Friday, Feb 20, 2009
Depression levels of job applications
Cnn: Wanted: Lousy job, low pay
"I have asked several potential employers how many resumes they have received and the answers range from 200 to over 3,000," she said. "How do I stand out in a list of over three thousand people when the job market is impersonal and the field is flooded with applicants?" she asked.
Posted by mark @ 11:45 AM (546 views) Add Comment
4 Comments
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1. paul said...
Unfortunately, employers have been their own worst enemies in this respect - they've chosen to de-personalize the process and keep applicants at arms length, so applicants have simply reciprocated that approach.
Its all very well sending personalized applications as the article suggests, but why bother when the application email address is jobs@somecompany.com and they send the reply from noreply@somecompany.com? In fact many companies nowadays don't even promise to contact you unless you are successful.
What comes around, goes around.
2. stillthinking said...
I have a theory about this. In the old days 1000 job seekers and a 1000 available jobs, but each applicant would need a hand written letter, slowing up the application process to say 100 per job seeker. Nowadays, with internet job sites, you just click to include jobs and then do a bulk application. So much easier for each job seeker to take a shotgun approach and do 200/300 applicants. Perversely, this way seems much more hassle for recruiters.
So number of job applications probably makes things seem worse than they are, because not a true reflection of seeker:job ratio.
3. drewster said...
@Stillthinking is right. This has been the situation in the IT jobs market for ages now - even in the boom times, one advert on a popular jobs website would garner a couple of hundred applications, especially for the less-qualified roles. Now that everyone is online it just increases the load all round.
It's an arms race - all candidates have to apply for a hundred jobs just to be in with a statistical chance.
The solution for employers is to take on whoever is qualified and lives closest....
4. watchingthewheels2 said...
whoops.......wrong comment to wrong article....sorry.