Quintessential Careers Press:
Job Search 2.0: Advancing Your Career Through Online Social Media
Chapter 2: Making the Best of Job Boards While They Are Still Around
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"The crush of resumes has muted the ability of hiring manager to effectively respond," wrote career advice columnist Joyce Lain Kennedy. Victor Godinez affirmed this point in The Dallas Morning News. Quoting Lawrence Stuenkel, senior partner of outplacement firm Lawrence & Allen in South Carolina, Godinez wrote: "Machine-gunning resumes across Internet job boards is unlikely to result in a response from an employer anymore ... there are about 80 million resumes floating around on the Web."
Employers are increasingly deploying online pre-screening techniques in response to resume-spamming. These techniques include automated questionnaires that sift through the huge numbers and narrow them to a manageable slate of qualified candidates, reports the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. One designer of these pre-screening tools predicts that within the next five years anyone who applies for a job at a large company will have to respond to an online screening as part of the process. The screening applications generally have 20 or fewer multiple-choice questions, and applicants are asked to check the response that best fits them.
With these pre-screening techniques enabling a large volume of applications to be managed efficiently and effectively, employers may be more responsive to applicants who are qualified, and the search process may take less time.
The stalemate between resume-inundated employers and job-seekers who feel ill-treated online is another reason Web 2.0 recruiting and job search are catching on. As Matt Martone, manager of media sales for Yahoo HotJobs, says in an article by Laura Mackelden, "... recruiting is about networking and communicating, not screening thousands of unqualified resumes. Web 2.0 is taking recruiters back to recruiting." Social-media expert Chris Brogan adds that the job-search world no longer centers on the big boards like Monster and YahooHotJobs. "Now, people are individuals are becoming hubs for jobs." Similarly, Kona Grill Recruiting Manager Carrie Remarke, interviewed by Chris Martin on the blog Talent Revolution, notes, "Social media has broken down so many barriers. You can message someone you don't know or don't have contact information for. With current economic conditions and the technological evolution of the Internet, the traditional approach most job seekers have taken in the past is sometimes no longer viable."
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