Company Career Websites and responding to Linked In ads: Should you bother?

I just finished a contract position at a major insurance company. They, similar to most major companies these days, post every new job on their career website.  When someone applies for a position directly to the site, they end up in the applicant tracking system which is monitored by talent acquisition people assigned to that job.

In addition, many companies pay for Linked In ads to post jobs that are more difficult to fill. Linked In has an algorithm that matches your profile to a job and an ad pops up on the side of your page telling you that this is a match for you. If you respond to those ads, you will end up in an inbox of the talent acquisition person who is monitoring and evaluating what is coming in for that job.

So how can do you break through the clutter of masses of resumes and get seen? First, in my experience, there are not masses of resumes—mostly there are resumes of people who do not meet the qualifications of the position. The few “on target” resumes get reviewed carefully because they are an “easy” candidate. They came to you (you didn’t have to go find them and convince them of your opportunity), they are already motivated (they applied), and they’ll make time to interview. Passive candidates are more difficult to arrange interviews.

Here are some of the things I observed that may help you target how you position yourself when you are sending your resume in to a corporate ATS or answering a Linked in ad:

1.     If your background and resume looks like a close fit for the position, the likelihood of you getting contacted for a phone interview are very good—this goes for both the career website or Linked In.

2.     If the position is in a very difficult to fill category—you might get contacted if you are 60-70% match.

3.     What that means from a candidate perspective is this: if you target your resume appropriately so you match close enough, you will get an interview.

4.     Candidates really need to understand that talent acquisition people are looking for a skill set and cannot send to the hiring manager someone who doesn’t have the skill set required.  However, there are degrees of flexibility that you can learn to use to your advantage.

-        Write your resume with the appropriate key words in mind. Every one of the posted jobs has a job description. Write your resume to reflect the company’s terminology. For example, your company uses the term lead generation for finding interested people, but xyz calls it demand marketing—use what they use.

-        If you have a blended background and the position is for a specific job function which is one of the things that you’ve done, focus on that—do not keep your resume generalized.  For example, you are an experienced ux, website design, code in HTML and use Java. The position is to be a content manager that requires Java and other tools—focus the resume on that. Make it easy for the recruiter, not difficult.

-        If you have only a few years’ experience but know that you can do the job and have a basic skill set, position your resume in that way. Many hiring managers are open to training young people who exhibit intelligence and work ethic and are a bargain—saving them money on salaries (or allowing them to use the salary savings on another  position).

5.     Find someone who works at the company who can recommend you. You’ll get a closer look especially if your skill set is not close to a perfect match (also the talent acquisition person can use that recommendation to get your resume in front of the hiring manager: blah in accounting knows this guy and says he’s great—he doesn’t have an exact match skill set but you might want to take a look….)

6.     Only do this is you truly believe you are a good match for the position: find the internal talent acquisition person and send an email to them and let them know you’ve applied and why they should talk to you. You can also see if you can find the hiring manager and do the same—they will likely send it back to the talent acquisition person and ask them to speak to you. At that point, the Talent Acquisition person will talk to you because they’ll need to let the hiring manager know what happened. But again, don’t waste anyone’s time unless you have the skills.