How Competition Determines the Effectiveness of a Resume

When job seekers who've never had a problem obtaining a job interview begin experiencing long periods of no recruiter callbacks from their online resume postings or job applications, the natural response is to pursue a resume makeover. While this is a natural response, it may not always be a necessity.

If you've had success in the past with your current resume, what has changed? Most likely your resume has not. Rather, there must be something else that is interfering with your resume's effectiveness in "marketing" you. So, before you begin on the journey of a serious resume-rewrite, take some time to determine if there is anything else that's causing a problem the no response/no callback problem.

In general, there are many reasons why an experienced job seeker does not receive a telephone call for an occupationally specific interview. (I am excluding the calls for interviews that life insurance companies send nearly every job seeker who posts his or her resume on the most popular job boards.) One common reason for a lack of callbacks is excessive job competition.

Having been a job search consultant for over a decade, I've learned that most job seekers do not fully appreciate the level of job competition that exists in today’s job market, engendered by the precipitous adoption of online recruitment, and, more importantly, how this competition changes the resume sourcing or selection behavior of recruiters, which is the ultimate determiner of the effectiveness of a so-called "quality" resume.

What kind of competition am I talking about? 200 applicants is common. 1,300 applicants is possible. (As an aside, when an open position obtains over a 1,000 applicants, this is generally due to the centralized location of the job such that applicants are pulled in from the adjacent states within perhaps a 200 mile radius or the "collar" suburban areas.) When an employer or recruiter receives this many applications, there is NO way she will go through them all!

A couple of things go on with employers when they receive an excessive amount of applicants. If all these resumes are posted in a resume database, they will use a filtering parameter (education, salary history or specific job skill) to filter out a huge amount of applicants. Another option is that they will go through the pile and after identifying perhaps 25 high-quality applicants, they will pass over the remaining applicants. The final option (which I've heard happens in the Federal job sector) is that they will divide all the applicants' resume in three piles and give 3 different hiring managers a stack. Any error in the application package or a grammatical error will get the applicant disqualified.

So, how do you solve this problem?

Avoid the ‘distribution’ solution. Basically, this is the "shot gun" technique where you apply to anything in the hopes one application will hit the mark and get you an interview. The problem is that when there is a lot of job competition, everyone is using this failed technique. It only causes gridlock in the hiring pipe line. In addition, the job seeker has a tendency after getting frustrated to begin applying to jobs he is not fully qualified for. (In one case I know of, the employer got so many unqualified candidates, she set aside the entire stack of resumes and hired an external recruiter to source "qualified candidates.)

Be selective and only apply to jobs you are truly qualified for. That is, if you possess a unique or "desired" skill the employer is seeking, use that skill as your search keyword to find jobs. Now, I'm not referring to everyday skills like MS Excel. Rather, something truly rare such as Ruby-on-Rails  or switched mode power supplies or Basecamp. This requires a lot of self-screening on your part. This will result in fewer jobs but by self-screened jobs you will find jobs where you are very competitive for.

Remove the middlemen out of the hiring equation. Take a break from the job boards for awhile. Make a list of twenty-five employers that are (a) local and (b ) you really want to work for because the company has always interested you. Then, go to their websites, search for jobs, post your resume, and set up job alerts on their career sites. Many times jobs will be posted there that are not indexed by a job-ad aggregator or posted on the popular job boards or simply overlooked. This will result in fewer applicants and less competition.

If you indeed have rare skills, and are very experienced, then go to Linkedin or other social recruiting platforms. But only if you have a rare skill. There is a lot of buzz about social recruiting. While it is true that job recruiting is moving to social recruiting, the actual hiring based via social media is still only about 3.5% of  all hiring sources and far behind referrals at 28%.