Thursday, August 28, 2003

MAILING RESUMES At first blush, mailing resumes directly to the Human Resources Departments of various companies seems like a good job hunting method.  Unfortunately it is not.  Richard Bolles in WHAT COLOR IS YOUR PARACHUTE? states that sending resumes to targeted companies has less than a 7% job hunting effectiveness rating.  I maintain the rating is actually much lower than that, and in today's economy, it probably approaches zero.  Like all other parts of the company, the Human Resources department has been cut to the bone.  They hardly have time to perform their normal tasks, much less open hundreds, and in the case of fortune 500 companies, thousands of unsolicited letters and resumes.  And if they do open them, by Federal Law they must now be sorted by race and kept for several years (although I suspect the compliance rate is very low at this time).  Another reason I believe the job hunting effectiveness rating approaches zero is base on my experience as a recruiter.  We have mailed approximately 2,000 well printed and laid out brochures to companies in the last year.   Out of those brochures we have had only one response and that was in our home town.  Simple math (the only kind I can do these days) yields an effectiveness rating of .05%.  These brochures do not even require opening or much reading so I doubt an unsolicited resume is going to do much better.  We will talk more about the Internet later and why sending unsolicited resumes via email will probably yield an equally bad, if not worse result.  Obviously, I am not a proponent of mailing unsolicited resumes. 10:28:07 PM    comment []