You see a job posting, you're qualified, hell you're over qualified. You're willing to settle, maybe you're desperate. You take the time to fill out the app and attach a resume, and you hear ... absolutely nothing. Not a peep. Not even a polite decline. This happens to you over and over and over. Perhaps you wonder, what did I do wrong, what could I change? The answer is, probably, nothing. It has nothing to do with you. Odds are your resumes aren't even read, they aren't even filed away; they are simply deleted along with hundreds of others.
I asked a friend who works in HR for local medium sized business to keep track of how many applications she got the next time a job was publicly posted and how HR managed those applications. The company was hiring "three to four" entry level employees in what is essentially telemarketing. The goal is to set appointments for Microsoft, Oracle, and other large enterprise software company reps with IT managers and decision making executives of the prospect company. Commission is awarded when the client reps make a sale to the prospect company. Here's what happened.
This jobs starts with new employee-trainees sitting through a one week training course on products, sales techniques, and internal tracking software with a comprehensive exam on the following Monday. Trainees that fail the exam have the option of studying for it and taking it again the next day. If they fail twice they're out, but almost everyone passes the first time. After the in-house exam, the employee-trainees are put "on the floor" where they sidejack, that is listen into actual calls made by more experienced employees, for about a week. After that they start making calls on their own with support from experienced employees and supervisors as needed. It's an auto dialer, a computer-telephony-integrated system. The employees just sit in a cube farm while the system dials. When it makes a connection the information and any past contact with that organization is displayed on an employee's screen.
This job pays a training rate of $8.00 an hour for the first six weeks. Employees who 'survive' the six-week cut go onto to earn $9.00 an hour plus commission. It takes anywhere from three months to a year to actually see commission booked on a paycheck. (Good luck trying to pay for company healthcare insurance on that, and you damn well better not get sick for more than day.) The order has to go through, payment has to be received, and if you get fired for any reason along the way before it hits you are out that commission. A typical employee earns about 500 to 1000 dollars a month in commission, but occasionally some earn more and have a really good month. There's an unofficial cut off of around 500 a month -- less than that and the employee salesman will be let go within three or four months at most. There are practically no prereqs or experienced required, no degrees or education stated on the job posting.
You getting the picture? This is not a great job. It's a dreary, stressful, uncertain job where you could be golden one month and out on your ass the next through no fault of your own. Outside of entry telemarketing sales jobs, other commissioned jobs like door-to-door sales or insurance, military postings, and medical jobs that either pay poorly or require nursing or other highly skilled licenses or degrees, there's almost nothing else available. You'll see a few highly specialized jobs for very specific kinds of engineers, or managers, or paralegals, with years of experience. Maybe a smattering of fluke assistant positions that happen to speak a foreign language or know ASL or possess some other unusual talent. And they get snapped up in seconds assuming that someone, or a dozen someones, doesn't already have an inside track. For each of those good jobs with real salaries and good benefits there are hundreds and hundreds of highly qualified, and increasingly desperate, applicants.
The kind of job I'm describing may not be the kind you're looking for, but it's one of the only kind that's widely available these days, because the entry level turnover is high (The odds of being promoted are lousy).
The notice was placed on a well known job site on Monday, August 16, at 9 AM central. The HR department receives the incoming applications in batches (For some reason they don't stream in quite in real time like you'd think). The first batch hit later that day and the total count was 67. Those 67 applications were probably filled out in the first hour or two the job was posted. By the next morning the HR office had received over 100 applications for three or four jobs. At that point she told me "We just stopped counting and sorting, and started deleting."
Even 100 applications are too much to review and rank in any kind of objective way in the space of a couple of hours. So the first thing HR did was weed out as many as they could based on experience. The posting said no experience required, sales experience a plus. But in this case they picked a cut-off of five years recent experience in telemarketing. That narrowed it down to about forty apps. Then they went through and tossed out any applications that had no experience in technical sales, that knocked it down to less than a couple of dozen. It was only then that they could actually skim the resumes and applications and start making subjective calls. And as she described it, it's almost arbitrary from there on, really the first ten or so they skimmed, provided nothing jumps out at them, get an email of interest or a phone call and the rest get tossed.
About eight or nine people were called in for a ten minute interview, one guy was hired who was referred in by a senior supervisor leaving only three slots. If you didn't answer your phone or respond to that email real quick you were SOL, if you couldn't come in for an interview the next day you were toast, they just went on to the next app. After eight or nine people accepted and received interviews, three offers were extended, again somewhat arbitrarily; it boiled down to answering your phone on the first call. When HR got three who accepted, boom, that was it. They had lots of other shit to do.
In the meantime applications kept pouring in even though they took the posting down. She speculates that job sites keep as many postings up for as long as they can to artificially inflate their numbers and attract as many job seekers as possible. So a week later, out of almost five hundred or so serious applications by qualified applicants for four entry level slots filed, only the first hundred that came in, all within the first day, and probably the first few hours, of the job being posted had a chance. Less than ten would get anything beyond an auto-generated email that the application was received. Every other applicant would have no idea what happened, their application might as well have gone into a black-hole. The company didn't even save them, there was no time to mess with a system of classifying it for future hires. Easier to just post the job and start over again. (Which incidentally, is a good reason to store your resume on job sites, so you can just click and send the moment you see a job.)
If you call the company to see what the status of your app is, or to try to talk your way into an interview, you won't get through. If you walk in you'll be told the same thing. I guess if you don't have internet access you're out of luck, you won't even see the job posting, you're not even counted as an applicant. The operators and receptionists have strict instructions to refer all job seekers that call or walk in to the online application process. A conversation they have down pat because they get to practice it all day long.
That's the reality of what's going on out there, for an entry level job, the kind of job just about any idiot used to be able to get. It had nothing to do with an applicant's age, or how pretty their resume was, or health problems, or anything like that. It sure as hell had nothing to do with being over qualified or any of that crap you sometimes hear. It came down to experience, internet access, and a big dose of pure luck. HR didn't even have time to check but a handful of past work references of the people they did hire. The odds of being hired were non-existent for anyone who didn't see that job go up within a few hours of posting and something like fifty to one for those who did. That's for a mediocre job, the kind of job you might be able to scrape by on if you live with a roommate in a crappy apartment, or struggle to raise a family in a two income household. That's in Austin, Texas, a region and city considered by most analysts to be far above average in job opportunity.