About this 21st Century.
Before leaving school, knowing my cast might hamper my ability to take a welding test, I sent out resumes to only four employers. It took nearly a week (Friday to Thursday) for one of them to respond. Took the test and haven’t heard back (I’ll be calling them today).
The day after the last day of school, last Friday, knowing my cast would come off this Friday, I sent out eight more. I have heard from none of them. No, my phone did not explode on Monday.
Yesterday morning I sent out four more. I actually got a response from one of them, but it was from the company that the company I want to work for hired to handle hiring. She had, in my opinion, some benign questions that weren’t likely very helpful to my prospective employer.
I talked with David about this last night and he said this is typical. That these days it takes a while for companies to get in touch with prospective employees.
This is completely foreign to me. But, then again, I haven’t looked for a job in over 15 years. in 1999, I could carry a resume with me, walk into a company and talk to the HR drone, fill out their application form in the lobby while we talked, have an actual interview with the HR supervisor and the department manager, and walk out with a job.
Yet another former fact of life time has ruined. And I would put $20 down that none of the backgrounding most likely going on behind the scenes while I wait can be shown to improve the quality of employee they actually hire.
What does a guy who wants to work have to do to get hired faster, please?
FYI: This is not an April Fools. I am getting bored with sleeping in and doing no welding. Yes, I may be insane.
Computer filtering has completely disrupted the job-search market. Without the right buzzwords that whatever their program is looking for your chances of getting to someone who understands yor skillset are pretty close to zero.
HR departments are mostly AA sinecures these days.
Best approach, though perhaps time-consuming, is to bypass the official hiring process entirely.
If you know, or can manage to get acquainted with, someone who already works there in the right general area, he can introduce you to the manager whose opinion really matters, and he can hire you and tell HR to start writing paychecks.
So: either you get inside their social network, or you have to deal with the HR department… or, as you’ve found, with a completely unrelated HR-department-for-hire.
I had been sort of looking for a job since last September. And seriously looking since December. I got my first response back in February. And first phone “interview” (simple questions from HR) in March. Then a flood of phone interviews and a couple in person interviews. I started my new job on Monday.
My “job coach” insisted that a good LinkedIn profile is required because of the social networking. She claims 90% of the HR people will look at your LinkedIn profile before passing you on to the hiring manager. She also said that many of them “live” in LinkedIn when searching for candidates. I reluctantly went along with this. It wasn’t a factor in the job I got but it might be for other people.
By “sent out resumes” I hope you mean submitted an electronic application in response to a job posting. It’s all e-mail / electronic these days.
Try job boards such as Monster and make yourself a benign profile on LinkedIn.