Job-hunting 2.0

Job-hunting used to be a pretty personal endeavor. And it was all about you - the job applicant. The application process was designed to help you market yourself. Your cover letter and resume were your chance (if you didn't already know someone at the company) to start building a relationship between yourself and your hoped-for new workplace.

The advice from friends, career counselors and loved ones was also pretty consistent - keep your resume short, consistent and to the point. Ensure that your cover letter shows you to be engaging, confident and strong in your desire for the new job. And all of those things made sense.

But something pretty dramatic has happened over the last 10 years. Not only has the economic downturn changed the landscape of job-hunting (so that there are a whole lot more people looking for jobs and far fewer actually finding them), but the technology that powers many recruiting departments has transformed both how you submit your job application and what happens to it after it's been submitted.

The sad fact is that the first person to see your resume or cover letter these days won't commonly be a person at all. It will likely be a resume filtering application. It works like this:

• You submit your resume online (either by attaching a document or cutting and pasting the resume into an online form)
• The resume filter application scans your resume for the existence of certain "keywords" (like those used in Web search) and, if the right keywords - or enough of them - are found, then your resume may actually make it into the hands of a human being
• Presuming that your resume contains the keywords that the company is looking for, then the recruiter may actually start to read the fine words you've carefully composed in order to get their attention and explain how you are different and why the company NEEDS you

And all of that is very, very different advice than the traditional "keep it short, simple and to the point". I won't go into a lot of detail on job-hunting tips, as other blogs have already done a good job of that - such as last year's Underblog post that asked "Would You Pass The Resume-Filter Test?" and the excellent set of tips to which it linked at Iagora - which explains, in considerable detail - how best to create CVs for the New Reality.

This is an area I've been long interested in. A few years back, I interviewed a hiring industry luminary - Dr. David P. Jones - and he provided a great perspective on what were then looming trends in hiring. You can read that article here: http://www.verificationsinc.com/newsletter/01152007/million.html and, I think it's a great illustration of how things that were - not long ago - just 10 minutes into the future can have an impact on your present day life.

I'd welcome any tales and feedback from anyone who's currently job-hunting and how this new Resume Reality is impacting them.