Many career searchers immediately look at job boards when looking for a new job. Unknowingly, they are joining a huge group of professionals who seek similar positions.
The organizations that are searching for candidates suddenly experience a large influx of resumes from hopeful job seekers. Over the past 25 years, human resource departments have informed their applicant tracking system vendors to assist in their efforts to screen out unqualified candidates.
The applicant tracking system developers began to roll out their solution — a keyword match between the job description and the candidate’s resume. There are only one or two small problems.
The first problem is fairly significant when you consider that many job descriptions do not truly describe the job. Consider, when an employee absolutely excels in a position and is promoted, is the job description rewritten to include the new responsibilities the promoted employee created?
In more than 40 years of experience, I have seen many managers or HR departments simply pull the “old” job description out of their computer files and post it.
Is the manager going to expect their candidates to be a fit for the previous employee’s responsibilities or the promoted employee’s additional responsibilities?
We all know that answer. If the company simply posts the original job description, they will hire the wrong person.
There is another important consideration for companies. Understanding all words in the job description becomes words that candidates must match to receive a high enough keyword score to be considered for a position by someone who has not read their resume, only their score.
Not long ago, I coached an executive candidate who earned their Harvard MBA. They showed me the list of companies where they applied, yet received no response. I asked them to forward the most recent job posting where they applied, and the resume they used.
The moment I looked at the job description, one reason their keyword score was low was the phrase “high school diploma required.” Someone had copied the boilerplate language in the job description without considering the downside. Of course a candidate with a Harvard MBA will forgo saying they have a high school diploma.
Would you like to know how to avoid this applicant tracking system trap? The solution has been proven over 45 years of metrics that were developed by the career transition industry. According to those metrics, 74% to 76% of all jobs are filled by networking, initially with people you know.
Next time you are searching for a job, reach out to your network. Talk with friends and former coworkers, former managers, former classmates, relatives and anyone else who will chat with you about your search. At the end of each conversation, ask them this question: who do you feel I should contact next?
Never ask them to “think”. They will think for several weeks and then forget what they were thinking about. When you ask how they “feel,” they will give you a knee-jerk response and usually a name.
Bill Humbert is a talent attraction consultant. Mr. Humbert can be reached at RecruiterGuy.com.
