Gaming HR's Job Site Limits

Multi-talented people who qualify for multiple positions within large companies have a new reason to bypass HR and use networking to reach hiring managers. Large companies with online application systems create this situation by limiting the number of cover letter and resume versions applicants can use. This severely limits the number of positions to which one can apply.

For example, I applied for an Industrial Engineer (IE) position with a major Defense contractor. Their system stores only one version of an applicant's resume. When I applied for a Systems Engineer position, the system could only use the resume and cover letter I had crafted for the IE position.

• Sidebar: That's Systems Engineer, as in multi-disciplined, end-to-end technical managers of projects. IT Systems Engineers and specialists in other disciplines are generally not Systems Engineers, even though many companies give them the title.
  

This practice allegedly limits the ability of resume-spammers to apply for jobs for which they do not qualify. Counter-productively, it also limits companies' access to high value, multi-talented people. An applicant could apply for multiple jobs under the old mail-in paper filing system, but poorly implemented technology places a governor on the flow of applications.

When HR looks at my application for the Systems Engineering job in two weeks, they'll see the cover letter and resume for the IE job and say I'm unqualified. In fact, they'll ask, "Why's this IE applying for a Systems Engineering position?"

Had I replaced the IE version with my Systems Engineering version, the same thing will happen. In fact, when the IE hiring manager goes to retrieve the IE versions of my cover letter and resume, they will no longer exist in the database.

Even worse, if I applied for all the positions I have the skills for, HR might consider me a job-spammer and ban me from the whole system.

Using a generic version does not solve the problem. For many reasons, generic resumes do not compete with tailored, targeted versions.

The systems severely limit how often you can apply for jobs, even if you're fully qualified for each one.

I may have found a way around this limitation for some job sites. Some offer a way to upload supporting documents such as certificates, transcripts, copies of licenses, etc. One can upload a file containing a tailored cover letter and resume. My hypothesis: If the primary resume in the database gets past HR's screeners, the hiring manager will see your "supporting documentation."

Game HR's web application system if you must. Better yet, bypass HR through networking.

Systems Engineers, IT, and Sanitation Engineers

I feel a strong kinship to the civil engineer who specializes in garbage removal and landfills when PC bureaucrats call garbage collectors Sanitation Engineers.

The IT industry labels just about anybody a Systems Engineer. They demean the title by giving it to people who have skills in computer networks, software coding, or server administration, but may have little or no education in engineering, no multidisciplinary background, and no high-level perspective of systems development. I respect the IT folks knowledge and the hard work they put in to acquire their expertise, but that doesn't make them engineers, let alone systems engineers.

Systems Engineers work both at detail and at higher design levels. They consider business needs, requirements analysis, risk management, cost estimation, project planning, use cases, life cycle analysis, design, integration, and verification and testing. Their broader perspective requires formal, multidisciplined education and extensive experience so they can communicate with and bring together business, management, and engineers from different disciplines to communicate with the customer and deliver a complete and coherent design or service.

Two guilty parties who lead the title inflation include Microsoft, with its Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer certification, and Cisco Systems, with its Cisco Certified Network Engineer certification. MCSEs and CCNEs know their subjects, but passing a test qualifies them as technicians or technologists, not as engineers who devoted four or more years to passing hundreds of tests in dozens of subjects.

Some say the usurpation of the SE title is a non-issue. As a job-hunter, I disagree strongly.

The mis-labeling has wasted hundreds of hours of my life over the past 20 months. I have to access and scan dozens of job descriptions for each systems engineering position I find.

Example:  Sherlock Tech knowingly inflates a Systems Administrator into a Systems Engineer. You're full of you-know-what, Sherlock.

When you multiply that by having to read dozens of systems engineering job descriptions to find one position for which I qualify, you find a very large, tedious, and discouraging task.

Many disciplines such as hydraulics, controls, mechanical, optical, power, and manufacturing engineering -- not just IT -- usurp the term. In their case, the mis-labeling constitutes a lateral misplacement. The problem seems not merely due to inflation, but also due to laziness. This compounds the challenge of job searching for SEs, but also for job hunters in those other disciplines.

The Department of Labor and state employment departments have contributed by cataloging some technical occupations by discipline and others by industry. For example, aerospace and IT are not disciplines; they are industries. Computer systems, networks, software, and (cross-functional) are disciplines.

When I was in school, we already had a term and major for students of IT. It was Computer Systems Engineering. (Some schools lagged in separating out the computer majors from Electronic Engineering, or Electronic Engineering from Electrical Engineering, too.) Software Engineering had just starting to break out as a separate discipline.

A little specificity would go a long way in the job market.

The New Resume: For Experienced Workers

Long-term worker, expect resume-shock.

If you haven't explored the job market in five or ten years, you probably need a whole new resume. What works best has not changed, but what's commonly recommended has. Throw out all your old materials about resumes.

• Older materials explain the Functional style. Recruiters and hiring managers reflexively ask, "what is the applicant hiding?" and give functional resumes a quick toss.
  
  
• Many older samples used paragraphs; but paragraphs have given way to concise bullet points.
  
  
• Your descriptions of achievements, employment history, and objectives may need a radial re-write..

It's not about me.

Your Achievements and Employment History sections used to describe what you did. Now, every description must state how well you did it or how it will benefit the reader.

The same applies to the Objectives statement. Replace it. First, the application or cover letter should make it obvious which job you want. Second, emphasize what you bring to the pot luck, not what you hope others will bring. Your resume is a marketing device, not a Request for Proposal.

That's tough for long-term cogs of giant machines where managers rarely communicate the significance of the work. Restating my duties as accomplishments with numbers and results, and figuring out my work's significance from 10, 15, or 20+ years ago required a lot of research. But it has to be done.

Value propositions are in.

Look at the job description and at the company's mission and objectives statements. Figure out the business case for the job. How do the job requirements support the employer's goals?

Then consider your abilities that match the job requirements. Why does the employer want somebody with your skill? What is the value of your skill? Ask and re-ask what happens for the employer if your skill provides that value. Stop when you get past your sphere of influence, and take a step back. Now you can state the value you will bring by doing what you do.

Don't claim the VP's accomplishments. State that your redesign saved the final $2 million that made selling doohickeys profitable, but don't claim to have saved the Division (unless you really did). For example, if the required life of a satellite was seven years, you could describe how you contributed to on-board diagnostics that extended the life to 15 years.

Specifics build a case for the truth of your claimed abilities.

Set a time limit to avoid agism.

By the way, only go back ten (plus or minus) years. If you haven't lost the skills you had in ancient history, they've probably become obsolete. I break that rule. I divide my employment history into Recent Employment and Early Employment (>10 years ago) and go back all the way. I enjoyed and want to return to those older jobs. Without the older jobs, I can't support some of my claimed abilities. However, if I can support my claim to be qualified for a job based on my recent employment history, I chop out the Earlier section.

Let the shoe fit the foot.

This goes to tailoring your resume for each position. The combination format allows me to sort my Accomplishments so the most relevant skills appear at the top. It also allows me to delete distracting, irrelevant skills.

If you apply for a variety of jobs on a corporate site, however, they probably limit the number of versions of your resume. In that case, you have to keep each version of your resume longer and more general.

Less is more, but more is more, too.

Starting out, one page is reasonable. Short and relevant is best. A lot of technical managers want details, though. Making them get out a magnifying glass is not the way to do it. A veteran engineer who organizes a resume with lots of headings gets the "core competencies" across in a 15-second reading. If that 15-second read catches the hiring manager's interest, the applicant will probably get away with two or three pages.

Apart from the part about job objectives, Barclay's podcast provides a great overview.

Note: Most European employers and many American professions such as academia and research require curriculum vitae (CVs), not resumes. All I know about CVs is that they can run many pages.

Conclusion.

The worst resume mistakes of 2011 include describing what you want or what you have done. Every statement of proposed value, accomplishment, or history should demonstrate how you will support the employer's business. Keep it as short and as simple as you can, but include enough to support each claim you make.

For a good audio over view of resume writing (except that he still uses Objectives instead of Value Statements), visit The Job Stalker - PodClass III - Resumes.

Recruiters - What to Expect

Reference
Two Types Of Recruiters – Retained and Contingent
Brad Remillard
IMPACT Hiring Solutions
Undated; downloaded 16 January 2011

Summary of the Article

Recruiters contract to find applicants on behalf of hiring companies. Two major categories dominate: Retained, and Contingent. They may be a convenience, a connection to that job you need so badly, but neither works for you. They work as hired guns for the employer.

Retained recruiters get paid 2/3 of their fee whether or not the company hires the applicant. They only get the final 1/3 if there's a hire. They also offer guarantees to their clients (the employers), so if a new hire doesn't stick around, the recruiter has to return part of the fee and loses a bit of his reputation and future business. An employer won't want to pay multiple fees for each employee, so he will contract only one retained recruiter.

Retained recruiters protect their business by getting to know a company's culture and job requirements and by obsessing over finding the perfect match. Expect a thorough, frustrating screening and then having to repeat the process with the hiring company. They also submit only a few resumes, so the applicant competes against only a few others; but the others have gone through the same screening and match the job well, too.

Contingent recruiters get paid only if you're hired. No matter how many contingent recruiters submit applicants, the company only pays one, so a whole squad of recruiters might go out looking with a single position to fill. If two submit the winning applicant's resume, the first one gets the fee. This put them in competition, so they collect resumes for fast submission and skimp on niceties like pre-screening.

Applicants relying on contingent recruiters compete against the larger number of applicants from multiple recruiters and have lower likelihood of fitting the job; but other applicants are less likely to fit the job, too. Applicants don't go through dual screenings, and their names get in front of the employers sooner, but they experience more of the black hole effect, never hearing back from the recruiters.

Also, once a contingent recruiter has your resume on file, he might submit it to companies without your knowledge. This can complicate your search if employers get tired of seeing your resume submitted for positions for which you don't qualify.

When dealing with a recruiter, ask how his client compensates him and how he will use your resume later.

Values and Value-based Resumes

In a discussion on LinkedIn, a poster confused value statements in resumes with statements about values. I included the post after my comments (below) because he made some excellent points.

A value-based (not values-based) resume addresses exactly what the poster said. I do not know who started the use of value statements, but they appear to have taken a lesson from marketing: Instead of just telling the customer (the hiring manager) the products' specifications (your skills and experiences), show him how hiring you will relieve his headaches, make his office sparkle, and put money in his pocket.

Have you met somebody who bored you by talking about nothing but themself? Most job seekers still use self-centered objectives and static lists (or even worse, paragraphs!) to identify all the mundane things they were supposed to have done. In contrast, a value-base resume stands out by letting the hiring manager know that you are the labor-saving, money-making machine that makes him the envy of his corporate neighbors.

Several tactics will help hiring managers see you as the product they can't live without:

• Replace the heading, Objectives, with the title of the position you want. This starts to give you a "brand," creating a mental image of you in the coveted job. It also helps you focus on the job, making it easier to tailor your resume.
   
• Replace the statement of your objectives with a statement about how you will make your employer the one that smiles like "Bob" when he walks around the office. For example, from one version of my wife's resume:

Events Manager

• Events facilitator with training and experience in successfully planning and coordinating events attended by up to 10,000 guests.
• Leads with passion for the mission, flexibility, respect for coworkers and guests, and exemplary ethics.

• Tailor your experience to the opening. Cut out irrelevant tasks. You're going to need the room.
   
• Tweak tasks into accomplishments by adding results that draw a mental picture of your value. For example:

Facilitated successful church and civic events with attendance up to 10,000 and guests such as Phillips, Craig & Dean, the Heritage Singers, and Oliver North.

It is not ironic that I used the most verbiage for a single word, Objective. Using the job title molds the reader's first impression of you and renders unnecessary the old practice of saying, "My objective is to [blah blah blah me me me]." Your resume has mere seconds to grab readers' attention before they move to the next sheet in the stack, so don't waste their time with superfluous labels and statements of the obvious.

Applying the 80/20 rule, 80% of their impression of you will come from the first 20% of their reading. Accordingly, conveying at least 80% of your value in the first 20% of your resume.

The bottom line is that most hiring managers choose someone based on confidence that the candidate will deliver value corresponding to their level of experience and training that meets the hiring manager's need, AND based on perception that the candidate is a good fit for their work environment and position. Fit is based, in part, on the degree of alignment that a candidate presents himself or herself.

The poster offered excellent advice except with respect to values. As he stated, "hiring managers choose someone based on... perception that the candidate is a good fit for their work environment and position." Many corporations, especially those that deal with the central government, stress values. Issues such as ethics, compliance with government regulations, and teamwork can spell success or failure, so you need to say something about how you will support your employer as a good corporate citizen.

Most hiring managers, especially but not exclusively in the secular world, are utilitarian when it comes to hiring rather than values-based. In other words, as a hiring manager do I have confidence that you can do the job better than other candidates? Will you ease my work burden or create more work for me to do? Values, when they are considered at all in hiring, are in reality lower down the chain. The key to your question is to put yourself in a hiring manager's shoes. As a hiring manager what would you look for when sifting through a hundred resumes?

95% of what a hiring manager cares about is a candidate's relevant experience and education to a particular job opening. Everything else, including an objective or value statement, is secondary at best. That being said, if I was to rank objective or value statement, objective would be higher. However, objective should not be a generic statement such as, "Marketing position in a high quality company that values its employees." The objective should be customized to your target job and organization, such as, "Marketing Assistant at Nike." This demonstrates that you want a specific job in a specific company. If you are unsure whether a particular job opening exists in an organization, I advise omitting the objective altogether.

As a hiring manager I want to know that a candidate wants my job opportunity and my organization. I'm less interested in candidates that submit resumes in what I perceive as mass distribution.

The bottom line is that most hiring managers choose someone based on confidence that the candidate will deliver value corresponding to their level of experience and training that meets the hiring manager's need, AND based on perception that the candidate is a good fit for their work environment and position. Fit is based, in part, on the degree of alignment that a candidate presents himself or herself.

Values can be presented with impact when they are incorporated into a cover letter or as measurable performance in a resume. But that's another discussion.

Job Searching: The Silence of the App

Follow-up seems to be a one-way street when job hunting.  Job hunters are advised at every turn to follow up on every lead. Give yourself name recognition, establish a professional presence on the Web, clean up your personal image on the Web, check on job status, send thank you notes.

Headhunters provide feedback.  Apply for a position and they'll let you know you're not qualified.  They'll even check back with you because you are the raw material for their product -- employees marketed to employers.

Faceless institutions, however, represent black holes.  Your app goes in, and nothing comes out; not even the gravitational waves caused by the bits of your resume' printout hitting the bottom of their shredder bin.  In the days before application via web-based databases, large employers received so many applications that the bottom line may not have provided labor hours to send out individual responses to job applicants.  With the automation that databases can perform, however, I see no excuse for not performing the courtesy of notifying job seekers when reqs close.

Granted, the flood of applications has grown even worse.  Web-based applications make positions far easier to find.  Some employers have even created mechanisms to screen out people who submit resume' spam.  That's right: Some people submit resume's for jobs not even close to those for which they qualify; and if you have the money, you can hire a business to submit your resume' for hundreds, even thousands of positions for you.  (According to What Color Is Your Parachute? 2000, (Richard N. Bolles, Ten Speed Press), that technique never works.)  If you have enough discernment to read this, you obviously would never get yourself blocked as a resume' spammer.

So, with the tsunami of job seekers, it's not surprising that you'll find little departmental information, let alone contact information, in the online career sites.  Some don't even identify the city.  The sites put up a shield of anonymity for their Human Resources departments and their hiring managers.

This quiet zone for managers creates two major problems for job seekers:  First, it destroys a job seeker's ability to prove creativity, persistence, and people skills during the application process.  Second, it cuts off any source of information that the web site fails to provide.

Several weeks ago, I wanted to apply for a low-level management position with a defense-related division of a conglomerate.  The company's career page on listed two positions, Manager I, and Manager IV.  The job descriptions were identical.  No clue was given about which reported to the other.  In some companies, a Manager I would be entry level and a Manager IV would be a department director; but in other companies, a Manager IV would be entry level the way a Second Lieutenant looks up to a First Lieutenant.

Trying to avoid becoming a blocked resume' spammer, I found some contacts in the company and called them with my simple question.  I left a voice message for all but the one who answered.  The one who answered transferred me to HR, where I had to leave yet another message.  Nobody ever returned my call.

Then I found a local facility.  Surely they would talk to me to answer such a simple question.  Wrong.  The company operator who answered would not forward me to HR unless I had a contact's name.  Instead, the operator told me to fax my question to a number reserved for faxing job applications.  The operator did not respond when I asked how many job seekers have access to a fax machine.  I just can't bring myself to investing an hour to drive all the way downtown to a Kinko's and then pay Kinko's the cost of a fax, just to get one little question answered.  I have since replaced my broken $50 scanner/printer with a $69 clearance-priced copier/scanner/printer/fax, but I doubt I would ever have received a response to my question.

I guess this leads to pet peeves about employers' career sites:  First, the wall of anonymity limits job applicants and their evaluation.  Second, not enough information is available about the structure of job titles.  Third, few provide any feedback after you submit your application.  (They usually send an automated e-mail to acknowledge the first application you submit each day.)  The only way to status your application is to go into their database.  If they track the positions to which you apply, some will give a one-word status if the job req is still open.  Otherwise, the job req simply disappears from their database.  In other words, the page for the job req no longer exists and the database forgets that you ever applied for the job.  But sometimes, even those two indicators conflict.

Before I conclude, I want to honor Eaton Corporation, GE, and Raytheon Corporation.  Their job application databases have informed me that jobs for which I applied have closed.