How job seekers can get their foot in the door

Eve Tahmincioglu • Profile • E-mail

Landing an interview is becoming as rare these days as a night without a presidential debate.

Take Mike Mayer, a former marketing manager who lives in Cleveland. He’s sent out hundreds of resumes but it’s been six months since anyone has called him to set up an interview. “I’m looking for a sales or marketing job, and I have extensive international experience, but maybe that’s working against me,” he surmises.

And A.J., an accounts receivable associate for a property management company, is finding his efforts to leave his firm and embark on a new career in human resources have hit a job search dead-end. In the past three months of sending resumes out, he says, “I have not received a single call.”

Welcome to the growing resume abyss. More and more job seekers are finding they’re lost in it, unable to even get a call back from a prospective employer acknowledging they exist despite their credentials or experience.

“It used to be that job seekers were able to take a shot gun approach and hit something,” says Kurt Weyerhauser, a recruiting expert with search firm Kensington Stone. But in this economy, he adds, “you have to get beyond the resume.”

There’s a host of reasons for the problem, aside from just not being right for the job: a souring economy that’s gotten companies to cut back or suspend hiring; resume overload by recruiters who are inundated by electronic resumes; and a growing desire on the part of hiring managers to hire who they know, or at least hire someone who’s recommended by someone they know.

“If you go back a year ago people were talking about the war for talent, you don’t hear that anymore,” says Steve Gross, global leader for consulting firm Mercer. The company recently surveyed 126 U.S. employers and four that 33 percent of them were considering a hiring freeze or cutting back on staff because of the economy. That translates, he says, into a slowdown of the hiring process in general.

While you can’t disregard the importance of a well-crafted resume that’s targeted to the individuals jobs, unfortunately, it’s probably not a sharp enough spear for today’s job-hunt.

Seriously folks, you could be the perfect candidate for a job and never get beyond an electronic “thank you” reply for sending your resume.

Dan Enthoven, vice president of marketing of job search firm Trovix, conducted a study where he sent out fictitious resumes to companies that he knew were desperate to hire software engineers in Silicon Valley. The resumes included all the right credentials and background needed for each specific job posted on company sites, including degrees from none other than top engineering schools such as Stanford and MIT, just to make the candidates even more appealing.

Out of 35 of these perfect resumes sent only seven received emails saying, “we’d like to talk to you,” says Enthoven. “That was shocking.”

If the perfect candidates out there only have a one in five chance to get called back, it’s not good news for someone that may not be a perfect match or someone trying to break into a new career.

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