I’ve received that auto-rejection for positions that I know I could do in my sleep. Sometimes it’s that different organizations have their own lingo, and in my experience most of the HR personnel don’t know the difference between biology and chemistry.
In the event that the proper decision makers at any companies are reading this:
You’re system DOES NOT deliver you the best and most qualified candidates. I really, truly believe that (at least in STEM fields) you’d be better off sending your hiring managers a random selection of resumes. And I say this as someone who has been both an applicant AND a hiring manager. Look, I truly and honestly respect the humanities, but how can an English major really decide whether that person with UPLC experience is going to work for me when I said I was looking for HPLC (based on an actual experience)
Now I am really getting worked up, thinking about the number of times I have been contacted about positions for which I was completely UNqualified… My resume had a line about ensuring compliance of packaging and labeling design for clinical and commercial products, and I got a call from an engineering company asking if I would like to help with the design and build of a labeling machine. They were clearly looking for an engineer (ME I would say), and the HR person kept pointing to that one line, trying to convince me that this is what I do. And it was from a job years before…
Wow… It feels good to bitch today.
Hmm- I bet there’s a good economics thesis in this, having to do with the efficiency and precision of hiring systems in locating and placing the best candidates…
So it really makes no difference what you write down. Just write down whatever you think they want to hear. If they find out later you lied, they will have to decide if you have proved your worth. If you are a valued employee, they might not fire you. If you are not that good, you didn’t deserve the job in the first place. Or they might not find out at all.
That’s what I mean by HR working for you versus you working for them. One good thing about working for tech companies dominated by obnoxious engineers and lots of jargon is that HR doesn’t even pretend to be able to screen resumes. When I’ve looked for experienced people I defined the search criteria.
When I get calls from recruiters I usually ask them to tell me what my specialty is. I figure if they don’t know the chances of the job being a good match are slim to none. Some, I must say, know. Those people I talk to.
I, uh, know of a person… a friend of mine, say… who would submit resumes with the copy of the help-wanted ad placed in the bottom of the resume, font completely whited-out and font-sized minimized, so that the computer who scanned the resumes for keywords associated with the ads would, in fact, find those very same keywords regardless of the contents of the resume. The person reading it would see a resume with a few extra lines at the bottom and wouldn’t think anything of it, unless they highlighted the bottom of the resume and saw the hidden text.
This would require me, er, my friend, to save copies of the resume - “JohnT’s friend - Acme Inc” so they could refer back to it, but HD space is cheap… well, for my friend it is.
Actual call back rates shot through the roof. Or so my friend learned through tracking, that is.
I’ve heard that some HR software nowadays checks for that (keywords in the doc with white font) and flags it. Supposed to be a no-no that gets your resume/CV disqualified. Anybody know?
Our system cuts and pastes the resume into our online form, so the extra words would show right up. In any case, someone who knows something will read it eventually, and if you don’t have the qualifications you’d get rejected at first reading anyhow. It might improve callbacks but wouldn’t improve actually getting hired. Kind of pointless unless one enjoys being rejected.
The point isn’t to get hired via the white text gambit, but to get past HR people who don’t know that a “Technical Supervisor” is the same thing, or at least reasonably equivalent to, a “Supervising Technician”. The actual interviewers presumably know that they are more or less the same thing. HR knows that it wants someone with experience as a “Supervising Technician” and throws away any resume that doesn’t hit on the exact string “Supervising Technician” because they don’t know what it actually means and can’t actually understand the resumes they are filtering. So without the “match”, HR won’t even let you interview with the managers who actually understand the job.
The equivalence of those job titles wouldn’t be clear to me either. Presumably one is in the job post, and that would be the one to use in the visible abilities list. Not to mention what area one supervises.
Anyhow, still another reason why circumventing HR is a good idea.
Surely there must be some HR professionals on this board? I am surprised none of them have come along to either defend the process or acknowledge its shortcomings.
After all, I am sure that HR doesn’t wake up each morning and rub its hands gleefully, wondering how it will fuck over the company’s hiring today. It must hear these criticisms frequently…?
Well, the point isn’t to get past the people it’s to get to the people. If the computer is programmed to only pass on applications/resumes with specific keywords, give the computer the keywords.
And I’m not surprised systems are getting better at weeding out tricks like this… I last did this in 2008-2009.
Given some of the complaints I’ve seen, I don’t know. They may think they are protecting the managers from themselves.
For instance, if you make it hard to interview someone except from a select set of schools, you may be going for bragging rights rather than the best people. This is different from only sending recruiters to a select set of schools, which makes sense given limited resources.
Personally I’ve had nothing but good experiences with HR, but as I said in my companies they worked for us, not us for them.
If one can legitimately use the keyword, put them in plain view. We all know how the game is played - I’d look favorably on someone using the keywords from the job post - so long as they can legitimately use them. I’d be even more favorably impressed by someone who has researched us well enough to include words not in the job post but still relevant.
Someone who is spewing 500 resumes to all corners of the earth can’t do this - but they shouldn’t be spewing resumes.
I think it’s like many professions. They can’t see their inherent flaws, or don’t recognize the same scale of the problem as those that use the systems. I’m an IT worker in a hospital and often have to try to see the use of the systems from the user’s perspective, rather than my own. From the HR perspective, they get enough resumes, so there isn’t really a problem. They fill the open positions, so what’s the issue?
Have to type your password because the single-sign-on isn’t working? Tough. I sometimes type my password 5-6 times an hour, and often more. Have to wait 30 seconds for a print job to start printing? This doesn’t seem a problem to me. But it is to them.
I’m certainly not justifying the problems in the hiring process, but the HR folks aren’t the ones actually making the decision on how to change the process. I’ve tried to fix the onboarding IT process several times with my HR department, and if it involves a change on their end, it falls on deaf ears. I stopped fighting the fight.
A huge part of it, IMO is that HR has different incentives from both the jobseeker and the hiring manager.
The latter two probably think the goal is to get the very best, most qualified, highest skilled candidates passed through. From HR’s point of view, the goal is to get a specified number of adequate, minimally qualified, skilled-enough candidates passed through, with the least amount of time and effort.
Suppose 100 candidates apply, of which about 50 would be acceptable were you to read all the resumes. Now suppose you can run those apps through a data mining process, and reduce it to 30 apps, of which 20 are acceptable. You still have 20 acceptable apps from which to pick 5 to pass on for interviews, and you’ve saved yourself from reading 70 resumes.
It’s possible that the best possible candidate was one of the ones they didn’t look at – after all, they eliminated 60% of acceptable candidates without even looking – but who will know? All the hiring manager will see is the 5 he gets before him, and as long as they’re adequate, that’s all that matters.
For two years, I was unemployed and looking for a job in the field of academia. One of the most frustrating things about applying for jobs was this: every employer wanted certain basic information, information that was included on my resume (vita). But every website would say, “No, you can’t just send in your vita, you have to type it all out all over again”.
So, thousands and thousands of times I filled out the same exact information over and over and over again. Typing it out. By hand. (I eventually had memorized the mailing address of each college or university I had attended or worked at.)
In this day and age of online application forms, surely there has to be a way to centralize this information, like you type in the information into one website somewhere and then click a button on a particular employer’s website to upload that information to them. Sure, some employers may want the occasional extra piece of information (like, really, some of them wanted to know the name of the high school I went to! And I have a Ph.D.! And I’m not from the same state, so they won’t know anything about that high school!)… but surely this problem could be ameliorated.
I’ve looked at some unfiltered resumes submitted through our site - and a large number of them aren’t even close to the requirements. The current system may filter out those who cut and paste their resume to any site looking remotely relevant, and I consider that a feature. Any person who pays attention to the posting, and who cares enough to edit the resume to match, and who has basic qualifications can usually get through, I think.
Now resumes culled from job boards may not get customized - but no one should really expect to get hired that way.