Facing the hiring process

Over the past several months I have completed over 50 job applications and sent out well over 100 emails to potential employers to absolutely no avail.

When doing so, I did not limit my search to any one state, region or time zone. I made sure that my resume accurately conveyed that I have worked for a book publishing company, a magazine, and two journalistic news organizations. Even so, months have passed and I have nothing to show for all of my effort. I have not received a single call or email from any of the employers that I contacted.

The broken hiring system is ridiculously inefficient and biased. The process is more of a good old boy system as opposed to a being a crucible of knowledge, skill and character.

The good old boy system being a, hire the people you know even if they are subpar, system.

“If you’ve sent out forty or fifty resumes or responded to dozens of job ads and you’re not getting interviews, something is wrong,” Liz Ryan, a Forbes contributor wrote. “We all know that the corporate and institutional recruiting process is broken, but there is way to crawl through the wreckage of the broken recruiting system to get a good job despite the sad state of what’s often called the Talent Acquisition apparatus.”

While I agree with Ryan that the system is broken, I disagree with how she thinks it can be sidestepped.

The way to “crawl through the wreckage”, in Ryan’s opinion, is to directly contact employers instead of posting resumes on job listing sites.

This method is all but impossible. How do I know? I have tried it several times. I have combed through About Us and Contact Us pages for more hours than I care to count. The phone numbers and email addresses of the employees is almost never listed.

This is not the only thing out of whack.The hiring system is broken in more ways than one.

Because of the “institutional recruiting process” there is a high chance that someone’s resume will never even be seen. If a recruiter does so happen to see it, it will not be read, just skimmed.

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Matthew Kosinski wrote in a 2015 Recruiter article that a recruiter spends no more than six seconds looking at a resume and an inaccurate applicant tracking system disqualifies 75 percent of applicants.

On several occasions, I have spent all night in the library tailoring my resume and cover letter to specific jobs in the hopes that potential employers would see my level of education and experience and email me to set up an interview time.

Of course they have yet to do so.

With broken systems such as applicant tracking in place, it should have come as no surprise to me that none of my applications have been successful.

Judging by those odds, I would have to send out hundreds of applications before even one employer got back to me.

I strongly believe that the only real way to bypass the pile of resumes that will never be read is to be in the know.

I have heard countless times “it’s not what you know, but who you know.” Amy Rowell, senior career development specialist at Career Services for Georgia Southern said that 75 to 80 percent of jobs are found through who you know.

Believing that having an extensive knowledge of the given subject matter was all that was needed to secure a job was very naive of me.

Yes, actually knowing what you are doing has no substitute, but networking is imperative as well.

Adam Martin, the Assistant Director for career development at Georgia Southern University, believes that companies are more concerned about their bottom line than hiring someone they know. Hopefully that is true, but my experience thus far has led me to believe otherwise.

It is more than frustrating to know that someone else may pale in comparison to my skills and knowledge, but get hired over me because they are church members with the hiring manager’s brother.

No, this particular incident has not happened, that I know of, but sadly it is very likely that it could.