I had a group interview today for a position I have been wanting for over two years. I felt confident that my strengths (experience) helped cover my weaknesses (grades, type of college attended). Near the end of the interview, the recruiter told the 6 applicants, including myself, about how high their company’s standards are.
She said that so far this year, they have received 50,000 resumes, and that they will only hire 0.5% of those applicants (250). Half a percent. This made me nervous, thinking I only had half a percent of getting hired. During my application I had the understanding that there were a shortage of qualified people for the position, but now I kind of feel like 50,000 applicants does not seem like that much of a shortage.
Any Dopers who entered into a competitive field, do you have any advice? I’ll know whether I get called back by 6 PM this evening. If I don’t get called back, I suppose I can console myself in the fact that there were so many other applicants, but right now I don’t like to think about that.
Apparently resume Spam is becoming quite a probably now that internet/email applications are more the norm. The fact that you were actually being interview would seem to suggest that you’ve already made it past some of the hurdles. The vast majority of the resumes they got were probably from people with only the most marginal connection to the field.
Technically, its Education- it is a manager at a tutoring center. But the job duties are very broad, and kind of encompass being a manager, accountant, HR, PR, teacher, and babysitter all rolled into one. So they want people that can hack it as far as managing a company branch goes, as well as people that are able to work with kids and parents.
I don’t know about that particular field, but like any other, you have to figure out what makes you a better candidate for the job than the 1000 other applicants.
Depending on who’s doing the hiring, that is actually going to be a difficult position to fill. Very few people will have the necessary experience to smoothly switch between just a few of those roles. A lot of people will think they can, though. Hence the shortage of qualified applicants. If you have relevant experience in teaching, managing, bookkeeping, and HR, you should be pretty confident! Not to mention if you have relevant experience in all the areas you mention.
About four years ago, I was hiring for a C++ programming position. I got hundreds of resumes, many of which had no programming experience, education, or skills listed. I suspect they were being sent wholesale to every single job listing, regardless of work type.
The best one was a “resume” that listed a name, address, phone number, the word “Resume”, and a single line that said “Skills: C+ programming”[sic]
Of the remainder, nearly all had a vanishingly small number of our “required” skills (we’d consider a person missing one or two, but not 8 or 9 out of ten). We interviewed eight and hired one. So while we were being very “selective,” in a numerical sense (maybe a quarter percent), we were really hiring one in eight qualified applicants (and I made a case for another one).
I understand that a certain large Redmond, WA based software company similarly brags about hiring only the “top 2%” of it’s applicants. I also understand that a skilled developer is very likely to be accepted there, and that at one time they couldn’t find enough qualified people at all. Tends to make me believe that they’ve got a similar “applicant pool” and are wording things to sound selective.
