PDF documents.
  • ju-st 11y ago
    Yup, I got more than once extremely mad with crap HR recruiting websites. When you have to waste 15 minutes by filling out a lot of useless fields, having to reenter everthing again because autologout and/or using the back button in the browser, internal server errors, creating a user account and so on. And the worst is that you know that nobody ever will look at most the fields you entered because you can upload your PDFs at the end of the process. And everyone I talked with in the interviews had only my CV and cover letter printed out or opened. Somebody please make a sane recruiting service and sell it to every Bigco.
  • MrApathy 11y ago
    One solution to this is to create a plain text resume to be used when submitting through an applicant tracking system. You can still perform some basic formatting in plain text (e.g., string of hyphens for a horizontal line, asterisk for bullet, carriage return at 60 characters to prevent erroneous line wrapping, etc.). At the top of the plain text resume include a line stating something like "MS Word/PDF formatted resume available at http://ExternalWebsite..." http://ExternalWebsite..."
• klipt 11y ago
  Sounds like job applicants have the same problem that men have in online dating - no feedback from 99% no matter how much effort you put in, so in the end spamming seems like the most effective strategy.
  • fecak 11y ago
    >Sounds like job applicants have the same problem that men have in online dating - no feedback from 99% no matter how much effort you put in, so in the end spamming seems like the most effective strategy. And the same problem recruiters have when they don't get responses from potential candidates. If you wonder why you get 50 emails a week on LinkedIn, it's the same thing.
    • czinck 11y ago
      That's disingenuous. All the emails I get from LinkedIn are unsolicited and I take my normal approach to spam of not responding, because responding only makes the spam more likely. A better example would be someone putting their resume up on a job board (not a professional social network) and ignoring all the responses, which I have trouble believing anyone does.
      • fecak 11y ago
        Don't you think that some people use LinkedIn as a way to be contacted for new jobs? I think based on the way profiles are written and optimized, at least a fair number of people use it as an ongoing passive job search.
• cgearhart 11y ago
  > If there was even a small cost (time or money) to applying, you can be sure that resumes and cover letters would be much more common and of higher quality. I agree. I'd happily put a nominal fee in escro to ensure that the target company I'm applying to actually looks at the resume. I'd also happily pay the fee for them to drop any job ads that they don't intend to fill. > Job seekers are much better served spending an hour sending 10 focused applications than spending that same hour to send 100 sanitized applications. I'm not at all convinced that this is true. The response rate seems completely uncorrelated with the amount of time spent on the application. Even at a lower relative response rate, casting a wider net grabs a larger absolute volume of responses. As an aside: the biggest thing missing from the job hunt process is respect for your applicants _time_. At this point I drop out with companies that don't seem to consider that. I don't need feedback, but I also don't have time to waste doing repeat phone screens and months of interview process.
  • fecak 11y ago
    I think your response rate in relation to time spent on the application has a third element, and that's your audience. If you are applying to giant corporate bank, your resume is first being read by a machine (ATS) scanning for words. I have no idea if your cover letter is being read. Time spent customizing is no better than basic SEO optimization perhaps. Contrast this with applying for a startup where the CTO is reviewing the resumes, and you mention in the body of the application (they don't want a formal cover letter of course) that you've used their API and say something about how easy the experience was. You're getting an interview, unless you are largely unqualified. I understand your complaints on process, and that's why I only work represent startups and smaller companies that usually let me streamline the process for clearly qualified individuals. I, too, was once frustrated by the process of some of my clients.
• bduerst 11y ago
  What do you think about the "project" interview? Do you think that if companies had 2-4 hr projects for applicants to complete, that there would be a better interview process for both parties?
  • fecak 11y ago
    I think most companies that try that get some backlash from candidates who feel the company is taking advantage of free work. I have had clients who pay candidates some reduced rate for this project time, which I think is a good equalizer.
• gsnedders 11y ago
  > Job seekers are much better served spending an hour sending 10 focused applications than spending that same hour to send 100 sanitized applications. I don't know about the US, but at least here those who are out of work and on unemployment benefit (or, here, Job Seekers Allowance) have to "prove to [their] work coach that [they've] been looking for work". From those I know (and these are predominantly STEM people) who've been unable to get work after graduating, spending too much time on one application is considered faffing around—and if your "work coach" thinks you haven't been looking for work hard enough, they can lose their only income. So, what do they do? Apply with 100 sanitised applications, and get rejected everywhere (at the low-end because no service job will hire them because they're viewed as leaving at the first opportunity, and at graduate jobs because they don't have enough work experience).
• bsder 11y ago
  Devil's advocate: everywhere gets so many of these that they use automated filtering to sort out resumes. Consequently, there is no point in spending ANY effort until you get a positive feedback from an employer. So, you have a purely random process on both sides that nobody is willing to put in any energy to fix.