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Recruiters' Résumé Peevishness: Indulge or Ignore
By Joyce Lain Kennedy

Dear Joyce: I'm looking for a better job. My pet peeve is the hours and hours of wasted time when I try to post my résumé on certain company Web sites. Why is it necessary to jump through hoops answering 99 questions before your résumé is accepted? Why do they do this? -- C.A.

Dear C.A.: Companies prescreen online because they can. If you don't want to age gracefully at a time-intensive Web site, I can only suggest that you vote with your eyes and move on.

Pet Peeves
Realize, though, that online résumés raise blood pressures on both sides of the screen. Recruiters, internal or third-party, are peevish about certain aspects of onliners too.

Here's a paraphrased selection of irritations I spotted on the Electronic Recruiting Exchange, a popular professional forum.

E-Stalking
"One applicant e-mailed his résumé and a few days later sent another, saying he was waiting on a response. I replied the usual -- 'If we are interested, we'll call for an interview.' A few days later, and once a week for a few months, he sent e-mails that only said 'still waiting.' Creepy."

Comment: Checking back periodically works best if you send new information of interest to the recruiter. You might scan and send a brief, relevant news article - "In case you missed this" -- and add that you continue to look forward to the right timing for an interview.

Résumé-free Pitches
"My peeve list includes applicants who send in a general question -- 'Do you have any technical positions open in St. Louis?' -- instead of a résumé. Another annoyance: Providing a URL to a résumé Web site without a copy of the résumé included in the e-mail message."

Caps and Taps
"My sore spot is receiving e-mails with no use of capitalization whatsoever, or with some words mysteriously capitalized and those that should be -- proper names, beginning of a sentence -- are not capitalized."

Mismatches
It irks me when people send résumés without reading our job posting. If we advertise for a pizza chef, a bike mechanic is just as likely to self-nominate himself for the job, leaving us to figure it out."

"Our management positions require a background in a certain industry plus experience. We get responses from people with one year of experience and no management background. We get résumés that claim their experience is ideal or that they read the position and found it to fit their skills exactly, when in reality they have none of the experience detailed in the job posting."

"We advertised for a telecommunications consultant with call center experience and received a résumé of someone with experience in movie production and no experience in anything we look for. I am sure applicants would have a more positive outcome if they applied for positions that are relevant to their experience, although I doubt this will ever change."

Comment: Some job seekers, particularly in technical fields, operate on the lottery theory and blast résumés everywhere. Others adhere to the 80 percent strategy (if you fit 80 percent of the job's requirements, give it a shot) or believe that if you can manage one thing, you can manage any thing. Still others seek ways to apply viable transferable skills to new environments and, failing to make a strong enough case, are rejected because some recruiters are too inexperienced, overworked or insular to see the legitimacy of transitioning skill sets. And still other job seekers just don't get it and waste everyone's time in applying for jobs for which they are way off base.

The best way to go after a job with an apparently imperfect fit is to directly contact the hiring manager, if you can, and explain why you bypassed the online application route.

Attachments
"My big gripe is applicants who send attachments rather than pasting in plain text copy into e-mail for companies that automatically process résumés."

Comment: Virtually all but the smallest companies automate résumé processing today. Do a two-fer: In addition to enclosing your résumé in plain text within e-mail, offer the recruiter the option of a more attractively formatted version in an attachment.

Send career questions for possible use in this column to Joyce Lain Kennedy at Box 368, Cardiff, CA 92007, or e-mail her at jlk@sunfeatures.com. Sorry, the volume of mail makes personal replies impossible.