SIGIA-L Mail Archives: SIGIA-L: Is a machine reading your resum
SIGIA-L: Is a machine reading your resume?
From: Chris Chandler (chrischandler67_at_earthlink.net)
Date: Tue Aug 14 2001 - 00:27:26 EDT
Ziay Oz wrote:
> I've come to feel that the Internet has had a negative
impact on the
> process of job seeking and hiring. The capability of
high-speed,
> high-volume machine-parsing of text streams (resumes) for
key words now
> pass for job-candidate matching. This tends to amplify
buzzword compliance,
> at the expense of pretty much everything else. That is,
if you don't the
> pass the initial machine query of your resume, it gets
tossed out and
> nothing else really matters from then on. You've seen the
job descriptions:
> "good design skills *and* C++".
Comment #1: I've applied at several (6 or 7) employers who
use an automated, online application process. At every
single one, the HR department has the reputation of a roach
motel. -- i.e. resumes go in, and they never come out. At
each and every one (in my admittedly limited experience,)
people in the organization will tell you flat out to avoid
the HR system if you can. Sometimes you can't (at a Big 5
company where I applied for example,), and in almost every
case I've received warnings to discount the efforts of the
HR department as basically a hurdle that must be jumped to
get into an organization, but having nothing to do with
actual decisions.
Tip #1: The old saw about "who you know" is true -- of
course, in these times most of my network is looking for
work also, so you've got to improvise. Even if you don't
know the person making the job decision personally, you are
usually much better off if you can find out (by hook or by
crook) who that decision maker is and sending them your
resume. Yes, you risk bothering someone, but if you don't,
you risk them never seeing your resume at all.
Question #1: Has anyone had good experiences with automated
applications? Alternately, has anyone worked on an online
application "application" that works?
Comment #2: At the risk of casting a rather wide aspersion,
I'm not sure that one is necesarrily better off with the
typical human recruiter! Most of us have been members of
highly specialized cross-disciplinary teams -- and
appreciating that paradox is merely the first step a
recruiter will have to make to understand what we "do." To
make matters worse, in my experience, recruiters have the
least knowledge about what their own company actually
"does," and writing job descriptions is a time-consuming and
under-appreciated task. (I've written them myself, which is
bad enough, but editing what other people have put together
is even worse.) The biggest problem is in the technical
area -- when the job description asks that you know "graphic
design and C++" that's a sign that whoever put the
description together doesn't really know what they're
talking about. The tendency I think is to try and be more
inclusive, and to include skills that would be beneficial,
but that have little if any connection to the job being
offered.
Tip #2: Don't use a one-size-fits-all resume! As much as
possible you should tailor your resume and cover letter to
the job. Cut out stuff that doesn't apply and emphasize
those things that match what the job description does say by
moving them to the top. This is painful advice to follow
(though surprisingly easy to give <smiley>) in that it can
add hours to each application, but I think it does increase
your chances of getting picked out of a pile.
--
Chris Chandler
Information Architect
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2
: Sun Nov 23 2003 - 22:54:47 EST
|
