I wouldn’t even attempt to address the age-old second
question, but I would like to consider the first.
I am not sure how closely these facts of life are related to
each other, but I do believe that in this day and age of Internet job sites,
their association is an undeniable fact.
In the ideal world, job seekers would send their CV only for
jobs for which they are fully qualified.
In the ideal world, recruiters/HR people would invest the time to read each
CV in its entirety, in order to fully understand the capabilities of the job
candidate.
Of course, in the ideal world, I would be so rich that the
entire concept of job search would be irrelevant to me.
Enough of that, back to the real world…
Let’s look at this first from the HR/recruiter’s perspective
(for instance, me :>). I advertise
regularly on Internet sites and social media forums for job candidates on
behalf of employers. As can be
expected, I receive many CVs in response to my job postings. At first I was surprised, but now I have become
hardened to the reality that the majority of the CVs I receive are from people
that do not even meet the basic requirements of the job as described in the
posting. In fact, I am convinced that many
people send their CVs without reading anything but the job title. So, what this means to me is that I need to
do two phases of sorting, first to remove the completely unqualified people,
and then from those remaining, to identify the most relevant for further
consideration. Certainly in this first
phase of filtering, I go very fast, spending a minimal amount of time on each
CV, knowing as I do that most are irrelevant anyway.
Now, let’s consider this from the job seeker’s
viewpoint. When all you have to go on is
a job posting, even in the best case, it is virtually impossible to understand
exactly what the employer seeks, which “requirements” are critical and which
are simply nice-to-have. It costs virtually
nothing to send a CV, neither financially nor time-wise, so it is always better
to err on the side of sending and hoping for the best. Besides, even when a CV is sent for which the
job seeker feels there is a perfect match, the chance of getting a positive
response from the employer hovers around the 10% range at best.
So, what we have here is a problem brought on by the nature
of the medium. I don’t mean to imply
that the introduction of Internet job sites created the new situation of such a
large number of CVs being sent, many not suitable. I have no doubt that HR professionals from
previous generations had the same complaints.
However, it is certainly true that when the job seeker has easy access
to hundreds of jobs daily and can apply with the click of a button, the problem
is exacerbated exponentially.
HR personal certainly won’t invest a great deal of time in reviewing
CVs when they know the majority are irrelevant.
And job seekers have no incentive not to send their CVs as frequently as
possible.
Is there a better way?
Consider this… A
general rule of thumb in the job search industry is that two-thirds of all jobs
are never publically advertised. This is
generally agreed to be true worldwide.
If you stop to think about this, it seems counterintuitive. If an employer is seeking job candidates, why
wouldn’t they be advertising in as many public forums as possible?
The answer is that many companies come to the conclusion
that having a recruitment process that includes filtering (via some combination
of manual and automated process) large quantities of unknown people is not
effective. It doesn’t bring the results
that they require, but rather a huge administrative load with a poor
return-on-investment.
So, what do they do instead?
Some may use placement agencies to do the initial filtering,
meaning that candidates that are presented to the employer are only those that
have been pre-filtered based upon their specific requirements.
However, informal networking (word-of-mouth) introductions
play a huge part in the actual filling of these unadvertised roles. And these entire interactions are completely
hidden to those outside of the process.
One of my favorite stories told to me by a job seeker using
our Israemploy website illustrates this point.
The person had seen a perfect job posting on our site, and sent in his
CV as instructed. He heard back
nothing. So, he decided to take
additional action. The company name was
included in the job listing, so he used LinkedIn to find people that worked at
the employer doing a job similar to his.
From LinkedIn, he introduced himself to a couple of these people, and
was able to begin a conversation. At
some point in the conversation, as is not so rare, the person inside the
company told the job seeker to send them his CV, and he would forward it to the
HR person. Remember, the job seeker has
already sent his CV to the HR person via the job site. Now, he takes the exact same CV, and sends it
to his contact within the company. The
contact within the company takes this CV and sends it to the exact same HR
person that has already received the CV via the job site. The CV is the same, the HR person that
receives it is identical; the only difference is the way that it is delivered –
via a known/trusted person. However, in
this case that was the critical factor – because the internal person sent the
CV to the HR person, the HR person treated it differently, and ultimately the
job seeker was invited to an interview.
From this real world example, it is easy to see how
networking benefits not only the employer, but also the job seeker. This is the real (and oftentimes invisible) way
that companies identify new job candidates. Job seekers must understand the
significance of networking in the recruitment process, and take steps to insert
themselves into the mix. Without such
awareness, the job seeker is guaranteed to be missing many job opportunities
which can be perfectly suitable – and that is the biggest shame of all.
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