There are several explanations for this ineffectiveness. First, the job market tends to be an employer-controlled process. It is the employer who demands that a resumes to be submitted and decides when to hire, who to interview, who not to interview, how much money to offer, and to whom to offer the job. The employer is there by thought to be in the driver’s seat as the "buyer". Therefore, the individual normally starts out with a psychological disadvantage and goes downhill from there.
Second, the primary emphasis in our educational system is on providing jobs rather than job-hunting skills. So, the average job hunter is relatively inexperienced and poorly prepared for the coming ordeal. Plus, the institutions that do teach job-hunting skills teach the traditional, resume oriented approach.
Third, most job hunters prefer to job hunt via the mail because they do not enjoy job hunting and prefer to be rejected on paper rather than in person.
As a result, the average job hunter traditionally relies largely on his or her resume to find a job and subsequently is not very successful. One reason for this lack of success is that the job hunter’s resume is in competition with hundreds of other resumes that may or may not be competing fairly. It has been estimated that up to 40 percent of all resumes overstate the person’s background. Therefore, the average job hunter needs either to be equally creative and dishonest in the writing of the resume or to skip the resumes altogether and become an aggressive job hunter as described in this book.
Another reason for the low success rate when using a resume is the way in which the document is used through the mail. The resume normally is mailed selectively to various companies in response to a want ad or indiscriminately to a large number of companies (usually addressed to the personnel department) as a part of a mass-mailing campaign.
Want ads are the primary sources of job leads for most job hunters, although it has been estimated that only 15 percent of all jobs are ever advertised. Before advertising a job, the hiring company will usually consider internal sources for promotion, posting on bulletin boards, announcements in company newsletters, past applicants, walk-ins, as well as referrals from employees, head-hunters, and friends of the company. In some cases, key openings are not advertised in order to keep them confidential from competitors. Plus, any time a job is advertised, a company opens itself to a lawsuit from a disgruntled unsuccessful job seeker. Advertising an open position, screening the hundreds of responding resumes, and then interviewing the selected candidates is such a chore that most companies actively consider the less burdensome internal sources first. Therefore, responding to want ads means that an individual is in competition with the majority of job hunters for the minority of available jobs. No wonder a Department of Labor survey con concluded that want ads as a whole account for only 5 percent of successful job leads.
The Personal Interview
Besides the resume, the other highly subjective factor in the hiring process is the personal interview. According to a study done by a university, some of the most important factors in getting hired at the entry level are maturity, personal appearance, verbal communication skills, and personality. A study done by a national recruiting firm on executive level hiring determined that individual growth potential and creativity were far more important than experience in any specific industry. For the average job hunter at any level, these characteristics are far more easily displayed and evaluated in the personal interview than in the resume.
Moreover, the subjectivity of the interview can be manipulated to work in the job hunter's favor. The chance of being hired increases ten to twenty times when you reach the interview stage. This suggests that the job hunter can benefit greatly by skipping the resume screening stage and reaching the job interview with the supervisor as soon as possible.
A perfect example of the power and effectiveness of the personal interview in spite of an "imperfect" background is a college placement officer named John Artise. He researched the job-hunting process over seven years by interviewing for 300 jobs in a wide variety of occupations. He received approximately 200 job offers for such things as copy editor, biochemist, and marketing manager.
His conclusion was that personality was far more important in job training and job offers than were credentials.
