Unfortunately, because of standard communication problems and normal differences of perspective and personality, the person in the personnel department usually has a dramatically different idea from that of the supervisor as to who is appropriate for a job and who is not. So the personnel department and the supervisor are interviewing according to different expectations and objectives, and one is rejecting candidates that the other might hire, Another problem was suggested to me by a personnel administrator with a large oil company who declared in a moment of frustrated candor that the typical personnel department person is a "has-been or a never-was" and is accordingly ineffective and difficult to deal with. My experience somewhat confirms that opinion. The best of the personnel people usually quit to become headhunters and the worst are left behind. The mediocre ones quit, try to become headhunters, fail, and return to the personnel department.
Beyond these problems, these departments are overburdened with perhaps scores of job openings and hundreds of applicants while also having responsibility for an awesome amount of administrative support such as benefit packages, wage and salary surveys, insurance claims, equal opportunity compliance, employee personal file maintenance, and more. Therefore, any one job seeker receives very little attention in the personnel department s massive flow of paperwork.
In any event, dealing with the personnel department is norm ally a frustrating and futile endeavor. The lesson here is to avoid the personnel department and to go directly to the decision makers. If you are referred later by a decision maker back to the personnel department, the weight of that referral can be used to give your routine processing a higher priority.
Despite the fact that resumes are notoriously overblown and inaccurate documents, employers encourage external candidates to use them because it is more efficient to initially screen job applicants on paper than in person. In one hour an employer may be able to rapidly review one hundred to two hundred resumes but can personally interview only one or two people in the same amount of time. Therefore, an employer usually wants to ensure that an applicant "looks good" on paper before committing to a personal interview.
Although this procedure appears to the employer to be a logical method of screening candidates and scheduling time, the hiring decision is not always a logical conclusion to the job-hunting process. The best qualified person does not always get the job; in fact, he or she rarely does. Sometimes, even an individual who is theoretically only marginally qualified (or less) is hired. Typically, the job is filled with a person who meets some, but not nearly all, of the requirements, and who has the potential to grow into the job, and, most important, who has the right personality mix. Because people are not computers, the hiring decision is often based largely on very human, sometimes irrational, and usually subjective factors.
The two most subjective factors in the hiring process are the resume and the interview. Whereas the job hunter can largely control the subjectivity of the personal interview since he or she is present, the subjectivity of the resume is uncontrollable once it is placed in the mail. The primary purpose of the resume from the employer's point of view, is to decide who not to interview. Although one would expect employers to objectively review resumes relative to job performance requirements, it rarely happens that way.
From personal experience, I am aware of qualified individuals whose resumes have been rejected for the following reasons:
The list of reasons for resume rejection could continue. Some of these interpretations by employers are admittedly hasty and perhaps almost ludicrous, but such interpretations have happened and will happen again whenever one fallible human being with one set of subjective values, biases, and expectations reads a piece of paper written by a different human being with a different set of values, biases, and expectations. The point is that the interview-getting resume for any given job hunter will differ substantially from company to company, job to job, reviewer to reviewer, day to day, and mood to mood.
What will not change is that the resume will be rejected 95 times out of 100. From personal experience, again, I know candidates whose resumes have been rejected for a given job who have subsequently gotten that same job once they found (or were shown) the proper "Back door" into the company. This reveals, from tie individuals standpoint, another major drawback of the resume. So much energy will go into the writing and mailing of the document that the more important aspects of job hunting will be neglected, cultivation of contacts, identification of job leads, interview preparation and follow-up, and proper psychological preparation. In that vein, in a recent study of managers actively involved in hiring, over four-fifths of the respondents felt that job hunters sometimes depended too heavily on their resumes.
In summary, there is no universal theory as to what constitutes a proper resume was an accepted, objective, logical method of reviewing resumes by employers. Therefore, every time a job hunters mails a resume to a prospective employer, he or she is taking a gamble in which the odds are always in the employer's favor and do not always reflect the job hunters qualifications for the given job.
