I invite you to consider the plethora of career web sites that lure job seekers into spending hours upon hours sitting on a home computer terminal creating user names and encrypted passwords in order that one may discover and secure at best the dream job, or in a state of financial urgency, a job that will at least pay the bills. It matters not, for both motivators are equally low yielding. Ponder a while on this process and ask yourself is it time well spent? I suggest it is not. There are thousands of lurid career opportunities and seemingly open positions posted on these so-called career building web sites. Quite unarguably, it takes a great deal of your time and effort just to find the job that meets your needs, experience and skill. For each application one can expect a lengthy registration process, perhaps a questionnaire, optional, though compulsory if one wishes to continue the application. The whole endeavor ends with an attachment of one’s resume accompanied by a cover letter. As this one dimensional, non-human experience is finalized with no more than a left click of the mouse, your application, along with hundreds of others enters a sort of cyber twilight zone of ones and zeros. Its human resources, without the human. These web sites are not designed with you in mind. Nor are they designed to find you or anyone else a job. They are designed to generate hits. The more hits or visits the site receives, the more viable and attractive to advertisers who are always eager to find new ways to display their products and services in front of a critical mass. Please take this invitation of consideration seriously, particularly if you are serious about your career. Differentiating yourself from the crowd is of paramount importance if you wish to pursue the job you really want. It means deconstructing almost everything you have learned about the job-hunting process from resumes and searches to interviews and offers. My role in your success is to reconstruct the process for you and help navigate you to the job you really want. It means changing the way you think and how you approach the whole process. It also means altering the way you think about and use career building web sites, blogging sites and virtual networks.

...to complete an on-line job application? One, two or more hours? Perhaps longer if one is a first time user at a particular company’s web site, unfamiliar with its various nuances. Would you not agree the task of establishing new user names and encrypted passwords, not to mention the whole on-line registration and application process is both laborious and one dimensional? Again, human resources without the human. Further more, are you focusing on the job you really want, the job that matches your skills and talents, or optimistically hallucinating with one-dimensional vigor to secure just anything that will pay the bills in a recessed market? These are poignant and important questions worthy of repetition and serious consideration.

Career web sites post thousands of jobs. Lest us forget, these cyber hubs are not designed with you in mind nor for your personal benefit. Some of these jobs may not even exist. Others jobs have been filled, but the posting has not been removed, creating the illusion that a job is still open. This diminishes the likelihood of career success as about the same as finding a jackalope rabbit in the pre-Cambrian. There are even stories of companies posting false job opportunities where none exist simply to create the illusion of the organization being in the hiring phase and thus being perceived as economically healthy, stable and viable. It’s a variation of manipulating the numbers to suit a particular agenda. And, while I grant it is rare, it does happen. Scams are omni-present, and on the rise so please, as the old chestnut goes ‘forewarned is forearmed’

...your competition, your peers, who are also vying for the same positions? How many are on the same web sites applying for the same job? It could be hundreds if not thousands. Once your resume and application is electronically submitted, it begins a factory style process of elimination along with countless others. This is not good for your career. These aforementioned web sites are not designed with you in mind!

There is no way a recruiter can screen thousands of resumistic documents and cover letters. Application data received en mass via on-line submissions require vast computing power with processing speeds that far exceed the capabilities of the human brain. Larger companies outsource this task to vendors who design software that has the nano second capability to screen resumes at the speed of light. Resumes that do not marry the job description are eliminated. Those that do make it through to a second screening may also be eliminated before a real human being gets to see them. This process of elimination is designed to take thousands of on-line applications and reject almost all of them. If you are one of the lucky ones you may receive a computer-generated auto reply thanking you for your submission, with a cursory and terse ‘do not reply to this email’. Sincerely, The Human Resource Recruiting Team. A shameful use of the word ‘sincerely’ if ever there was one! Perhaps only bettered by the commonly used phrase;’ while we were impressed by your experience and skills we have decided not to pursue your application any further. We thank you for considering XYZ Incorporated for your career goals and we wish you luck with your future employment endeavors, Sincerely, ‘The Human Resources Recruiting Team’ I in no way wish to offend the Human Resources Recruitment profession, they do important and honorable work, instead I am simply pointing out how the human in human resources has become rather obsolete giving way to a more androidian screening process. Only upon conclusion of this process does the human being trump the android. We can only assume as voyeurs of technology that this trend will continue to develop, perhaps video-interviews, dressed in a crisp half-suit, shirt and tie while your favorite flannel jim-jams go unobserved and unnoticed below your waist. Innovations and new Zeitgeists are closer than they appear. Be ready, you cannot drive forward with your eyes fixed on the rear view mirror.

Lets assume the planets were aligned and the constellations favored you this particular morning as your resume along with perhaps several others made it onto the desk of a real, living recruiter, an extraordinary feat in itself, akin to the biological process that occurs at conception. Continuing the analogy, 9 months may well elapse before you receive an offer, during which time your candidacy went through several stages of development and growth and with luck lead to the birth of a new career opportunity for you. Lets take a moment to look at some of the things that happen during such development. It begins once the recruiter has a handful of resumes to review, he or she will choose which ones will go forward for further consideration. Telephone interviews have become popular, though lazy and largely ambiguous they serve the recruiter as another tool for further elimination. Or, you may receive an invitation to interview in-person with a recruiter, or best of all, your resume may be forwarded to the most important person of all, the hiring manager for his or her consideration. This is the holy grail of job hunting. Unless you are applying for a job in Human Resources, consider HR the enemy. The person who matters most to you is the person who ultimately will be your boss, otherwise known as the hiring manager. The primary purpose of your resume is to act as bait to hook an interview. Again, pursuing the hiring manager not HR. Most resumes I see on initial contact are fishing with the wrong bait on a broken hook in a fishless pond! The majority of resumes pivot around the applicant’s professional objectives, goals and aspirations. Commendable, but a big mistake. For a resume to avoid elimination it must speak to the hiring manager, AKA the most important person. The document is a sales tool. Its sole job is to communicate to a hiring manager that it would be a big mistake not to bring you in for interview. So, resumes must speak from the hiring managers perspective not yours. They are not interested in your objectives. They are only interested in their objectives. Putting the word ‘objective’ on the top of your resume is a big error despite what you may have learned at resume school. Every organization is hemorrhaging in some way or another especially in recessions and hard economic times. Managers, Supervisors, Team Leaders are all charged with two responsibilities, make money for the company, or save money for the company. Attaining these two basic accountable responsibilities requires hiring the right people for the job. What job? With rank comes the freedom to delegate. Problems, fire-fighting, managing change and dealing with crisis, day-to-day assignments and goals that change in an instant, are all challenges that any manager delegates daily. The more problematic chores they can delegate the better they’ll sleep at night, which begs the question, What does your resume say that says to any hiring manager ‘I can ease your burden and give you a better nights sleep’? Unless your objective at the top of your document clearly communicates that, get rid of it, hiring managers are on a different planet than you. Eliminate the conflicting objective on your resume and replace it with an agenda that the hiring manager can relate to. Make it easy for the hiring manager to buy from you. Show that you can solve the hiring managers problems.

I hope I have communicated clearly the slim chances of securing the job you really want by way of on-line job applications. Accompanied with a self-centered resume, chances of career success are about the same as a blind man in a dark room searching for a black cat that isn’t there. If it sounds like I am being rather bullish toward the on-line and web based career phenonomen, the HR screening process and self-centered resumes. Please be assured I do so because as a person with extensive experience in Human Resources both as a corporate citizen and as a consultant I know only too well that these web sites along with the laborious application and screening processes are designed not for your benefit, but for the self-service and benefit of the organizations who create, sponsor and pay for them.

To position yourself in the best possible way means thinking differently about yourself, you’re resume, the hiring process and how you go about it. My role is to partner with you, deconstruct your resume, debunk widely held and well established myths about the job hunting process, slaughter a few sacred cows along the way and re-craft, reconstruct and re-brand you so you are in a position to navigate your career with GPS like precision and focus on getting the job you really want expeditiously and on your own terms.

Christopher Wylde

Copyright © 2012 Chris Wylde & Associates LLC