Its hard to apply for a job without having to apply online. With every resume submitted you are subjecting yourself to the corporate hiring machine. It doesn’t really matter how good your credentials are or how great your references are if a computer discards your resume before a person can make a professional decision on qualifications.
Have you ever applied to a job and wondered how come you didn’t meet the requirements or how the company could really have a huge surplus of qualified candidates?
Below is a email evidence that the system that corporations are using to pick “quality” candidates is very much broken. The system makes you live and die by the resume. The first step is to conquer the system. To get some insight into how your resume ranks check out this resume ranker.
The problem is man and machine don’t necessarily see eye to eye. One of us at the site had this chain of events happen.
Background
I had applied for a job as a Manager Trainee which was a corporate program as a full-time job. About a day or two later I checked my email to find I was being selected for a phone interview.
Exactly three minutes after the request for a phone interview was sent, another automated system email was sent. This one was a standard disappointing no thanks you are not what we are looking for rejection note.
Naturally I responded promptly to the first email, asking for a phone interview. Within an hour I had an appointment for a phone interview.
What job am I interviewing for?
During the phone interview it was discovered that the position the recruiter had inquired about was for an internship, not for an entry level training program that the application was for.
It only took a few minutes to figure out that the job I was interviewing for was wrong. I asked the recruiter if I was interviewing for a Store Manager Trainee position and she said it was for an internship.
She said that she would interview me for the trainee position and took a minute to find the questions. Her disposition on the phone changed dramatically from actual interest to simply saying “Okay, Okay, Okay” after every one of my responses. It was very clear she was just humoring me and not going to do anything with my information.
At the conclusion I asked what the process was for going forward and she said that it would take four days to get a response for the position.
The rejection note came via email a few hours later.
What we learned
Corporate Hiring Systems Aren’t Always Right. This particular scenario had man and machine pitted against each other. One system picked out the same resume as a candidate, the other made an evaluation that the candidate was good. It turned out that the position that was flagged as a good fit was not even applied too.
Have you ever seen a similar situation to a job application? Sound off below.
