Millions of Americans are hired to fill jobs every month in the American economy. If this is true, why can’t you get a response when you send your resume in response to a job posting? Here is the answer.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, “Your Resume vs. Oblivion”, by Lauren Weber, January 24, 2012. The Starbucks Corp attracted 7.6 million applicants over the past 12 months for about 65,000 retail and management positions. Procter & Gamble Inc. got nearly a million applications last year for 2,000 new positions plus vacant jobs. And the Texas Roadhouse Inc. gets as many as 400 resumes for a job opening within 24 hours after listing it online.

Many people complain that they submit their resume to hundreds of job postings and never hear anything at all back from any company. The reason they hear nothing is because the software “bots” that companies use to screen resumes are not passing the resume on to HR recruiters unless the key words in the resume match up nearly perfectly with the key words in the job description of the posting. The reason companies are doing this is clearly shown in the data in BUZZ Today. There is no other practical way to deal with the massive number of resumes received.

Unfortunately, the bots are merely a fact of life in the labor market today. A bot is a piece of software, not a human. The bot does not interpret or infer. It matches key words. If the key words are not present it does not pass the resume to the recruiting manager. So for example, if the job ad says “Bachelor degree required, masters degree preferred and 5-7 years experience” the candidate’s submission has to match exactly.

Here is an example of how hard this can be. Here is an actual job posting for a marketing position at an innovative company.
Position: Sr. Manager, Digital Marketing
* Education: Bachelor’s degree required, MBA preferred
* Experience: 7-10 year’s experience with a consumer-oriented internet business in a multi-channel environment.
* Must have experience in the following marketing functions: agency management, strategic brand marketing, digital marketing vehicles, website operations.
* Experience managing complex projects and multimillion dollar budgets.There is no way around this grim reality. Because our labor markets are now functioning like this it is more important than ever that the applicant do what is presented in my book “Your Future is Calling”. Rather than picking a college, then a major and getting a degree and then looking for a job (marketing in this case), the book advises, Who you are then career choice, major, degree, university. In this way the person has a better chance to have what is needed when they get to the job posting.

Even in the face of this trend in hiring there are some reasons to be encouraged. Employers will need 22 million new workers with post-secondary degrees – and the report shows that we will fall short by three million workers without a dramatic change in course. This translates into a deficit of 300,000 college graduates every year between now and 2018.