Avoiding the Resume Blackhole
You have worked so hard to earn your engineering / science / technical degree. And now you're ready for your first full-time gig. You want to put your skills to use and land with a company you can feel proud to work for.
But so far, you've gotten a lot of automated responses to applications. The proverbial, "thanks, but no thanks" when employers have moved ahead with other candidates.
What’s going wrong?
This, my friends, is the job application black hole.
When a job-seeker is reliant solely on online job applications, applying to company after company where they don't have any connectivity... it can be as effective as sending your resume to a literal black hole to be consumed by a singularity.
There are a lot of things engineers and scientists are not taught in school. And here's another one of those things that you must understand as a job seeker:
Not all job postings are real openings.
There are many reasons why this could be the case for any particular job. Here are a couple such reasons.
If a company is anticipating a large amount of work in the "pipeline" for an office or region, they might open up several job requisitions to begin collecting resumes for anticipated work. It's anticipated - it's not work that's in the door or that they have won yet. Their competitors might even be doing the same... in anticipation of winning the same work the two (or more) companies are competing for. The thing is, only one company will win the work. So all those potential candidates that applied on the losing company’s website - they won't get so much as an interview.
Consider that a hiring manager may have identified a candidate for a role, either internally at their company or externally from their network, but due to the employer's rules for fair practice, the company will still go through the motions of posting the job opening on their website and collecting resumes. They may even go through multiple interviews before giving the role to the (pre) selected candidate.
The point is today's tip:
You should not
not
NOT
...rely solely on online job applications for your job hunt.
Instead, you must network - i.e. build relationships with humans in your target industry.
Learn more about networking in this post and learn about networking on LinkedIn on this video.
I'll be sharing a hierarchy of how job-seekers should prioritize their time on the job hunt. In the meantime, I am cheering you on - you can do this!
-Mel